Understanding generational housing inequalities beyond tenure, class and context

Abstract

Much of the literature surrounding ‘generation rent’ has been criticized for neglecting socio-economic inequalities, stimulating an emergent body of work addressing intersections between age and class in shaping housing opportunities. Despite this, two key conceptual and empirical gaps remain under-explored: the manifestation of housing outcomes beyond a binary owner-renter tenure framework, and the drivers of inequalities aside from exclusion from homeownership. In addressing these omissions, this paper compares shifts in tenure (restructuring of rental sectors), housing conditions (affordability and precarity), and alternative housing situations (parental co-residence), between income groups in two contexts: Australia and the Netherlands. Findings illuminate increasingly multifaceted housing pressures faced by young adults, remarkable differences between private-renters and occupants of other tenures, and growing socio-economic disparities within the private-rental sector.

Keywords:

• young adults
• housing
• generation rent
• inequality
• private rent

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editor for their feedback. They thank Oana Druta for her insightful comments as discussant for an earlier version of this paper as presented at the European Network for Housing Research, 2023. They also thank Rebecca Bentley and Emma Baker for their leadership in the CLOGH project, which shaped the themes of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, under grant number DP190101188. This grant was awarded to the project ‘Closing the housing gap: A spotlight on intergenerational inequalities’. It was also supported by the VENI grant from NWO, the Dutch Research Council, under grant number VI. Veni.191S.014. This grant was awarded to Cody Hochstenbach for his project ‘Investing in inequality: How the increase in private housing investors shapes social divides’.

Notes on contributors

Amber Howard

Amber Howard is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and the University of Amsterdam. Her research is concerned with young adults’ changing housing arrangements, their social stratifications, and their outcomes for mental health.

Cody Hochstenbach

Cody Hochstenbach is Assistant Professor in urban geography at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the political economy of housing and socio-spatial inequalities, drawing on a range of quantitative and qualitative methods.

Richard Ronald

Richard Ronald is Professor of Housing and Chair of Political and Economic Geographies at the University of Amsterdam. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Housing Research at the University of Adelaide. His research addresses housing markets and systems in relation to social, economic and urban transformations with a focus on societies in Europe and Asia Pacific.