Young People,Homeownership and Future Welfare

Homeownership has become a ‘normalised’ tenure of choice in many advanced economies, with housing playing a pivotal role in shifts from collective to asset-based welfare. Young people are, however, increasingly being excluded from accessing the housing ladder. Many are remaining in the parental home for longer, and even when ready to ‘fly the nest’ face significant challenges in accessing mortgage finance. This under-30 age group has become ‘generation rent’. As this policy review emphasises, this key public-policy issue has created a source of inter-generational conflict between ‘housing poor’ young people and their ‘housing rich’ elders. To fully understand the complexities at play however, this paper argues that we need to look beyond the immediate housing-market issues and consider how housing policy interacts with broader social, economic and demographic shifts, and how it is intimately connected to debates about welfare. This is illustrated with reference to the UK, although these debates have international resonance.     

Exploring ‘Housing Asset-based Welfare’. Can the UK be Held Up as an Example for Europe?

In the UK, homeownership has become increasingly important as a financial asset used for welfare needs, particularly during old age. It has been suggested that other European countries will follow the example of the UK. Traditionally, homeownership has been regarded positively because of the low housing expenses associated with outright ownership and the financial benefit of having a nest-egg that can be released, if needed, by selling. New mortgage equity release products reduce liquidity constraints and are regarded as promising in the context of changing welfare states. This research focuses on household strategies. It finds that housing assets play a role in households' financial planning in all countries within the study, particularly where welfare levels are low or decreasing. Homeownership was used in the traditional way in all countries, but it is only in the UK that households have adopted mortgage equity release products to cash in their housing equity for welfare needs.     

Homeowner investor subjects as providers of family care and assistance

Abstract

This article asks: What becomes of the idealized asset-accumulating investor subject rallied in asset-based welfare policy and discourse in the context of mounting social risks facing families? It brings into dialogue two disconnected literatures: one on financialized subjectivities, drawing on post-structuralist and Foucauldian analysis, the other on welfare states drawing more heavily on comparative political economy. Drawing on homeowner interviews in Melbourne (Australia), it identifies how parent homeowners’ devise housing strategies to manage their children’s housing welfare risks. Their housing investment and landlordism strategies align with financialized subjectivities, but other strategies subvert or reject these subject positions. Its first contribution is to specify how an Australian refamilization of welfare responsibilities, including for housing, is unfolding as processes of financialization erode the efficacy of growing state social spending. Its second contribution is to challenge the individual subject of asset-based welfare (ABW) and introduce intergenerational assistance as an under-explored contingency for ABW projects, and further driver for welfare inequalities between and within generations.     

Housing Policy as a Lever for Change? The Politics of Welfare,Assets and Tenure

The housing tenure structure has long been associated with different forms of welfare state capitalism in Western Europe. However, with the rise of owner-occupancy, this association has not been so straightforward. An alternative view is to view housing policies that promote owner-occupancy for households to acquire assets, as an attempt by the state to reform social welfare systems. The politics of welfare reform are related to the discourses of homeownership ideology. The ownership of (housing) assets agenda serves as a means to change the relationship between state, market and individual households. This view is mostly based on the British experience and this paper seeks to broaden it by examining the Netherlands and Spain. The paper shows differences, but also that housing policies play an important role in driving towards or maintaining market-dominated solutions. Housing is used to either reorient towards or maintain a welfare system where asset ownership and market dependency is deemed more appropriate than secure income and public expenditure.     

Constructing Homeownership Policy: Social Constructions and the Design of the Low-Income Homeownership Policy Objective

This paper offers a new perspective to explain how and why the U.S. federal government pursued a policy agenda that from the early-1990s promoted homeownership as the preferred housing tenure of choice for low-income households. Using policy design theory (Schneider &; Ingram 1997 Schneider, A. L. and Ingram, H. M. 1997. Policy Design for Democracy, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.  [Google Scholar]), this paper argues that the social constructions of homeownership, low-income households, and the private mortgage industry were instrumental in the development of policies to increase low-income homeownership. The benefits associated with homeownership, based on long-standing norms around success, stability, and the American Dream, justified government interventions to increase access to private mortgage markets for low-income households. This policy stance, however, did nothing to assist households with maintaining homeownership for the long term. The social constructions embedded in the rationales and implementation of these policies contributed to their failure to sustain homeownership and realize its benefits for low-income homeowners.     

Shifting Trajectories of Homeownership in Japan

In contemporary Japanese society, ‘post-bubble’ housing debates are being shaped by labour market restructuring, demographic change and policy shifts. In this context, this paper explores shifting trajectories of homeownership using three specific housing debates: ‘the emergence of a gap society’, ‘increasing single-person households’ and ‘housing assets in later life’. By exploring these various debates, it attempts to highlight how housing, demography and social policy interact at different levels and in different areas to produce dynamic shifts away from the conventional post-war housing trajectory. Current trends have exhibited shifts away from: the linear upward housing trajectory; the family-centred housing model; the land-orientated housing system; and homeownership dominance per se. The concept of generation is used as a thread to tie the different debates together. Each housing issue is often more relevant to a particular generation, but relationships between generations within families and society add to the dynamism to the current shifts.     

