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Both cross-sectional and panel data can be used to analyse the dynamics of housing markets over time. Myers proposes the method of longitudinal cohort analysis of repeated cross-sectional data for the study of trends in housing market circumstances. He emphasises the problems and limitations of the use of panel data for such purposes. In this article it is argued that Myers underestimates the potentials of panel data for the study of housing market dynamics over time. Panel data are now relatively easy to obtain and use, also for the analysis of long-term changes in housing markets. Prices and turnover rates in housing markets have been shown to be strongly auto-correlated across geographical space. Therefore, panel data can be used to analyse regional differences in housing markets, even if these data have a relatively small sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Global Financial Crash, there have been significant changes to the private rented sectors across the UK. The PRS has become increasingly important to providing housing to millions of homes and has gained increasing political and regulatory focus. At the same time, there has been a substantial increase in the number of short-term holiday lets enabled by online platforms such as Airbnb. There are concerns that this housing stock is being lost from residential housing and exacerbates issues of housing equality. This paper undertakes a case study of Airbnb growth in London to examine changes in listings and provides insight into Airbnb hosts. The extant literature and analysis in this paper support the argument of the loss of privately rented properties, with housing stock being reallocated as tourist accommodation, potentially displacing local communities. Finally, the paper analyses the struggles this poses for policymakers, communities and housing providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most nations homelessness remains a major injustice. A key response in Wales has been the introduction of a pioneering justiciable right to homelessness prevention and relief assistance. This paper explores the complexities of the new welfare bureaucracy this has created. We explore whether these housing rights invoke a paradox, whereby the positive impacts for citizens are accompanied by distancing and exclusion. The study reveals both a faceless bureaucracy characterised by processes of silencing and subordination propped up by tools of exclusion, particularly impenetrable paperwork, but also a system that can work to grant housing rights to those in need of support. There is no evidence for an utterly 'faceless tyrant' of a bureaucratic system, due to the often-inclusive ways that frontline staff operate, frequently at the margins of the law (Arendt 1970). Thus, this paper draws attention to the complexities inherent in a rights-based homelessness system and the paradoxical nature of attempting to grant housing rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Homeless' people are usually considered as citizens without property. The absence of ownership, especially in terms of housing, co-creates the very idea of homelessness in current societies. Despite this fact, 'homeless' citizens negotiate and experience their property, things, or the shelter in which they dwell. This paper sheds light on how this property is negotiated and experienced and how it influences home-making. It does so by drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the city of Pilsen, a second-order city in Czechia. Based on the intra-urban comparison of informal dwelling in two abandoned buildings – a former railway station tower and an allotment cottage – the paper conceptualize the unspotted home and argues that it arises from the assemblage of socio-materiality, meanings, and various dimensions of politics, where the politics of home-ownership has an important position. While informal ownership here is related to power asymmetry within home-making, paradoxically, it also brings about more complex informal citizenship and the potential for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years ago, in December 2000, the SRU Law (Loi Solidarité et Renouvellement Urbain) was passed in France, requiring selected municipalities to devote 25% of their local stock to social housing, in order to curb growing trends of segregation. Almost twenty years later, the balance is striking: still 1,222 municipalities targeted by the program do not comply with the set quota of 25% social housing units per municipality. Out of these non-complying municipalities, 269 had to pay an increased fee in 2017, based on the Article 55 clause included in the SRU Law. The total fee that these 'outlaw municipalities' had to pay for not providing enough social housing represented a total of € 77 million in 2017, and helped finance the national rental social housing fund for housing. In this paper, I ask what impact the Article 55 fee clause designed to enforce SRU Law objectives has had on the rebalancing of social housing stocks for municipalities not complying with set quotas. To answer such a question, I conduct a Difference-in-Differences study that measures changes in social housing stocks before and after the passage of the law. The treatment group comprises municipalities not complying with quota requirements and subject to the Article 55 fee, while the control group consists of municipalities not complying with quota requirements, but exempt from the fee. Findings underscore how after the passage of the Article 55 fee, municipalities that were subject to the fee have built less social housing than municipalities that are exempt, relative to before the enactment of the law. They corroborate my conceptual framework, which states that beyond the adoption of a national fee for noncompliant municipalities, social housing production trends are impacted by the types of land use ideologies in place in municipalities, be they pro-social housing or exclusionary. Twenty years later, these findings bring a new perspective to current debates taking place in policy circles around the effectiveness of one of France's most important social housing policy programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of disasters on human well-being extends beyond loss of assets. Asset based compensation approach, usually in monetary form, that the governments adopt for reconstruction of losses of affected persons is marred by challenges in identification of compensable disasters; identification of eligible claimants; identification of compensable losses; and valuation of losses. The largest asset that a household possesses is their house, which suffers major damage. Loss to a house goes beyond the asset itself and affects many dimensions of human well-being. The question this paper examines is, what are the dimensions of well-being, that housing and its location, as resource, have been able to reconstruct for households who were resettled in resettlement colonies of Chennai (India)? Using the framework proposed by Martin Binder, this paper identifies the dimensions of housing well-being