2024/04/22 by Rowan Arundel, José Manuel Torrado, Ricardo Duque‐Calvache · 1 voice · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Housing Market and Economics #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism #Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/0308518x241247738
openalex publication_date 2024/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Housing wealth is central to structuring inequalities across societies. Processes of financialization have intensified the speculative nature of housing, while labour and welfare restructuring increase the importance of property wealth towards economic security. Housing, however, represents an exceptional asset given its inherently spatial nature and buy-in barriers. This implies that not only access to homeownership but where households enter the housing market is central to wealth trajectories. Spatial inequality in housing trends thus fundamentally structures wealth dynamics. While some scholarship has posited increasing housing market spatial polarization, there remains a lack of empirical evidence. This research turns to the context of Spain, to directly assess spatial polarization in housing value accumulation. Employing an innovative dataset at a detailed geographic scale, the analyses reveal strong increases in polarization across the national territory over the past decade. Strikingly, these dynamics appear resistant to major upheavals, including the post-GFC crash and Covid-19 impacts, and are robust across scales. The analyses reveal that more expensive areas saw greater absolute gains and higher rates of appreciation. The findings expose a structural intensification of spatial polarization and provide crucial empirical evidence of how the housing market acts in amplifying inequality through the spatial sorting of wealth accumulation.