Late home ownership and social re-stratification

Abstract

Home ownership was a significant element of social change in the post-war, mature, capitalist economies such as the United Kingdom, United States and Japan. This growth of individual home ownership occurred, however, within a particular demographic, economic, social and political context. This distinctive set of conditions include the atomized, nuclear family; suburbanization; high growth; the conventional mortgage market and a young, working population. These conditions have changed and coalesce in the constitution of what we refer to as ‘late home ownership’. The paper conceives of contrasts between ‘real estate families’ or ‘accumulating families’ which maintain or further accumulate valuable multiple property assets over generations; ‘dissipating families’ which are forced to deploy and diminish their property assets accumulated in the exceptional era; and propertyless ‘perpetual renter families’. It is argued that these emergent divisions are pivotal in understanding new forms of social re-stratification in which the patterns of ownership of residential property, the income flows from residential property investment, a changed demographics and intergenerational dynamics are key drivers.

Keywords:

• home ownership
• wealth
• social class
• post-war exceptionalism
• neoliberalism
• financialization

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ray Forrest

Ray Forrest is currently Research Professor in Cities and Social Change and Director of the Centre for Social Policy and Social Change at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies at Bristol University. Prior to joining Lingnan, he was at City University, Hong Kong, where he was Chair Professor of Housing and Urban Studies and served as Head of the Department of Public Policy from 2012 to 2017. At Bristol, he was appointed Professor of Urban Studies in 1994, and served as Head of the School for Policy Studies from 2001 to 2005. He is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. His recent research has focused on cities and the superrich; Chinese urbanism; financialization and the housing market; and the impact of housing wealth on social inequalities.

Yosuke Hirayama

Yosuke Hirayama is Professor of Housing and Urban Studies at the Graduate School of Human Development and Environment, Kobe University. He specializes in housing and urban change, home ownership and social inequalities, as well as comparative housing policy. His work has appeared in numerous Japanese and international academic journals, and he is co-editor of Housing and social transition in Japan (with Richard Ronald; Routledge, 2007). He has received academic prizes from the City Planning Institute of Japan, Architectural Institute of Japan and Tokyo Institute of Municipal Research. He is also a founding member of the Asia-Pacific Network for Housing Research.