and the extent to which these are reconstructed through post-disaster relocation, using the case of households relocated in resettlement colonies in Chennai (India) after disasters since 2004. This paper reveals that housing, and its location contributes to well-being, which is much more than its asset characteristics. Post-disaster resonstruction through relocation and provision of housing must create those opportunities that contribute to well-being. Opportunities for higher income, neighbourhood security, social capital, safety level in the neighbourhood, access to informal/social system for childcare, social and economic associations are significant contributors to housing well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service providers' crucial roles in securing housing for refugees in Canada is a topic scantly addressed in the broader literature. A focus on frontline workers in the housing and settlement sectors offers a productive analytic lens to map the critical link between service provision and housing access for refugees. Based on thirteen semi-structured interviews with service providers across nine organizations in Toronto, Canada, this study illuminates housing access barriers, such as lack of affordable housing and perceived housing discrimination. Furthermore, this paper unearths the intersectional praxis of frontline workers. Broadening the analytical frame to include an intersectional lens centring race, class, immigration status, and gender, this paper enriches current scholarship on 1) housing inequality, 2) refugee settlement, and 3) intersectionality. This paper also makes an epistemic intervention in the evolving field of housing studies at critical junctures. While this research was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, this study reflects on the added complexity of the pandemic to refugees' housing access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn 1967, John Rex and Robert Moore published an influential book on ethnic housing inequality in Birmingham, titled Race, Community and Conflict. The book presented a theory about classes formed in the housing market, inspired by a particular reading of Max Weber’s ideas about class. The basic idea of the housing class is that people’s relation to the means of housing is a class-forming factor that is not reducible to their relation to the means of production. This paper presents the original housing class theory and its revision by Peter Saunders, property class theory, and criticisms of the two theories. Since the 1980s, both theories have disappeared from housing research. In the 2020s, the basic idea of the housing class was revived in Lisa Adkins’ and her co-authors’ asset class theory. This paper discusses the history of the idea of the housing class and its contemporary relevance. It also raises questions about the conceptualization of class and housing inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThere has recently been a burgeoning interest in private rental housing, yet few studies have addressed the tenant/landlord relationship as lived. This paper contributes related insights from the ‘young’ markets of Eastern Europe where the tenant/landlord relationship is entirely market based but embedded in specific cultural norms and supply/demand balances. Drawing on cultural theories of risk and rich qualitative data from tenants and landlords in Romania, this paper examines narratives of risk and repertoires of risk mitigation practices of the relational risks of renting. Findings portray a supply-rich market where tenants have market power hence financial checks on tenants are socially unacceptable, evictions are rare, and most tenants feel at home in their rented properties. In this tenant market, landlords rely on the social vibe of the first tenant/landlord encounter, showing openness to construct win-win collaborations. These less institutionalised practices seem more inclusive to tenants’ economic unpredictability but high rents push the poor, and ethnic stigmatisation drives the Roma ‘others’ into alternative housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities of the Global South are often unable to invest in developing urban housing. Land value-based tools for developing low-income housing, like India's In Situ Slum Redevelopment (ISSR, part of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana—Urban scheme), seek to balance welfare and economic agendas, but have not achieved expected results. ISSR's focus on attracting private capital to redevelop India's slums reflects a perceived rent gap on slum lands. This paper dissects this perception using a probabilistic simulation model to assess the scheme's feasibility and profitability, integrating data on slums, real-estate markets and policy incentives. The paper proposes a Land Shape Index, identifying slum land shape as a critical—and overlooked—determinant of rent gap. Finding little to no rent gap on slum lands across big and small cities—reflected in ISSR's low uptake—the paper argues that land value-based capital-led slum redevelopment is unlikely to gain traction and scale. These analyses provide avenues for policy introspection, practice, and lessons for housing studies in India and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses coliving as a product shaped to attract both young professionals in a student-style accommodation and investors of various scales, while integrating new geographies and housing types into capital accumulation. Taking Brussels as case-study, it answers the question 'how are new residential products created by the financialization process affecting the private rental sector?' by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The paper also provides results on intra-urban geographies of financialized housing. First, coliving is aimed at a particular market segment consisting of young international workers attracted by the international functions of Brussels. To attract this clientele to a student-style accommodation, operators must promote a unique experience. Second, the Brussels coliving market illustrates that the financialization of the private rental sector relies notably on the creation of new products shaped so that investors of various scales can easily inject their capital. Third, most Brussels coliving establishments remain small-scale projects located in renovated old single-family houses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the resurgence of private-rental housing as both a place to live, and a site of capital investment. Individual landlordism is a key feature of this resurgence. This paper aims to understand the networked geographies of private landlordism. Drawing on Dutch register data, containing geocoded information on the full population and housing stock, this paper is able to uniquely link private-rental units to their (landlord) owners. By linking landlords' places of residence and investment, flows of capital across space are visualized. Empirically, these findings show that, despite the liquidity of capital and the typical focus on transnational investments, most landlords invest