Richard Ronald

Comparing Homeowner Societies: Can we Construct an East-West Model?

Distinguishable patterns of mass homeownership have emerged across industrialised societies in recent decades, and have become increasingly central in comparative analyses of housing systems. This paper examines the nature of differences and similarities within and between two particular groups of societies where owner occupation dominates housing demand and policy systems, one constituted of English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon societies, and another of East Asian societies. The paper considers the potential of forming loose models based on core divergences in terms of systems, regimes and socio-ideological relationships. The aim is to further illustrate interactions between housing systems and welfare regimes in international contexts. Comparisons of housing and welfare elements are broadly related between societies, rather than quantitatively isolated, as systems are substantially variegated across the East Asian region. However, a loose system-model provides considerable insight into convergence within the group in regards to how housing systems have served a minimal social-welfare regime type.

Young Adults’ Pathways into Homeownership and the Negotiation of Intra-Family Support: A Home, the Ideal Gift

Emerging affordability problems in British housing have accentuated the role of parental support in facilitating entry to homeownership, with financial transfers and in-kind support smoothening transitions for many. This article explores housing trajectories, focusing on how dependency and autonomy are negotiated within and across generations in relation to gifts, loans and in-kind transfers for home purchase. It draws on the experiences of a group of young adults aged 25–35 and those family members who supported them in acquiring a home. We consider the nature of support, and how those giving and receiving it understand this exchange. We show that gifting for homeownership is an ‘ideal gift’, allowing givers to exercise moral control over the receivers by supporting a normalized tenure choice. Managing relationships of indebtedness between kin presupposes negotiations in which the maintenance of autonomy is paramount. The article examines four types of negotiations and their impact on intergenerational relations.

Baby Boomers, Baby Busters and the Lost Generation: Generational Fractures in Japan’s Homeowner Society

Over the past two decades housing pathways have become increasingly differentiated between generations, particularly in advanced societies dominated by owner-occupied tenure systems. Demographic transformations caused by aging and falling fertility rates, along with a more volatile economy and a neo-liberal reorientation of governance have combined to restructure housing conditions. Drawing on empirical research in Japan, this paper illustrates the social origins and impact of generation-based differentiations in housing patterns in that country. It considers the housing experiences of three cohorts: baby-boomers, baby-busters and the ‘lost generation’. The contrast of housing pathways between these generations in Japan illustrates the contemporary dynamics of housing and social processes in homeowner societies.

Parental co-residence, shared living and emerging adulthood in Europe: semi-dependent housing across welfare regime and housing system contexts

ABSTRACT Transitions to adulthood not only represent a key period for individual development but also contribute to processes of social stratification. Growing evidence has pointed to increased complexity, postponement and individualization in transition dynamics. Previous research has focused on trends in school-to-work transitions and family formation; however, the central role of housing represents an interrelated process that is less understood. As pathways to adulthood have diversified, many young people experience partial independence in one sphere while continued dependence in others. Semi-dependent housing, either through parental co-residence or shared living, can be an important coping mechanism. Using the European Survey on Income and Living Conditionst, the research investigates the role that semi-dependent living plays within emerging adulthood across varied European contexts. The data suggests that the extent and type of semi-dependent housing varies substantially across EU15 countries. The findings indicate that levels of housing independence can be partly explained by welfare regime context while the propensity for shared living appears correlated with affordability in the rental market. Although socio-cultural and economic trends play an important and interrelated role, the study argues that housing dynamics of young adulthood and the role of semi-dependent living is fundamentally shaped by the context of the housing system and welfare regime.

Testing Home Ownership as the Cornerstone of Welfare: Lessons from East Asia for the West

In recent years, one driver behind the promotion of home ownership in Western countries has been the belief that owner-occupied housing assets provide a means to build up individual welfare security, potentially offsetting pension shortfalls in retirement. In contrast, many developed East Asian societies have both long focussed on advancing ‘asset’ or ‘property-based welfare’ systems as well as experienced the late-1990s Asian Financial Crisis which forced changes in housing and welfare practices. This paper examines how home ownership and asset-based welfare fared in these contexts and the lessons to be learned. It begins by considering the role of owner-occupied housing assets in different welfare regimes before empirically examining how asset-based welfare systems have been realized. It then considers how East Asian home ownership and asset-based welfare systems have stood-up to economic crises. The final section considers what the East Asian experiences contribute to an understanding of the housing assets–welfare relationship.

