Naturalization and the transition to homeownership: an analysis of signalling in the Dutch housing market

Abstract

This article pioneers in investigating a citizenship premium for homeownership of first-generation immigrants, using Dutch register data from Statistics Netherlands (N?=?106,187). I hypothesize that naturalization favourably influences the risk-calculation of lenders through positive signalling among employed migrants, who are likely to meet the basic financial criteria for credit. Results confirm that, all else constant, employed immigrants who have naturalized are 26% more likely to be homeowner. Additional analyses specifically designed to isolate endogeneity bias show that the effect is smaller, but still reveal an increase in the probability of homeownership after naturalization. Citizenship acquisition matters less for migrants with a native-born partner, suggesting that legal status discrimination may be an underlying mechanism. I find no evidence that the relevance of citizenship is conditioned by cultural distance of the origin country or the post-2008 economic crisis. I conclude that naturalization matters in the housing market, but that its relevance cannot be generalized to all migrant groups.     

Housing Tenure Preferences in the Post-privatisation Period: The Case of Slovenia

The privatisation of social housing transformed many transitional countries in Central and Eastern Europe into societies with predominant homeownership and a marginalised rental sector. The case of Slovenia shows that, despite a low level of government support of homeowners, the homeownership rate has remained at its unsustainably high level and households continue to express strong preferences for homeownership. The paper explores factors explaining current homeownership preferences in Slovenia. A comprehensive model of housing preferences is built. The model follows the proposition that tenure preferences are strongly influenced by general cultural norms and factors characterising the social, economic and political environments. The model is tested using structural equation modelling based on a survey of Slovenian households. The results reveal that the strong preferences for homeownership in Slovenia can be explained by the firm perceptions of the financial advantages of homeownership and by the lack of available rental alternatives.     

Housing market dualization: linking insider–outsider divides in employment and housing outcomes

Abstract

Past decades of economic growth, relatively widespread employment security and expanding mortgage markets promoted growing homeownership. Recent years have witnessed this growth undercut across advanced economies, evidenced by a rise in other tenures and increasing housing precarity. Studies have shown that these housing outcomes follow more fundamental changes in labour markets. By adapting the established concept of labour market dualization to housing, this paper examines how employment and housing positions are intertwined under late capitalism, and how their relationship has changed through the Global Financial Crisis. Examining the salient case of the Netherlands through household-level data from the LISS panel, we demonstrate that being a labour market ‘outsider’ vastly increases the likelihood of being an ‘outsider’ across housing market dimensions, in terms of housing equity, affordability and prospective asset accumulation. Comparing housing and labour dualization over 2008 and 2016, we further show that the share of multiply disadvantaged households has grown substantially, both among labour market insiders and outsiders.     

DIY Dreams and the Potential of Home

Despite the cultural and economic importance of do-it-yourself (DIY) home improvement, questions about its role in the production and consumption of home have been traversed in only a limited way in the housing studies literature. We consider New Zealanders’ DIY house improvement intentions and what these ideas for house modification reveal about the idealized relationships they have with their dwellings. We focus on homeowners’ thinking and dreaming about the ways the material and symbolic “potential” of home can be achieved by engaging in DIY projects. We theorize our work using the literatures on house and home, self-provisioning activities, leisure work and cultural intermediation, particularly the important roles played by family, friends and print and electronic media in advancing ideas for DIY projects.     

“We’re just existing,not living!” Mortgage stress and the concealed costs of coping with crisis

Following the financial crisis, an extensive literature has examined the vulnerabilities facing mortgagors in default and foreclosure. However, in addition to these “overt casualties” of the crash, many households are struggling to meet their mortgage payments by enduring severe cutbacks to their quality of life. The experiences of these “unrevealed casualties” of the financial crisis and the coping strategies they employ to respond to mortgage stress remain under-explored. Drawing on survey data of Irish mortgagors (n = 433), this paper examines the impacts of mortgage stress upon quality of life and mortgagors’ coping strategies to respond to their financial difficulties. The findings suggest that mortgage stress affects a broader range of households than previously considered; mortgage stressed households adopt a range of expenditure, employment, finance and housing-related responses; and more punitive responses correlate with greater mortgage stress levels, thereby providing a fuller account of the real cost of coping with the crisis impacts.     

中国城镇居民住房现状、问题及对策研究

根据2005年4到6月进行的"中国城镇居民教育与就业情况调查"所得到的城镇居民住房数据,从消费者的角度出发,探讨了中国城镇居民的住房自有率、人均面积和拥有多套住房家庭等问题,并由此给出相应的政策建议.     

Asset-based welfare in Brazil

Abstract

The idea of asset-based welfare (ABW) has been widely discussed since the 1990s. This paper presents a policy developed in Brazil in the 1960s that could also be perceived as an ABW policy. The Fundo de Garantia do Tempo de Serviço (FGTS) is a compulsory savings scheme, managed by the state and financed through monthly deposits made by employers on behalf of their employees. The FGTS resembles a personalized public pension, but the balance of an individual FGTS account can also be used to facilitate access to homeownership. We do not argue that this is an inclusionary and redistributive policy, but we do argue that the FGTS acts as a facilitator of asset-building for those included in the formal labour market. Contrary to ABW practices in the Global North, in Brazil, the introduction of ABW policies represents the expansion rather than the retrenchment or readjustment of the welfare state.     

Generation rent and the financialization of housing: a comparative exploration of the growth of the private rental sector in Ireland,the UK and Spain

Abstract

This article analyses the growth of the private rental sector over recent years through a comparative analysis of three classic homeowner societies: Ireland, the UK and Spain. The article argues that theories of financialization provide a useful framework for understanding ‘generation rent’. In particular, the cyclical nature of credit markets tends to undermine homeownership over the medium term. This contributes to and intensifies the wider set of policy changes associated with neoliberalism. The article also accounts for the divergent experiences of our three case study countries within their common trajectory. It does so through an analytical focus on the interaction between global aspects of financialization and more nationally based ones, such as mortgage markets, as well as on how both are mediated by national policy regimes. The article thus aims to contribute to the emerging literature seeking to explain ‘generation rent’ and explore its significance, and more broadly to political economy approaches to housing system change.     

After poverty reduction: trajectories of U.S. urban neighborhoods that escaped high poverty during the 1990s

Based on the Neighborhood Change Database, this study tracks U.S. urban neighborhoods that escaped the high-poverty category during the poverty reduction trend in the 1990s and explores their poverty transition patterns in the subsequent decade. Escaped neighborhoods exhibit a significant propensity to relapse back into high poverty. This study found several neighborhood characteristics to be associated with a neighborhood’s ability to resist poverty relapse, such as high educational attainment and residential stability of the inhabitants. Homeownership is also found to be a neighborhood stabilizer, but its effect varies by specific racial and ethnic groups.     

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.