locally or regionally, resulting in urban-regional networks of landlordism. These patterns pertain to landlord spatial strategies as well as the functioning of urban systems. Conceptually, findings demonstrate that property-based class relations between tenants and landlords are spatial relations as well, linking places of accumulation with places of extraction and reproducing spatial patterns of (dis)advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractDrawing inspiration from autoethnographic accounts of gentrification, this paper examines the privileges and disadvantages of middling transnationals in the private rented sector to reveal the complexity of housing decisions, thereby challenging the inclination to conceive this particular group as ‘gentrifiers’. By demonstrating the ability of middle-class migrants to prioritize their preferences while considering the challenges they face due to their newcomer status, this paper contends that housing decisions are the outcome of the interplay between migrants, rental agents, and digital platforms. In so doing, this paper highlights the gatekeeping capability of traditional and digital intermediaries in the rental market. Methodologically, this paper underscores the value of the microscopic view enabled by autoethnography, which broadens gentrification research by facilitating the recognition of emerging trends and the identification of promising areas for future research. Overall, through its reflection on the potential influences of transnational migrants on gentrification, this paper contributes to research efforts that intend to understand gentrification in relation to migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to research that examines how state actors support the financialisation of land via the development process and how planning systems have facilitated the accumulation of privately-owned land-based wealth. The empirical focus is the specialist residential land promoter sector in England. This is a particularly appropriate case study because of how this sector of the land market has become integrated with the planning system via crisis-driven planning reform that has facilitated the commodification of planning risk and the financialisation of land. The paper examines the business models and strategies of land promoters to show how they have been shaped both by the politics of planning reform as well as the financial objectives of their funders. The research is in dialogue with international literature on the relationship between planning and the land market, how this relationship is shaped by risk and uncertainty, and the role of state regulation in reshaping the physical environment in accordance with financial logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010 the English planning system, like others across Europe, has undergone a series of market- oriented reforms. There has been a concerted attempt to make state organisations, and those in receipt of public funds, more entrepreneurial and financially proactive and independent. This paper focuses on one manifestation of these wider trends - the regulation of English Housing Associations [HAs] as examples of organisations that are under pressure to take on more financial risks and deliver a wider range of affordable housing for communities in need. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, the paper assesses some of the regulatory and governmental challenges that emerge in using market-led forms of coordination. It examines the role of new regulators and the ways which they seek to 'co- produce' regulations with HAs in more liquid and negotiated ways. We show that in reality decisions are taken in response to a polycentric mix of simultaneous regulatory pressures that act as gravitational pulls on the activities and decisions made by HAs, rather than enforcing a consistent and linear form of regulatory control. We conclude with wider reflections for planning theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines third sector social housing in early post-apartheid South Africa, hence offering important new insights into how institutions in emerging economies shape the implementation and impacts of this approach. Based on qualitative research methods, the paper finds that under conditions of weak formal governance, nascent industry capacity and disaffected communities, third sector social housing resulted in serious project failures and squandered public resources. The study employs an institutional lens to understand how formal and informal institutions shaped the implementation of projects and how key stakeholders acted upon conflicting incentives. It discusses five major factors – inadequate formal policy and regulatory framework, limited government capability and support, limited sector capacity, private finance reluctance and adverse informal arrangements – that caused serious difficulties both at the program and project level. The paper argues that developing robust third sector social housing comes with substantial financial, administrative and political responsibilities for governments, and its success depends on the alignment between the formal policy framework and informal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While housing can facilitate many of the freedoms associated with a 'well-lived' life, the Capabilities Approach (CA) is yet to have transformed housing research and evaluation. This paper explores the relationship between housing conditions and well-being, using Nussbaum's version of the CA as the basis for analysis. It draws on data from a UK-based qualitative study of the experiences of individuals residing in privately-run hostels in the North of England. The analysis reveals much diversity in terms of the ways in which the residents perceived their housing conditions and the impacts of these on their exercise of key functions, despite all living in similar environmental conditions. This highlights the highly subjective and complex nature of the relationship between housing conditions and well-being. It is argued that a more robust understanding of the key factors that mediate the relationship being investigated is needed if the potential of the CA to advance housing research and evaluation is to be further realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing social movements, in the course of their everyday activities, continually share and produce knowledge, a process defined as learning. This paper addresses a gap in the literature on housing activism, looking at learning as a crucial domain of housing movements' politics and practice. By looking at housing activism through the lens of theories on learning in social movements, we provide a nuanced understanding of Barcelona's neighbourhood-based housing groups. Previously centralized in one movement (the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca), housing activism in the city is now spread into a heterogeneous network, including small and localized collectives. The paper examines one neighbourhood housing group, the Grup d'Habitatge de Sants, and its relations with other groups, scrutinizing how processes