Socio-demographic Variations of Homeowners and Differential Effects of Parental Homeownership on Offspring's Housing Tenure

Previous research indicates a positive effect of parental homeownership on offspring's homeownership, but rarely tests whether the effect is due to self-selectivity. In the context of socio-demographic variations of American homeowners, this study extends previous research by examining the differential effects of parental ownership of a single-family home. The current study employs the Panel Studies of Income Dynamics data, using propensity score matching to address self-selection problems. The results suggest that the intergenerational effect of parental housing tenure has been differentiated by race, income and the housing tenure history of parents while reinforcing inequality. Even within the same housing tenure, offspring of socio-economically disadvantaged groups are less likely to take advantage of parental homeownership in attaining a single-family owner-occupied home.     

Comparing Overall Effects of Family Background on Homeownership During Early Life Course

This paper considers the overall effect of family background on homeownership by applying sibling correlation models. Sex differences, differences between singles and couples, and variation during the early life course (25–35 years old) are analysed using Finnish register data. These models enable the estimation of the overall effect of the family background, irrespective of identifying mechanisms behind these effects. The results indicate that family background has a significant effect, explaining around 11 per cent of the variation in the probability of homeownership. The effects for men living without a partner were significantly higher than for men living with a partner: around 24 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively. No corresponding difference for women could be established. These findings suggest that the effect of family background on homeownership is, in general, high and especially so for single men.     

Neighbourhood participation in super-diverse contexts: comparing Amsterdam and Vienna

Urban policies are increasingly localized, stressing the role of neighbourhood social contacts in generating cohesion and citizen participation. Studies on ‘everyday’ multiculturalism also emphasize the neighbourhood as a meaningful place for encounters. However, there remains a lack of understanding of how specific contexts condition encounters with difference. We compare two European neighbourhoods that provide different contexts for participation: Amsterdam and Vienna. We ask how residents experience local spaces of encounter and how this influences their experience of the neighbourhood. We find a mismatch between the aims of local policies and the experiences of residents, who also value more superficial contacts.     

住宅产业化进程中的居住隔离——以上海为例

论述了现阶段我国居住隔离的社会经济背景,并以上海为例,从多层次的住宅供应体系、居住隔离的空间分布、居住隔离的外部表征三方面对其加以考察,重点描述居住隔离的空间特征。最后指出,在住宅产业化进程中,遏制居住隔离现象是我国城市住宅建设的当务之急。     

Asset-based Welfare,Equity Release and the Meaning of the Owned Home

The advantages of ownership—both financial and personal—were a prominent theme in UK government policies promoting owner-occupation in the latter half of the twentieth century. More recently, the liberal discourses of the ‘ownership society’ have been conflated with the neo-liberalisation of welfare to restructure the socio-political ideology of ownership around accumulation and decumulation of housing wealth. This paper analyses findings from a new qualitative study to explore the tensions that this shift has created for owner-identities. Equity release transactions provide a prime context to explore the role of homeownership ideologies on participation in asset-based welfare: these are conceived as products that enable older owners to de-cumulate housing equity while continuing to occupy their homes and retaining the ‘badge’ of ownership. This paper focuses on the impact of housing wealth decumulation through equity release on the meanings of the owned home and to reflect on the role of feelings about ownership on participation in asset-based welfare.     

Analysis of Neighbourhood Effects and Work Behaviour: Evidence from Paris

This paper highlights the effects of being located in a deprived neighbourhood on unemployment. Interest is focused on the consequences of neighbourhood effects. The paper uses the 1999 Population Census for Paris and the three surrounding sub-regional administrative districts in order to estimate different models that take into account the potential endogeneity bias of the residential location choice. The study first runs a bivariate probit model that includes the residential location as an endogenous variable. A probit model is also run on a sub-sample of households living in public housing with the idea that for them the location choice is exogenous. Whatever the method used, it is shown that living within the most deprived neighbourhoods, in terms of local composition, decreases the probability of employment.     

Kemeny revisited: the new homeownership-welfare dynamics

Abstract

This article connects homeowner subjectivities and state practice to specify how the post-war homeownership-welfare dynamic has radically transformed since the 1980s. Specifically, this article revisits, 35 years on and against the onset of financialized capitalism, Jim Kemeny’s seminal thesis on the relationship between homeownership and welfare. Focusing on Australia, as a less considered case in the liberal Anglophone cluster, it traces how the state actively overhauled the local post-war homeownership-welfare dynamic from the late 1970s. The analysis establishes how this refurbishment outdates Kemeny’s thesis by rendering features of the post-war homeownership model ineffective and, more significantly, by fashioning new homeowner subjectivities—namely, the investor subject. By bringing together Foucauldian perspectives (mortgage biopolitics) with Marxian political economy, this state-sensitive account both responds to Kemeny’s unexpected silence on the active hand of the Australian state in structuring its homeownership-welfare dynamic, and contributes to the asset-based welfare critique by emphasizing its post-1980s features and the structural drivers that explain its persistence, despite its unequal wealth and welfare outcomes.     

