2025/01/03 by Julia Furtado, Julia Furtado de Barros, Lindsay B. Flynn
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics #Urbanization and City Planning
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/00207152241295976
Affordable housing is a pressing political problem that seems to be fueling social unrest among young people. Rising rents, expensive property prices, and stagnant wages leave young adults with few prospects of entering the housing market without intergenerational financial support. In this article, we examine the role of homeownership, housing unaffordability, and intergenerational transfers in explaining welfare preference and voting behavior of young European adults. We propose the emergence of a new growing interest group composed of financially overburdened young renters and mortgaged homeowners whose welfare is increasingly threatened. We bridged HFCS 2017 and ISSP 2016 datasets through statistical matching and used ordered and multinomial logit models to analyze these trends in Belgium, Germany, France, and Slovakia. We find that homeownership polarizes young adults in terms of their welfare support. Housing unaffordability, however, coalesces young homeowners and renters by increasing redistribution support.