and potentials of learning unfold in four critical moments: assemblies, workshops, direct action and debates/congresses. We reveal learning as a complex and multilayered phenomenon, arguing that it is fundamental for housing activism and an essential path towards achieving housing justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the functions walls perform in gated communities from the standpoints of both gated community developers and their residents. It posits three types of walls and scrutinises the purpose for each. Drawing empirical data from face-to-face interviews with 11 developers and 20 residents drawn from two gated communities in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area in Ghana, the paper finds that, contrary to received wisdom, internal cluster walls in gated communities are used to segregate residents into different economic and social classes, often under the pretext of offering them different housing choices. It further casts doubts on the widely touted view that gated communities offer a better sense of security as residents express anxieties over suspected criminals living among them. The paper concludes by calling for a re-examination of several features of gated communities, including the meaning of the concept itself and the typologies that exist to bring out more of such nuances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the planned externalisation of affordable workers housing under Delhi's ongoing extended urbanisation. Drawing upon recent literature on planned illegalities, subaltern urbanisation, and agro-urban transformations in India and specifically in the Delhi region, the paper proposes tenement towns as a relational settlement category to understand the planned externalisation of housing. It examines three manufacturing clusters spread over an extensive territory in the DMIC urban corridor running out of Delhi. Finding evidence for how the workers housing is externalised into spaces marked as 'rural outsides' in the masterplanning documents. It examines the role of parallel agrarian institutions and social structures in enabling the illegal growth of the tenement towns. Finally, the paper critically examines the role such settlements play in maintaining a permanently temporary surplus workforce crucial for cheap global manufacturing. Through introducing tenement towns as a relational category, the paper attempts to contribute towards a global housing studies that transcends space-time and north-south boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Europe, reports of problematic housing situations for young adults have increasingly emerged during the last decades. This paper explores housing experiences among young adults living in a disadvantaged area of Malmö, Sweden, taking the concept of housing inequality as its point of departure. The results suggest how young adults become stuck in between a number of parallel housing markets, leaving them no choice other than the illegal rental market – characterized by steep rents, insecure conditions and precarious quality. The paper advances a multidimensional understanding of housing inequality, as the limited access and poor quality of housing that young adults experience reproduces inequality in a broader sense: It influences potential wealth accumulation, the possibility to lead independent lives, the access to work and education, and thereby, the young adults' health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architectural anthropology offers a way to critically analyse spaces through the social life that happens around them. It is a qualitative approach that relies on ethnography to connect larger systems and subjective dimensions, self-reflexivity, and the use of visualisations as a key analytical tool. This paper reflects on the possible contribution of architectural anthropology to housing studies. More specifically, it looks at homing processes in social housing, interrogating how non-domestic spaces perform through tenants' inhabitation practices. It tests ways to visualise ethnographic data gathered during immersive fieldwork that involved participant observation and informal interactions in a high-rise estate in Brussels. Three types of visualisations (subjective map, annotated photograph, lived-in axonometry) are presented to articulate the paper's discussion of homing, un-homing and de-homing processes at the level of a district, urban interstices, and beyond social housing. Ultimately, the paper concludes that architectural anthropology may contribute further to housing studies by exploring the relationship between home(making) and urban contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe incredible mobilisation to welcome Ukrainian refugees following the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 demonstrated how housing is an affective sociomaterial infrastructure. In cruel contrast, such mobilisation also exposed the inherently racist and colonial face of accommodating refugees and migrants, and the structural inequalities that racial capitalism continues to reproduce. Drawing reflections across several geographies and temporalities through illustrative vignettes, this paper begs the questions under what conditions do we accept that some people are housed, others not? What kind of power structures allow certain bodies to be welcomed? This paper borrows from postcolonial, black and critical theory to examine refugee housing through the lens of necropolitical infrastructure. It connects Mbembe’s notion of necropower with Power and Mee’s notion of housing as infrastructure of care, and filters this through reflections across Calais, Brescia and Athens, to illustrate the bio- and necropolitical side of the refugee housing infrastructure in Europe. The paper ultimately argues that refugee housing, because it is an infrastructure and because it is part of the broader extractive and exploitative system of (humanitarian) care, is deeply imbricated in the production of racialised subjects. Specifically, it is complicit with the extraction, (re)incorporation, abandonment and slow death of Black and Brown refugee lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can tenants affect housing policy? This paper compares rental housing politics in Los Angeles (USA) and Berlin (Germany) between 2008-2020 by examining how political processes influenced policy. It serves as a case of the emergence, escalation, and impact of tenant power. Tenant movement organizations employed five mechanisms to affect policymaking: (1) making demands, (2) forming coalitions, (3) promoting referendums, (4) engaging government officials in dialogue, and (5) transferring agents to government. The paper draws on multiple data sources, including interviews and participant observation over ten years. The cities witnessed policy episodes with four parallel characteristics: (1) locally progressive and regionally moderate, (2) shifting from defensive to offensive, (3) shifting from particular to universal, and (4) signs of a breakthrough beyond neoliberal housing policymaking. The findings suggest that the rise of tenant movements and