Families, Housing and Property Wealth in a Neoliberal World

The twenty-first century has so far been characterized by ongoing realignments in the organization of the economy around housing and real estate. Markets have boomed and bust and boomed again with residential property increasingly a focus of wealth accumulation practices. While analyses have largely focussed on global flows of capital and large institutions, families have served as critical actors. Housing properties are family goods that shape how members interact, organise themselves, and deal with the vicissitudes of everyday economic life. Families have, moreover, increasingly mobilized around their homes as assets, aligning household transitions and practices towards the accumulation of property wealth. The capacities of different families to realise this, however, are highly uneven with housing conditions becoming increasingly central to growing inequalities and processes of social stratification. This book addresses changing relationships between families and their homes over the latest period of neo-liberalization. The book confronts how transformations in households, life-course transitions, kinship and intergenerational relations shape, and are being shaped by, the shifting role of property markets in social and economic processes. The chapters explore this in terms of different aspects of home, family life and socioeconomic change across varied national contexts.

Richard Ronald is Professor of Housing and Chair of Political and Economic Geographies (PEG) at the University of Amsterdam. His research, focusing on housing in relation to social, economic and urban transformations in Europe and Asia Pacific, has been funded by the European Research Council, the Australian Research Council, The Dutch Ministry of the Interior, the Japan Foundation and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. He has been Visiting Professor at National University Singapore, the University of Birmingham (UK), and Kyung Hee University (Seoul, South Korea), and Distinguished Professor at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. He is the current Editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s ’Contemporary City’ book series and former Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Housing Policy. Richard sits on various funding and scientific advisory boards in Australia, Canada, Germany, Poland, Sweden and the UK. He originally graduated from Nottingham University and Nottingham Trent University in the UK and was a Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellow at Kobe University in Japan before moving to the Netherlands in 2006.

Rowan Arundel is an Assistant Professor within the Political and Economic Geographies research group at the University of Amsterdam. His research focusses on dynamics of housing inequalities and interactions between housing, labour and welfare, as well as a broader interest in spatial analysis and macro and micro quantitative methods. He is the recipient of an NWO Veni fellowship from 2021-2025 for his project ’WEALTHSCAPES: the spatial inequality of housing wealth accumulation.’ Looking at the Netherlands, UK and Spain, the project confronts the crucial role of both housing market spatial polarization and divided housing access in driving growing wealth inequalities.