Central themes
This working group was originally developed around a group of researchers who had participated in a number of EU-funded projects (EU Framework 5, 6, and 7) in the 2000s. Collectively, these projects were concerned with understanding and explaining the relationships between globalization, homeownership and housing market transfromations in Europe. This research attempted to map the main developments in labour and financial markets, social security systems and housing markets, as well as security and insecurity within home ownership. After the Global Financial Crisis, attention shifted to declines in homeownership across European societies as well as emerging fault lines, socially, economically and generationally, in access to and wealth generated from owner-occupied housing. More recently attention has turned to the impact of the Covid pandemic and subsequent shift in the economy following recent energy and cost of living crises, on housing market and home ownership conditions.

The most recent EU-funded projects (HOUWEL and HOWCOME), completed in 2017, addressed home ownership in context of social transformations related to welfare systems and structures of social inequality. In 2019, a new research project, ‘Closing the housing gap: a spotlight on intergenerational inequalities’, looking, comparatively, at unequal access to home ownership, and funded by the Australian Research Council, was initiated as a collaboration between ENHR members in Australia and Europe. This project ended in 2022, with plans now for a follow up project addressing the shifting roles and obligations of families in housing and home ownership.

Working Group Activities and Outputs
Previous meetings have resulted in various edited volumes including ‘Home Ownership: Getting in, Getting out, Getting from’ (volumes I, II, and III). This was followed up with an edited volume, entitled ‘Housing Wealth and Welfare’, published by Edward Elgar Press in 2017. This book addresses housing wealth and welfare relationships across various developed societies, and interprets the concept of ‘welfare’ in its diverse manifestations and meanings: i.e. welfare provision, but also well-being, inequality and poverty. In this sense, the book extends on previously edited volumes sponsored by this working group and brings together a varied range of authors from different disciplines. The most recent book related to the group was published at the end of 2023 and titled ‘Families, Housing and Property Wealth in a Neoliberal World’. This is an edited collection and involved a number of regular working group members. Below is a short precis of the book:  

Families, Housing and Property Wealth in a Neoliberal World
Edited By Richard Ronald, Rowan Arundel

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 focused on global flows of capital and large institutions, families have served as critical actors. Housing properties are family goods that shape how members interact, organize 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 realize 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.

Working group meetings have been traditionally organized outside of the main ENHR-conference, and have taken place in Paris (2014), Bucharest (2015), Amsterdam (2016) Granada (2017) and Vienna (2019). In 2021, the working group organized a one-day, Virtual Group Workshop. In 2022, an in-person workshop was held in Amsterdam, revolving around the notion of ‘late homeownership’, as coined in the works of the late Ray Forrest.

In 2023, a special in-person workshop was organized in Helsinki, Finland, in collaboration with the Finnish Ministry of The Environment. The workshop “Urban change and housing market developments in Europe” drew upon the latest research from across Europe paying particular attention to contemporary housing market transformations that both reflect and enforce new technologies of financialisation, recent economic shifts and ongoing demographic transitions. Presentations were held about new forms of housing inequality, changes in patterns of housing wealth, as well as about new, housing-related forms of socio-spatial divisions in the post-GFC period.

In 2024, a workshop, entitled “Homeownership, Housing, and Inequality” was organized in Luxembourg, in collaboration with Dr. Lindsay Flynn at the University of Luxembourg. Presentations focused on the ongoing reconfiguration of access to, as well as development of, homeownership in relation to processes of financialization, (hyper-)commodification, macro-prudential policy, and familialisation. Presentations focused on a wide variety of contexts, including the Netherlands, Spain, England, the Baltic Region, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Canada, India, and China, among others. The open call for papers attracted a wide response from the housing researcher community, underlining the timely focus of the working group.

Future plans and activities
In June 2026, the working group will organize an in-person event in Cambridge, UK.