Deliverable 3.1 (D3.1) provides one of the first comprehensive profiles of housing inequality in Europe, addressing inequalities manifesting themselves between and within housing tenures, and beyond. It mobilises several available pan-European representative surveys and other data sources to provide a comprehensive overview of both the scale of housing inequality in Europe and of its form (in terms of its housing affordability, accessibility, quality, security, housing type and size, housing wealth across all housing tenures and also housing-related inequalities such as energy poverty). D3.1 also address relationships between Europe’s emerging housing crisis and the reported rise of extreme forms of housing exclusion, i.e. homelessness.
- Explanatory power: although the research literature on housing inequality is substantial, previous studies have limitations in advancing our understanding of housing precariousness and housing inequality. For instance housing inequality is often studied as an outcome in and of itself. Ch1. offers conceptual tools to grasp changing and intersectional dynamics in housing inequalities over time. By deploying an theory-driven dynamic and intersectional approach, D3.1 thus demonstrates how increases in relative housing inequality occur under the waterline of slowly improving aggregated trends across the population in general. The analysis presented in D3.1 also addresses several limitations regarding the conceptualization of housing inequality itself. Ch4 investigates how, across Europe, housing problems tend to co-vary in a systematic way, whilst allowing for trade-offs or cumulated disadvantages. We identified three types of housing precariousness ranging from less to more severe in terms of the stacking of additional problems: quality-, cost-, and, security-precariousness. By examining the different types of precariousness, we are able to understand nuances of housing precariousness experienced by different social groups and across countries. These nuances may remain hidden when using a single summary scale that merely compares the number of coinciding housing problems to determine if a household is more precarious than others.
- New insights: (i) into the relationship between wealth and housing inequality: While scholars recognise the growing importance of family (housing) wealth in the ability to buy a house, comparative profiles of such so-called ‘re-stratification’ of homeownership are scarce. Ch6 of D3.1 presents a descriptive exploration of cross-sectional patterns in (housing) wealth inequality across 23 European countries, based on the latest wave of the HFCS. This analysis advances the state-of-the art by: 1) conceptualizing measures of gross housing wealth and non-housing wealth that account for cross-national differences in mortgage finance as well as differing housing wealth accumulation trajectories over the life-course; 2) qualifying established relationships for a larger sample of countries from this alternative angle, broadening the focus from relative inequality to absolute levels of (housing) wealth, as well as to the concentration of (housing) wealth across the income distribution; and 3) analysing further intersections with age group/cohort and degree of urbanization. (ii) into the relationship between labour markets and housing precariousness: Ch7 of D3.1 fills important knowledge gaps by exploring the combinations of labour and housing precariousness at the regional scale in 27 member states of the European Union.