their allies help drive policy change via multiple channels, exhibiting both similarities and differences across cities, especially in terms of money power and people power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought under the spotlight home's severe inadequacies, which take a particular intensity in the various unregulated, insecure rental housing markets across the globe. It is now timely to deliberate what it takes for a rented property to be made home, and in that debate tenants' voices should be heard. Taking the UK as a case-study and drawing on data collected through an online qualitative questionnaire, the paper focuses on a group of tenants theorised as 'everyday activists' to address the empirical question of what they demand from the government for the sector to improve. Considering participants' legitimising narratives and assertions for self-representation in policy construction, the paper then proposes a reading of the demands made through the 'Right to Home', a concept carefully grounded in Henri Lefebvre's Right to the City. The Right to Home calls for home-ing and democratising current de-radicalised understandings of the right to housing in order to craft more transformative futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financialized student accommodation has emerged as an international asset class and is a more visible and politically contentious feature of Irish cities. In this paper, I focus on Dublin which has seen the construction of for-profit Purpose Built Student Accommodation, and rent increases, skyrocket. Contributing to, as well as advancing, debates on rental market financialization, I present changes to student housing provision tied to financialization and explore the consequences for students' right to housing. I build my argument around qualitative research undertaken between 2019-2021, namely documentary analysis, focus groups, and key informant interviews. I explore how financialization is contested through engagement with the student housing campaign 'Shanowen Shakedown'. I present the political outcomes of this campaign and demonstrate that whilst it achieved greater housing rights for students, students continue to battle the uneven geographies of financialization. The paper argues student accommodation is implicated in wider transformations of Dublin's urban housing system and the ongoing financialization of the private rental sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an emergent field of writings on financialized landlords' undertaking of apartment renovations as an investment strategy and its effect on housing inequalities. Seldom do these studies contextualize these tendencies within countries' specific housing policy traditions. Therefore, through a qualitative case study in a neighbourhood in Sweden, this paper aims to uncover how private landlords undertake renovations as an investment strategy and its effect on tenants and, in turn, on the hybrid character of a universal housing system. It finds that renovations enable landlords to extract value from the built environment while tenants experience rising rents, a lack of information, poor property maintenance, and apprehension. Hence, I argue that renovations represent an investment strategy that serves to undermine the traditional social right to housing within a universal housing policy context. The paper thus furthers knowledge on how the situatedness of financialization tendencies entails their translation through and transformation of housing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper's main argument is that housing financialisation can be understood as a set of intertwined digital/material processes, and that resisting housing financialisation requires activism that recognises and capitalises on this dynamic. Drawing from Desiree Fields' (2017a) work on urban struggles with financialisation, this conceptual argument is unpacked through a case study of post-crash Dublin, an urban space reshaped by housing financialisation and struggles resisting it. Housing has been a key subject of contention in post-crash Dublin and activists' digital/material struggles illustrate how digital technologies and platforms can be and are appropriated to resist housing financialisation. The paper traces the intertwining of housing financialisation, resistance, and the digital in post-crash Dublin and argues that future research on platform real estate, urbanism, and automated landlord practices must take seriously the ambivalent opportunities, agency, and counter narratives that housing activists create through their digital/material practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractHousing decisions are often constrained by practicality, while dream home aspirations remain unrestrained. This gap widens significantly in the housing industry, where boundaries blur, advertising fairytale-like estates while providing homes closer to reality than dreams. This study researches, proposes, and tests a framework to assist in making informed housing decisions between dreams and reality. Through a set of 24 themes and a three-step funnel, this paper carefully weighs the themes and their overlapping spatial, architectural, aesthetic, and contextual variables against a spectrum. Positioned as mediating the psychology of decision-making and the dynamics of housing in the market, the paper controls demographic variability by selecting a single context. In this study, 183 Egyptian participants act as a microcosm of the global phenomenon. The framework is proven to be statistically significant, and the findings are multidimensional, revealing nuanced differences of complex residential aesthetic preferences. At the boundary between modernized fairy-tale home aspirations and limited housing practicality, this framework holds the key to making dream homes come true by informing existing and future housing decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing vacancy is a significant issue in developed countries' decaying and densely populated cities. Comparisons are made between the number of 'vacant housing' and 'homeless people' stressing the existence of inequalities in access to housing. The reasons for addressing vacancy are manifold, ranging from mitigating urban blight to mobilising latent resources in tight markets. Little attention is paid to vacancy in municipal housing strategies. Still, mapping vacant units appears to be complex and resource-demanding, likely discouraging municipalities from planning further operations against vacancy. Given the lack of methodological support in the literature, this paper discusses how to identify housing vacancy units. Through a case study in Wallonia (Belgium), this paper highlights the benefits of combining visual surveys and processing data provided by utilities and registered addresses. Our results suggest that housing vacancy is underestimated through official statistics and that data mining would help mitigate the administrative burden related to identification and help to prioritise operations designed to reduce housing vacancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are