(Re)Viewing Ethnic Residential Segregation in Southern European Cities: Housing and Urban Regimes as Mechanisms of Marginalisation

Housing and residential marginalisation in Southern European cities represents the most critical and controversial of urban conditions for the settlement and inclusion of immigrants. However, these issues are conspicuously under-researched in both the international and Southern European comparative literature. The complexity of ethnic housing hardship and segregation is often de-problematised and misleadingly attributed solely to market mechanisms or inevitable polarisation dynamics. This paper reviews the distinctive features of ethnic residential segregation within wider societal and urban contexts, drawing on an analysis of eight Mediterranean cities with a special focus on the role of housing systems and processes of ethnic and social differentiation. Problems and drivers are reconceptualised within an holistic, comparative framework. It is demonstrated that low levels of ethnic spatial segregation conceal a real problem of social residential marginalisation. This paradox predominantly originates from macro-scale mechanisms of differentiation rooted in the welfare redistributive arrangements and dualist housing systems. It is additionally reinforced by current urban renewal strategies.     

格尔木市居住格局及居住隔离研究

民族地区的居住隔离与大城市不同,因此,探究民族地区居住格局及居住隔离是构建民族地区和谐社会的前提。要采取相应策略,方便对症下药。     

Tenure type landscapes and housing market change: a geographical perspective on neo-liberalization in Sweden

Abstract

Discussions of tenure mix have received renewed interest as many have suggested that neo-liberalization has made way for gentrification of neighbourhoods and increasing segregation. Yet, few scholars have studied country-wide changes in tenure mix, due to the lack of data and appropriate methods. In this article, we propose to use tenure type landscapes to analyse changes in housing policy. We do so while acknowledging the evolution of housing policies in Sweden since 1990. Using individualized and multi-scalar tenure type landscapes to measure change in neighbourhoods, we analyse housing clusters in 1990 and 2012. We show that the tenure landscape in 1990 at the height of the welfare state was fairly diverse and mixed. During the next 22 years, however, the landscape changed to become more homogenized and dominated by ownership through tenure conversions and new housing. We argue that awareness of these changes is essential to understanding present and future segregation and gentrification processes.     

The Creation and Transfer of Housing Wealth: The Experience of Elderly New Zealanders

Issues of housing inequality among the elderly reflect their lifetime experience of the housing and labour markets. In retirement there are thus a range of households formed depending on whether they are asset and income rich or poor. The paper explores the experience of a sample of New Zealand households with respect to their level of accumulation and attitudes towards and practice of intergenerational transfers.     

探求上海“保障性住房涵盖之外”低收入阶层住房解决的可能性途径

通过对特大城市中保障性住房发展建设若干局限性的分析,指出解决特大城市低收入阶层住房不宜仅仅依靠大规模建设保障性住房,充分利用现有的住房租售市场、打破城乡二元分割的住房政策等也是解决低收入阶层的居住问题不可忽视的方面。以上海为例,分析上海市低收入阶层的构成及空间分布,探讨目前"保障性住房涵盖之外"的低收入群体解决住房的典型方式,并据此提出若干针对特大城市中未纳入保障性住房体系的大量低收入阶层解决基本住房需求的政策建议,以缓解社会压力,维护社会的稳定和谐。     

福利国家与住房政策

本文试图通过欧美福利国家系统和住房系统的内在联系,运用欧美学者在１９９０年代中期的最新研究成果,从定性和定量两方面来认识欧美国家的住房政策类型。     

Housed Gypsy Travellers,Social Segregation and the Reconstruction of Communities

This paper explores the ‘accommodation careers’ and social adaptations of Gypsies and Travellers living in ‘bricks and mortar’ accommodation and the implications of this trend for current concerns pertaining to social segregation and ‘parallel communities’. The paper discusses the ‘constrained choices’ regarding accommodation that Gypsies and Travellers face, before considering the structure of social relations in their respective localities. The strategies by which cultural identities are sustained in housing and how the presence of kin and other Gypsy/Travellers helps to mitigate some of the difficulties experienced are explored. However, the argument is made that while frequent social interaction and the maintenance of a distinct cultural identity provides a crucial source of support, there is also the danger that social relations become restricted to close ‘bonding’ networks, thus intensifying the social isolation of Gypsy/Traveller communities and further fragmenting neighbourhoods along ethnic lines.