On a global level, processes of so-called ‘financialization’ have been at forefront of housing market transformation. While a broad concept, financialization describes real forces that have progressively changed the nature of housing, through integration with global flows of capital, neoliberal re/deregulation and the increasing commodification of housing: changes that may exacerbate the translation of labour market to housing divides. All this, in an era where labour inequalities have increased and housing has only grown in importance in the face of welfare cutbacks and shifts towards ‘asset-based welfare.’ Housing matters: being crucial to the attainment of independence, wellbeing, decisions of family formation, and increasingly towards household economic security - as a resource over the life-course in times of need. Housing dynamics further structure societies in essential ways, whether affecting patterns of family formation and fertility or reproducing stratification across generations. Given differentiated homeownership entry, diverging outcomes on the property market, and intergenerational transmission, housing assets are clearly central to shaping inequalities. Financialization forces - albeit varied across contexts - have seemingly only amplified the importance of housing.
The project, entitled Housing Dualization: Divided Housing Careers and the Financialization of Housing Markets (HOU-DUAL), set out to tackles these issues, with the objective of developing a theoretical and empirical understanding of how European housing markets are increasingly structured by insider and outsider dynamics - or housing dualization - in the face of both rising labour market inequalities and housing market financialization. The project presented a critical investigation into dynamics of rising labour and housing inequalities, with fundamental implications for science, society and policy. The researcher, bringing a strong previous experience in housing inequality research, was embedded among key scholars in the field of housing market financialization at KU Leuven, led by Prof. Manual Aalbers.
The project was terminated early within the first year due to professional circumstances that could not be postponed. As such, the project work was only able to be carried out during a constrained period resulting in more limited output in the face of its early termination. Nonetheless, in the relatively short period previous to the termination of the grant, important work was undertaken in the project in meeting initial objectives, as outlined below.