currently observing an international trend towards the establishment of nonprofit-oriented, collaborative and self-managed housing models. In this respect, ideas have been circulating globally and initiatives mutually interacting. The SchloR and Bikes and Rails syndicate projects in Vienna, the focus of this paper, bear witness to this development. They belong to the Austrian umbrella association habiTAT, founded in 2014 along the lines of the German Mietshäuser Syndikat. Against this background, the present paper explores the ways in which mobilized housing commons are implemented in new locations and the role that translocal networks play in this context. The results of our analysis, which is based on 30, partly network-graph assisted, problem-centered interviews, reveal that the housing projects have made explicit use of translocal networks at national and international scale and that vertical linking is a key condition for those projects today. Moreover, way beyond their own needs, they contribute to set up a translocal European knowledge and expert network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that Housing First (HF) is a human-rights based approach to housing some of society's most vulnerable citizens is often alluded to in the literature, but seldom interrogated. In this paper, we examine whether HF in Alberta, Canada is practiced in a way that realizes the right to housing for chronically homeless people. We do so using four human rights principles identified by Fukuda-Parr: non-discrimination, participation, adequate progress and remedy. Based on interviews with staff of 14 HF programs in three cities, we identify constraints to a human rights-based approach, including time-limited support, which necessitates a strong emphasis on housing sustainability. We also identify positive practices, such as client participation in decision-making and tenant rights education. The paper also provides a model for systematically assessing whether HF programs respect, protect and fulfil the right to housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public housing has contributed tremendously to addressing housing deficits in many countries. Notwithstanding the shift towards neo-liberalism, public housing is still relevant in the Global South. Ghana's response to the neo-liberal call was to sell-off most of the public housing stock and transfer some of the remainder to local authorities. Despite its contribution to labour mobility and productivity, Ghana's public housing conditions are poor largely due to ineffective management and maintenance. The paper aims to use systems theory to identify the organizational challenges for management that has resulted in poorly maintained public housing. The study interviewed housing experts, local authority staff and tenants; and finds that the organizational structure is poorly defined; irregular financial resource flows impede maintenance, and there is low tenant involvement in housing management. It recommends that housing management activities should be concentrated at the municipal level with defined roles. Mechanisms for tenant participation in management should be introduced to ensure that outcomes meet tenants' expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home is often dually conceptualized as a physical space of living and a psycho-social place of belonging. To engage with this dual nature of home, housing scholars refer to the concept of ontological security to understand how different forms of housing affect subjective well-being. This paper extends the scope of this research. Developing a framework inspired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we aim to understand what kind of psycho-spatial arrangements of home-making are involved in establishing ontological security. Based on empirical research in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we suggest three modalities involved in home-making: the need for shelter as the most basic psychic relation to survival, the demand for housing as a psycho-social arrangement with the Other, and the desire for home as a psycho-spatial constitution in the fantasy. Through this, the paper calls for a deeper understanding of how the subject is inscribed actively and dynamically into their social and built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forced relocation—displacement—of social housing residents resulting from estate regeneration involving demolition has been the subject of considerable academic and policy debate. While some scholars and policy makers regard such displacement as having harmful outcomes in relation to loss of homes and community relations, others argue that residents benefit from relocation as they move to 'better places'. This paper contributes to this debate, and to the wider 'post-displacement' research agenda, by providing an experiential perspective on residential relocation with reference to in-depth interviews with social housing residents in London who returned to new-build flats at the redeveloped mixed-tenure estates. The paper employs a multi-scalar approach to place attachment which is illustrated and analysed at three spatial scales: domestic (home/dwelling), intermediate (block of flats) and neighbourhood (estate). The home scale is the most positive albeit not unequivocal aspect of residents' post-displacement experiences, whereas place attachments at the block and neighbourhood scales are characterized by extensive and intensive disruptions and losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequently increased time spent at home signified the importance of understanding on the link between housing and mental health. This paper examines how housing qualities affect depression and suicide ideation for each age group (i.e. young adults, middle-aged and older adults) and gender. With South Korea population-based panel data, fixed-effect models and a partial least squares structural equation model were used. A functional problem was a major risk factor for depression in women, whereas a structural problem was a key risk factor for men's depression. For older adults, living in basement and vulnerability to natural disaster were detrimental to mental health. Functional problems increased the likelihood of suicide ideation in the middle-aged. The mechanisms of the housing qualities-mental health nexus were varied by age and gender. This paper proposed policy suggestions including a tailored housing policy and provision, a housing rating system for health and a support system for noise control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A spectre haunts how we think about housing—describing it in binaries, in oppositions, in 'essentialised' identities (formal/informal, north/south, social/spatial, product/process). What does a more nuanced understanding of assemblages—drawn from the original work of Deleuze and Guattari—have to offer housing studies to move beyond such dichotomies? This paper outlines a conceptual framework where housing is re-thought as an unfolding of socio-material processual-relations and desires forming a field of intensities. This theoretical