Home ownership, ideology and diversity: Re‐evaluating concepts of housing ideology in the case of Japan

Traditionally, theories of home ownership ideology have emphasised its significance in maintaining social stability and political legitimacy, particularly in recent decades and in Anglo‐Saxon dominated societies (Kemeny 1981, 1986, 1992, Forrest 1983, Marcuse 1987). Underlying these claims are ranges of assumptions concerning the nature of ideology or the systems of values and beliefs surrounding home ownership. This paper attempts to challenge these ideological and theoretical assumptions that have dominated housing studies since the 1970s. This challenge takes the form of a critique of the crude model of ideology applied by housing theorists. Alternatively, normalisation and discourse, the subjective meanings of housing and dwelling, and family and cultural practices are emphasised in understanding the relationship between tenure, hegemony and ideology. A comparative approach is also identified as an effective tool in revealing the nature and practice of home ownership values and ideologies. The case of Japan is drawn upon to demonstrate divergence in the role and effect of home ownership and ideology, and to undermine the ‘eternal truths’ applied to housing and home ownership in the European and Anglo‐Saxon context.

Home alone: the individualization of young, urban Japanese singles

Social life in Japan has been historically orientated towards hierarchical networks of social integration starting in the family home and extending to the neighborhood, company, and nation. In the postwar period, households and life courses were largely fixed, mediated by company society, a standard breadwinner family model and an ascent up an owner-occupied housing ladder. The bursting of the economic bubble two decades ago, and the subsequent ‘lost decade’, disrupted established flows into employment, family life, and owner-occupation. We examine recent restructuring of life courses around the home which has become characteristic of social changes and a medium of individualization. The home, once ingrained with notions of the eternal Japanese family, has become a conduit of atomization for younger generations who have experienced radical shifts in social and economic conditions. Since the 1990s numbers of single-only and couple-only households have ballooned while marriage and fertility rates have declined. Although homeownership norms have persisted, new patterns of renting and single living in the city, or remaining in the family home as a ‘parasite single’, are increasing. We consider how the reconstitution of ‘home’ under more insecure housing and employment conditions is embedded with the reshaping of life courses, housing pathways, and patterns of urban space and living.

Meeting the income needs of older people in East Asia: using housing equity

ABSTRACT In the welfare systems of East Asian countries, the income, care and other needs of older people have traditionally been met less by state social protection measures and more by the family, supported by what might be termed the first homeownership strategy: widening access to home ownership as a physical, emotional and financial basis of family wellbeing. Recent political, economic and demographic developments, however, have undermined this model. Examining policy responses in the three most advanced East Asian economies, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, but also with reference to Taiwan, the paper identifies common tendencies in the ways in which the ability to use home ownership has been strengthened. As a second strategy, home ownership has been used to reduce geographical constraints on family support, while, as a third strategy, governments have introduced mechanisms through which older people are able to realise some or all of the equity they have built up through the housing market. These mechanisms include, moving down market or even converting to a rental solution, as well as forms of reverse-mortgage products, some available through private financial institutions and some involving state-organised and state-operated devices.

Homeownership in South Korea: Examining Sector Underdevelopment

Despite government emphasis on home purchase and four decades of extensive house building, levels of owner-occupation in South Korea remain relatively modest. This paper examines Korean homeownership policy development, identifying key reasons for the limited growth: the underdevelopment of housing finance; unproductive government intervention on property speculation; ineffective tax support for low-income home purchase; and the structure of the rental sector. Korean housing policy is characteristically supply driven, which has expanded housing stock but distorted distribution, increased speculation and polarised housing wealth. This paper considers the underdevelopment of demand-side policies as the underlying failure in the sustainable and equitable expansion of homeownership. It also implicates housing more centrally in East Asian policy regime divergence.

Housing East Asia: socioeconomic and demographic challenges

Housing and home ownership has been strongly embedded in East Asian socioeconomic and policy models. Based on the primacy of national economic growth objectives, it was promoted as a means of, on the one hand, contributing directly to economic growth through the motor of the construction industry, and, on the other, supporting a low-taxation, low-public-expenditure economy with minimal social protection measures based on the support of the family. In recent years, however, this housing pillar is facing new social, economic, political and demographic challenges, including a decline in the political authority of authoritarian states, the undermining of traditional developmental logic, fragmentation of families and household types and the growing volatility of housing markets. Most of these have been generated or exacerbated by intensified globalization and economic crises in recent years.