Limitations in the diffusion of collaborative housing in Poland: Expectations and beliefs of young generation as potential users

ABSTRACT

There is a strong attachment to individual homeownership in Poland. Young people, just after graduating from college, make housing decisions, most often aimed at purchasing a dwelling and taking out a long-term mortgage. With soaring housing prices in Poland between 2016 and 2021, this is increasingly difficult. Therefore, new integrative, collaborative, and social innovative forms of residence are required, especially when considering the expectations and beliefs of young adults. The authors use Rogers’ five attributes of innovation to examine the constraints on the diffusion of collaborative housing in Poland. A web-based questionnaire survey was conducted among 283 students drawn at the Poznan University of Economics and Finance in Poland. Using the binary logistic regression method, the authors identified a strong relationship between the belief in sharing instead of buying and the respondents’ preference for collaborative housing. Furthermore, lack of application of pro-environmental solutions in collaborative housing, a prolonged process of designing and building such projects, and a strong attachment of young people to individual ownership constitute serious limitations to the diffusion of housing innovations in Poland.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovations
• collaborative housing
• diffusion of innovations
• Poland

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges financial support within the Regional Initiative for Excellence program of the Minister of Science and Higher Education of Poland, years 2019–2022, grant no. 004/RID/2018/19, financing 3,000,000 PLN.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Regional Initiative for Excellence programme of the Minister of Science and Higher Education [004/RID/2018/19].

Notes on contributors

Piotr Lis

Piotr Lis, an Associate Professor at the Poznan University of Economics and Business, Poland. His research focuses on housing studies, in particular issues of housing cycles, housing policy, housing inequalities, housing finance and collaborative housing. He is the author of four books and more than sixty papers related to housing studies. His work has been published in Social Policy Issues, Studia BAS, Transformations in Business and Economics, Acta Scientiarum Polonorum Administratio Locorum.

Zuzanna Rataj

Zuzanna Rataj, PhD in the Department of Sociology and Business Ethics, Poznań University of Economics and Business. She focuses on social housing, social policy and housing inequalities. Her work has also been published in Housing Policy Debate, Acta Scientiarum Polonorum Administratio Locorum and her work has been funded by Regional Initiative for Excellence program of the Minister of Science and Higher Education of Poland and National Science Centre.

Katarzyna Suszyńska

Katarzyna Suszyńska, is an Assistant Professor at Poznań University of Economics and Business. Her research is mainly focused on social housing, housing tenure arrangements, social mix, collaborative housing and economic inequality. She has also been involved in projects concerning new technologies in the housing market. She has a deep interest in Scandinavian countries, which is often reflected in the research problems she addresses. Katarzyna’s work has been funded by the National Centre for Research and Development in Poland and has been published in Equilibrium and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.