EPCI (Economie politique du changement institutionnel) Seminar

Du 06/12/2024 de 11:00 à 12:30

MSE salle 116

DE ROBIANO Balthazar (European University Institute, Dpt of Social and Political Sciences)

Housing’s revenge on politics: the rise of tenure inequalities

This article presents a neglected change in housing policy in the last half-century in Europe and theorizes its potential on welfare: the rise of tenure inequalities. From a post-war politics of mass housing provision, West-European welfare States switched to a post-Fordist promotion of massive homeownership accession through mortgage credit. This change, hereunder called housing financialization, while initially associated with rising homeownership rates, has come to be associated with fast-rising housing prices, progressively excluding higher shares of households from accessing homeownership. This article finds that these processes are associated with higher housing costs for renters, more unequal housing costs amongst income groups and increasing inequalities in homeownership accession between income groups. Lower- and middle-income groups appear increasingly excluded from homeownership accession while simultaneously more disadvantaged on the rental market. This is termed ‘tenure inequalities’ and might underlie other phenomena observed in the literature such as refamiliarization and rising territorial inequalities