Historically, the main focus of the study of housing in advanced economies has been on houses that meet the accommodation needs of households: houses as the main residence of families. In recent decades there has been the growth in the numbers of houses used for purposes other than as a main residence, for example in the forms of the recent global spread of Airbnb and of foreign engagement in housing as an investment tool; alongside a set of ‘for housing’ houses (FHH) another, overlapping, set of ‘not for housing’ houses (NFHH) is emerging. The present paper begins by identifying four types of NFHH, and considers the significance of their growth. It argues that while the NFHH sector is relatively small it has large impacts, and these are such that they challenge housing researchers and policy makers to develop additional ways of looking at housing systems.
Comparative housing research is hindered by attempts to provide broad empirical categorisations of types of Housing Regimes and their equivalents and sweeping cross-country generalisations about their effects. Regime theory is right to recognise the housing provision is and can be organised in different ways but proselytises too strongly. Real issues and policy debates in countries are instead embedded in the existence of specific, tenure related, networks of housing provision and they widely differ across the world. Taking that on board can lead to more fruitful understandings.
The article describes the approach and method of Family Housing Pathways. This process of gathering and presenting data makes it possible to include the extended family’s housing resources, the management of these resources, and the transformations of households within a family. Twenty-eight Family Housing Pathways were gathered and collected as part of an assignment given to students as part of an undergraduate course on housing problems. The exercise shed light on recurring themes in the transformation of the housing system in Poland that influence individual and family management of housing resources. Even a sample of relatively privileged families demonstrates that housing is clearly a crucial dimension, especially in times of transition, e.g. in post-communist Poland after 1989. The Family Housing Pathways approach could be a promising tool as well as an approach that combines biographical and historical housing perspectives, without losing sight of concerns of a practical and ethical nature.
This paper explores the ways in which housing wealth is producing new forms of differentiation among households. In doing so, it will argue that ‘asset based welfare’ is now better conceived as ‘asset based social stratification’ and that social class rather than generation remains the primary social divide. However, these class divides are increasingly shaped by the differential ability to accumulate and deploy primarily housing -based assets. These new forms of social (re) stratification will vary societally, temporally and spatially and are currently most evident in what can be described as older, mature home ownership societies. But similar developments and emerging fissures can be observed in newer, ultra home -ownership societies such as China and in the broader interconnections between the mobilization of family assets and the shift from consumer to market societies.
The changing world economy since the 1970s and the decrease in welfare and deregulation in the Global North have led to an inefficient and declining stock of affordable housing. In the Global South, the need to economically catch up with the Global North has led to a lack of sustainable affordable housing policies. Social and affordable housing policies in the Global South have been either non-existent or very inefficient. The aim of this short paper is to start a discussion (and contribute to the existing ones) on how the social dynamics of informal settlements may be a source of new approaches to the provision of affordable housing in the Global North and South. Despite their illegal status and characterisation as urban blight, informal settlements are frequently illustrative examples of collaborative processes in the areas of planning and development that depend on the social connections and relationships among squatter households.
The paper will address the development of housing regimes in the new EU member states,introducing the analytical framework of a housing sector matrix to classifyforms of housing by tenure andintegration mechanism. Thus, ourhousing sector matrixcombines two common approaches: thestructure of housing provision (Ball and Harloe 1992) and the tenure-focused approach (Kemeny 1981, 1995). Starting from this rough typology of housing provisions, we also take further factors that have a major impact on the behaviour of stakeholders/actors into consideration, namely the legal/regulatory environment and the subsidy/tax system, to define the housing regimes. In its analysing of the development of the new member states the paperdifferentiates between global factors (economic development model, countries’ position in global economic structures, etc.) and local factors like the political/power structure, mainstream social ideology, the interplay betweendifferent stakeholders, etc. Institutional analyses (Bengtsson and Ruonavaara 2010) that take path-dependent factors into account are thus best able to address the process by which new housing regimes emerged in post-socialist countries and the degree to which we find convergence/divergence trends. The paper analyses three junctures in the development process after 1990: radical changes after the collapse of the old system; the development of the mortgage market and the regulation of the social sector at the turn of 2000; and reactions to the financial crisis of 2008. The paper concludes that the new member states are following the same trajectory despite their institutional differences.