The rural housing crisis: analytical dimensions and emblematic issues

Abstract

While the urban housing crisis is pivotal to current debates in housing studies, the question of affordable as well as sustainable housing in rural settings has arisen only recently. However, recent developments, including increasing demand for housing as well as for a specific supply, indicate that there is a rural housing crisis. Connecting the scattered strands of literature on rural housing, we propose an understanding of the rural housing crisis that involves spatialities, temporalities and intersectionalities. These dimensions are illustrated by three emblematic issues: the financialization/assetization of the rural housing supply, the increasing mobility of rural residents and the selective gentrification of rural communities. Building on a review of the literature on rural housing and its challenges, we argue that greater consideration of the rural in housing studies and a more nuanced focus on housing issues in rural studies would be fruitful, not only for future research but also for political action.

Keywords:

• Rural areas
• financialization
• assetization
• residential mobilities
• rural gentrification

Acknowledgements

We are very thankful to our colleague Tobias Weidinger for his inspiring thoughts and valuable comments on previous stages of the article as well as Maggie Studholme for her great manuscript proofreading. Moreover, we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped a lot to improve the structure of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term ‘Verhüttelung’ is a reference to ‘Hütte’, the German term for small cottages in the countryside.