Adriana Mihaela Soaita

‘Generation rent’ and the ability to ‘settle down’: economic and geographical variation in young people’s housing transitions

ABSTRACT The term ‘Generation Rent’ denotes young people who are increasingly living in the private rented sector for longer periods of their lives because they are unable to access homeownership or social housing. Drawing on qualitative data from two studies with young people and key-actors, this paper considers the phenomenon of ‘Generation Rent’ from the perspective of youth transitions and the concept of ‘home’. These frameworks posit that young people leaving the parental home traverse housing and labour markets until they reach a point of ‘settling down’. However, our data indicate that many young people face difficulties in this ‘settling’ process as they have to contend with insecure housing, unstable employment and welfare cuts which often force them to be flexible and mobile. This leaves many feeling frustrated as they struggle to remain fixed in place in order to ‘settle down’ and benefit from the positive qualities of home. Taking a Scottish focus, this paper further highlights the geographical dimension to these challenges and argues that those living in expensive and/or rural areas may find it particularly difficult to settle down.

Strategies for In Situ Home Improvement in Romanian Large Housing Estates

Socio-economic and physical change have visibly affected post-socialist cities, yet the state of decay of their inherited large housing estates has only deepened throughout the 1990s, despite the change in tenure through policies of large-scale privatisation. Housing disrepair has now reached a critical stage that requires rapid private and public intervention. This paper examines the extent to which Romanian block residents have been able to improve in situ their housing conditions since 2000, the strategies they employed and the challenges they faced. It focuses on the often ignored private domain of housing, flats and blocks, where changes are also likely to be less visible. By analysing the process of individual utility metering and the practice of collective block management, I argue that besides economics, the unregulated housing context and a relaxed legal culture have challenged individual and collective action and have generated a framework of housing privatism.

Romanian Suburban Housing : Home Improvement through Owner-building

The new suburban housing developments in post-socialist cities have been ubiquitous icons of socioeconomic and physical change. This paper examines suburban owner-built housing as a long-term strategy of home improvement in Romania. It analyses residents’ motivations and financial strategies to move up the housing ladder through owner-building and their responses to key neighbourhood problems, in particular poor public infrastructure and non-existent public facilities. It is argued that owner-builders generally benefitted from the economic informality, the relaxed legal culture and the unregulated housing context of the Romanian post-socialist transition; but the absence of public actors has weakened their achievements, which is most apparent at neighbourhood level. The paper draws attention to a context of politico-economic reforms and a set of socio-cultural values of housing privatism in which resident responses may frequently generate consequential (collective) problems localised at the level of streets, neighbourhoods or even the whole society.

Becoming a landlord: strategies of property-based welfare in the private rental sector in Great Britain

Abstract Ongoing neoliberal policies have realigned the links between housing and welfare, positioning residential property investment – commonly through homeownership and exceptionally also through landlordism – at the core of households’ asset-building strategies. Nonetheless, the private rented sector (PRS) has been commonly portrayed as a tenure option for tenants rather than a welfare strategy for landlords. Drawing on qualitative interviews with landlords across Great Britain, we explore landlords’ different motivations in engaging in landlordism; and the ways in which their property-based welfare strategies are shaped by the particular intersection of individual socioeconomic and life-course circumstances, and the broader socioeconomic and financial environment. By employing a constructionist grounded approach to research, our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the different ways that asset-based welfare strategies operate within the PRS. We draw attention to an understudied nexus between homeownership and landlordism which we argue represents a promising route for future research.

Debt amnesia: Homeowners’ discourses on the financial costs and gains of homebuying

In Anglo-Saxon societies, homeowners expect to create synergies between the owned house seen as a space of shelter, a place of home, a store of wealth and increasingly, an investment vehicle (and an object of debt). Drawing on interviews with owner-occupiers and on historic house value and mortgage data in Great Britain, we examine the way in which homes’ meanings are negotiated through the subjective calculation of the financial costs and gains of homebuying. We explore homebuyers’ miscalculation of gains, their disregard of inflation and more generally, the inconspicuousness of debt in relation to gains within their accounts, which we term ‘debt amnesia’. We show that the phenomenon of debt amnesia is socially constructed by congruent socio-linguistic, cultural, institutional and ideological devices besides being supported by historic growth in house values. Informed by the ideas of ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘metaphoric understanding’, we reflect on how the occurrence of the unspoken and the partiality of metaphor reinforce the internalisation of homeownership.

The changing nature of outright home ownership in Romania: housing wealth and housing inequality

This chapter traces the historical construction and persistence of almost universal, outright owner-occupation of housing in Romania, which assists understanding of the centrality of homeownership to household welfare in Romania. It thus traces the enduring legacies of historic forms of housing provision to the current characteristics of the housing system that restrict the potential to draw upon this mortgage-free housing wealth as a resource for family welfare in twenty-first century Romania. The paper specifically addresses the ways that housing availability and quality, mobility practices and affordability render the outright owner-occupied home as a form of wealth that can be mobilized to provide for family welfare. The analysis draws on secondary data sources and delineates between the two faces of inequality, those of exclusion and unequal inclusion. Regarding the financial possibilities facilitated by homeownership, exclusion distinguishes homeowners from non-homeowners; while non-homeowners are generally taken to be renters and the homeless, they can also refer to the many individuals living rent-free in complex, family-related households in Romania. Unequal inclusion highlights inequalities among owner-occupiers, for instance, in terms of housing quality and suitability to household characteristics but also in terms of single or multiple-dwelling ownership. The paper concludes by arguing that the nature of homeownership in Romania affords passive and reactive approaches rather than proactive strategies for mobilizing housing wealth as a source for family welfare.

(Un)Bounding Housing and Home: Two Perspectives

Housing and Home Unbound: Intersections in Economics, Environments and Politics in Australia, edited by Nicole Cook, Aidan Davison, and Louise Crabtree, Abington and New York, Routledge, 2016, 239 pp., £110.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1- 138-94897-6. Thinking on Housing: Words, Memory, Use by Peter King, London and New York, Routledge Focus, 2017, 56 pp., £48.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-29384-7

A Critical-Realist View of Housing Quality within the Post-Communist EU States: Progressing towards a Middle-Range Explanation

Abstract Employing a long-term perspective, we explore whether ideologically rooted quality outcomes of housing provision under communism have persisted during the post-communist construction of housing markets. Drawing on theories of path-dependent change, we hypothesize that patterns of housing quality still reflect past lines of division, namely the Soviet housing model, and the classical and reformist models of the Eastern Bloc. Using a critical-realist approach to housing quality, we relate households’ experiences to key underlying structures; this ontological depth is then operationalized by means of micro- and macro-indicators used as input for hierarchical cluster analyses. Findings support our main hypothesis, yet there is more diversity in households’ experiences than initially assumed. Our study advances a valuable middle-range epistemological frame for understanding the complex social reality of housing and helps shatter the growing view that communist housing systems were all too similar.