framework is used to think through empirical findings from a six-month socio-spatial ethnography conducted in Karail, the largest informal settlement in Dhaka that houses 300,000 people. The findings, seen through assemblages, allow identifying, firstly, the interconnections between different actors across different binaries that make it work and secondly, the different modes of settlement's production itself. Lastly, the paper recasts the settlement as a manifestation of a landscape of intersecting desires in an effort to speak of housing in a new language transcending the stifling dichotomy of top-down/bottom-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines public housing as an art of government to conceive, produce and discipline a normative ideal of 'good' citizenship through people and place. Using the framework of infrastructural citizenship, case studies from state-subsidised homeownership programmes in Cape Town (South Africa) and Stoke-on-Trent (UK) demonstrate how public housing provides a physical mediator for the politicisation of citizenship. Infrastructural citizenship is explored through both state expectations (of housing, of citizens) and citizens' everyday practices, revealing state-society contestation and conformity in how 'order' and 'decency' materialise. In bridging the global south/north the paper not only generates new knowledge from two rarely contrasted contexts, but also illuminates and challenges the dominance of global north examples in public housing debates. By juxtaposing contemporary case studies where neither is the dominant lens for analysis, the paper argues that difference is particularly illuminating for knowledge production, and that housing theory and policy need to embrace postcolonial perspectives to ensure global relevance and legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many cities in low- and middle-income countries, a sizable proportion of households live in informal housing. This paper proposes a framework for analysing the connections between formal and informal housing markets, both at the city-level in terms of the mechanisms that link the two housing markets, and at the individual-level in terms of the preferences of residents for whom informal housing is a possible housing choice. The framework identifies the mechanisms by which formal and informal housing markets are connected at the city-level, including competition, disamenity or negative spillover, and redevelopment or positive spillover. Informal housing in Mumbai serves as an empirical case to demonstrate the applicability of this framework. Results from field research suggest that the connection between formal and informal housing markets is dynamic – it can work in different causal directions, change over time and vary by scale. The preferences of residents in informal housing are diverse, and have varying implications for urban policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the global context, studies have found that young adults are facing increasing difficulties in accessing homeownership and delaying home-leaving. While the Western literature on housing circumstances among younger generations indicates the importance of family support, in an East Asian context, the family is particularly intertwined with housing arrangements given the cultural heritage of filial piety. To elucidate the dynamics of housing transitions, this paper adopted a holistic approach and used sequence analysis to establish distinct housing pathways in a less studied social context, Taiwan. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics, apart from providing empirical evidence on the emergence of the private rented path and a decline in homeownership associated with housing inequality, this paper explored the diverse housing pathways associated with the principal platform of family support, i.e. the parental home, and found that it may function as both a familisation instrument for young adults seeking independence and negotiating leverage sustaining the filial reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a framework for assessing maturity of the private rented sector (PRS) that is tested by reference to a study of Edinburgh set within a Scottish context. The mature market framework is developed by reference to investment theory and comparison with established PRSs in Europe. The PRS is accepted to a degree by users, the government, the wider community and investors. However, the PRS still lacks complete acceptance among tenants and fiscal changes have reduced its financial attractiveness to landlords. Recent Scottish legislation has brought greater regulation that has favoured tenants. There is also little evidence of acceptance by institutional investors. The study therefore finds the case for maturity is unproven, although some subsectors are more mature than others. From a housing system perspective PRS maturity is a function of how the state frames the interaction between private markets and public provision, particularly in countries like the UK which retain a significant sized social sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intermediary turn in housing studies has argued that professionals like estate agents are causally significant to housing market outcomes. This theory leans on the concept of 'professionalism' in two ways. Firstly, agents' professional identities build in them both the capacity and the motivation to affect the price setting mechanism. Secondly, agents' professional identities are conceptualised as a political inheritance, and therefore something that can indicate how housing markets have been configured and constructed by the wider political context. This paper interrogates this theory, using it to study the significance of high-street estate agents to house price inflation in London. While the intermediary turn proposes a causal effect between agents' work and price inflation, evidencing this causal effect was an empirical problem. Nevertheless the concept of professionalism was used to reveal a professional identity bound up in housing investment. We argue that this professionalism could be highly significant, offering an insight into the contextual political economy of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the heteronormativity of the increasing field of studies around intergenerational family relations within asset-based welfare systems, the paper analyses the housing pathways of lesbian and gay young people, focusing on family intergenerational relations and the implications concerning emotional, private and sexual life. The paper focuses on Greece and Italy, two countries characterized by the so-called 'Southern European' model of welfare system centred around the family. Given the persistence of homo/lesbophobia, this process pushes lesbian and gay youth to negotiate between housing choices and personal lives in ambivalent ways. The housing strategies analysed are regrouped into four categories: (i) the return to the family house; (ii) the dependence on the family of origin to buy or rent; (iii) international migration to be more autonomous; (iv) the experience of alternative housing models, mostly squatting, or sharing (including Airbnb). Our categorization must not be interpreted as fixed or immutable since people might try different solutions over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented which discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on a historical reinterpretation of housing policy in Great Britain, one on the influence of lobbyists in Australian housing policy processes, and another on the surge in international speculative housing investment in Australia.

Wealth and income inequalities are rising globally since the 1970s, with detrimental social, economic and environmental effects. The contribution of housing costs to rising inequality is not well understood. In this paper we examine the intersection of tenure, income, generation and geographical factors compounding after-housing income inequality to understand how housing costs impacted on rising economic inequality in Australia since 1993. Analysing data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Household Expenditure Surveys conducted in 1993–4 and 2017–8, the paper shows that rising housing costs disproportionally curtailed real gains from income growth for lower-income households, exacerbating inequality. Between 1993–4 and 2017–8, the incomes of the top 10% of earners rose at a rate twice as high as the bottom 10% of earners in before-housing income, or three times as high after deducting housing costs. The paper examines how this overarching trend was shaped by the intersection of socioeconomic, generational, tenure and geographical factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the resilience of social rental housing in the UK, Sweden and Denmark. Throughout the OECD, processes of retrenchment and privatization, alongside the growth of the owner-occupied and private rental sectors, have led to nigh universal declines in the size and scope of social rental housing. These processes have not transpired evenly, however. Embracing a historical institutionalist approach, alongside novel data and methodology, this paper assesses the variegated patterns of sectoral decline and resilience in these three northern European countries. We find the Danish, association-based model - with its polycentric governance and multi-level system of financing - to have been the most robustly resilient hitherto. In the UK and Sweden, we observe patterns of decline and evidence that the non-profit and needs-based principles which traditionally underpinned these systems have reached precarious thresholds. Nevertheless, despite manifold retrograde threats and vulnerabilities over the past decades, the social rental sectors in Sweden and the UK have proved surprisingly resilient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractDrawing on new infrastructural scholarship, this paper conceptualises housing as infrastructure, outlining a way forward for housing researchers to draw the concept into their empirical practises. We demonstrate how and why we should research housing as infrastructure, using co-living housing as our empirical touchpoint to develop a framework for infrastructural housing studies. This paper has two parts. First, we identify what it means to conceptualise housing as infrastructure. Infrastructure is: a socio-material system or pattern, relational and generative. Second, we outline some useful vantage points for thinking infrastructurally about housing. We consider affordances, politics and inhabitation as three useful locations to understand the infrastructural work that housing does to order and organise the social world. We suggest thinking infrastructurally about housing can be done by interrogating how the dimensions of infrastructure work to order and organise affordances, politics and inhabitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing has always had a close association with refugees but despite this, the knowledge base about housing and its impact in the lives of refugees lacks cohesion. The accommodation of refugees tends to be connected with broader neo-liberal trends, alongside a general animosity towards refugees, culminating in an overt, or implied, 'hostile environment'. This paper synthesises the available evidence to understand several key issues in the settlement of refugees, including: the role and impact of housing systems and policies, the impact of housing quality, tenure, housing support workers and how the diversity of the refugee population is reflected in the evidence. We also point towards gaps in the knowledge base and call for housing studies scholars to focus on the plight faced by refugees in order to help challenge the wider structural inequalities which constrain their lives. In this discussion, our focus is the United Kingdom (UK), although the paper draws on literature from a wider international perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative housing studies traditionally focus on housing systems and social or economic policy, only rarely considering design issues. Through an examination of subsidized housing and its design in 20 countries, this paper explores how design research can benefit cross-national housing studies. Subsidized housing is essential to delivering decent and affordable homes, underpinning the right to housing. To relate design dimensions to housing systems, the analytical focus is on regulatory instruments, technical standards, and socio-spatial practices as well as housing providers, tenures, and target groups. Design research benefits the contextualization of housing systems and design outcomes in several ways. It reveals the contextual and contingent nature of regulatory cultures and instruments, socio-technical norms and standards, and socio-cultural expectations and practices that shape housing solutions. The paper concludes by considering productive ways architectural design research might contribute to an interdisciplinary housing research agenda by offering new means of theorization and analysis beyond traditional housing system typologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social construction of house size expectations in two national panel datasets: German Socio Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) and the British Household Panel Study (BHPS). More specifically, it tests the aspiration spiral theory and positional good theory using data on housing/life satisfaction and house size judgements. In both countries, it finds substantial evidence that the current space expectations of individuals who have 'upsized' depends on the level of living space they experienced in the past year. For downsizers, however, the evidence in support of the aspiration spiral theory is weaker. In terms of the positional good theory, this paper finds no consistent evidence that an individual's space expectations are influenced by those around them. In both countries, the paper tests for two reference groups – the average level of living space in the region, and the mean size of the largest decile of houses in the region – and neither are found to be significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]