Main content

The project focuses on research on the recent housing paths of young people (born between 1985 and 2000) who are facing a boom in housing prices and decreasing housing affordability. The goal is to survey the main strategies that young people use to overcome the problem of decreasing housing affordability. These private strategies, but also hypothetical state policy reactions, have a wider impact on the housing system and inequality, which this project intends to examine. For this purpose, the research team will employ both quantitative and qualitative research methods that include new attitude survey and original microsimulation modelling. The project will be conducted in four selected urban centres.The project aims to add to existing youth, housing affordability and generational inequality studies but especially to the literature on trends in post-socialist housing systems, intergenerational housing wealth transfers, and housing inequality.

Grant project supported by the Czech Science Agency. The project started in 2019 and will be finished in 2021. The head of the project is Martin Lux, Ph.D.

State of the art and literature review

The project focuses on research of recent housing paths of young people (born after 1985) in the major urban centres of the Czech Republic who face house price boom and decreasing affordability of housing. Its goal is to survey main strategies that young people use to overcome decreasing housing affordability, including reshaping their housing preferences, abandoning traditional housing careers, inventing new tenure solutions or more intensive use of within-family financial transfers. These private strategies, but also hypothetical state policy reactions, have wider macro-structural impact on housing system and welfare (housing inequality) that this project intends to estimate.

Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been accompanied by house price correction in many countries of the world although its impact on housing markets significantly varied. However, since 2011-2013 we have seen recovered and since 2016 again global house price growth. According to OECD house price data, since 2016 inter-annual house price decline has been found only in Greece (price stagnation in Italy) while all other countries included in OECD house price statistics have been on growing track (OECD analytical house price indicators); in most of them, 2017 house price levels have already exceeded 2007 levels. Similarly, Eurostat confirms growing house prices throughout the whole EU since 2016; with the only exception of Italy (the figure for Greece is not available in Eurostat statistics).

OECD measures also changes in housing affordability through trends in price-to-income, i.e. ratio of average (median) household income to average (median) house price. If we take 16 major countries for which OECD has the longest time series, the actual value of price-to-income ratio have started to deviate from its long-term geometric average in half of these countries already since 2014. According to our computation, for the whole group of 16 countries the deviation of actual value of this ratio from geometric average increased by 1% between 2013 and 2014, 8% between 2014 and 2015, 8% between 2015 and 2016 and by additional 15% between 2016 and 2017. Consequently, in most countries house price growth have been exceeding the growth in household incomes; thus widening gap between household incomes and house prices and causing significant decrease of housing affordability for young first-time buyers.

However, the recent increasingly global house price boom differs to one before 2006 by two important facts: (1) house price boom concerns especially major national and international urban centres (Wetzstein 2017; Acolin et al. 2016; Ding et al. 2017), including centres in countries that were not affected by previous price boom preceding GFC, such as Germany (Wijburg & Aalbers 2017), and (2) house price boom in these cities is accompanied by booming market rents (OECD analytical house price indicators). Therefore, affordability of both owner-occupied and rental housing in major cities is significantly worsening. It is highly probable that despite of hikes in house prices during past years, user costs of owner-occupied housing may still remain below rents in many countries. This fact may further fuel housing demand and attract higher attention of speculative capital that may see in investment to residential market significant gains; in short, house prices in many countries may continue to grow despite of decreasing affordability and increasing deviation to trend in household incomes.

The new affordability crisis started to be called Global Urban Housing Affordability Crisis (Wetzstein 2017) and has a substantial impact especially on planning of housing careers of young people. Decreasing affordability of owner-occupied housing for first-time buyers and strengthening of criteria for mortgage loan extension are cited as major causes for (1) decreasing homeownership rate among younger cohorts in many countries, including US, UK, New Zealand and other (Bourassa, Shi 2017; Acolin et al. 2016) and (2) growing housing poverty (distress) among young households (Mackie 2016). McKinsey Global Institute (2014) estimates that by 2025, about 440 million urban households around the world would occupy crowded, inadequate, and unsafe housing or will be financially stretched.

Decreasing affordability of owner-occupied housing for young first-time buyers goes against normative pressure that these young people similarly face, and this is the pressure to become homeowner when they want to settle down and establish a family, especially in housing systems where renting has been stigmatised as transitional and residual housing tenure (Gurney 1999, McKee 2012). Observations from various studies (Coolen et al. 2002, Clark et al. 2003) gave birth to the concept of a ‘housing career’ and, in stratification studies, to the concept of ‘housing class’ (Rex and Moore 1967), both of which consider housing tenures hierarchically on a normative ‘housing ladder’ (Sweeney 1974). Homeownership figures at the top end of such normative ladders in many cultures (see, for example, Ronald 2008; Shlay 2006; Flint and Rowlands 2003; Hirayama 2010; Lux et al. 2017). Lauster (2010) sees the sources of the norm in the incentives of the privileged to distinguish themselves from the marginalised members of society. Gurney (1999) favours instead Foucault’s concept of the omnipotent and invisible ‘disciplinary’ power.

Whatever is the initial cause for “normalization” of homeownership, the young people may recently face pressure to become homeowners exerted by their parents and mainstream society on one side but inability to acquire it due to its decreasing affordability on the second side. The problem of housing affordability of owner-occupied housing for young cohorts resembles vicious circle. During crisis, these were especially young people who were vulnerable to decrease in income and employment rate and, moreover, mortgage lenders and central regulators imposed several restrictive measures on mortgage lending that affected especially accessibility of credit for young low-income households. During recent boom, if young people did not manage to jump to the housing ladder on time, they face sharply increasing prices and, once again, strengthening of mortgage criteria due to regulations imposed by central financial authorities to mitigate systemic market risks; the regulations lead to the need to have higher downpayment before taking a loan. Both crisis and boom periods seem to exclude large part of young people from access to homeownership.

Research in UK, Netherlands, Italy, Australia or Japan confirmed that due to decreasing affordability of owner-occupied housing, increasing part of young households delay entering to homeownership and growing number of them stays longer in the parental home (see overview in McKee 2012). However, much less is known (exception being, for example, Hoolachan et al. 2017, Druta, Ronald 2017, Heath 2017) about how this tension between normative housing career and decreasing ability to follow it is felt and interpreted by young people themselves (they are called also “generation rent” due to their longer stay in private renting, see McKee 2012); how interruption in possibility to follow traditional housing careers affects their housing preferences and plans; how these changing preferences or potential solutions (e.g., by public interventions or within-family intergenerational transfers) may change housing systems; and, finally, how these solutions and changing housing systems may impact housing and housing wealth inequalities. Lastly, there was no research of this issue in so called transition societies, i.e. post-socialist countries where the state retreated from direct housing provision and as a result of large-scale public housing privatization homeownership became the dominant tenure, while renting was completely residualised (Hegedüs et al. 2013). Owing to the lack of tenure alternatives in these countries, the homeownership norm is especially strong (Lux et al. 2017) and pressure for people to become homeowners is very high (Cirman 2008).

 

The research context

In the post-socialist countries, the retreat of the state has not been often replaced by the creation of the institutions or cultures required to create fully financialized housing markets (Stephens et al. 2015). Zavisca (2010) calls this ‘property without markets’. Debt-free homeownership creates a gap in housing welfare, which was filled by households in the form of intergenerational assistance and self-built housing; Stephens et al. (2015) conclude that post-socialist countries have ‘housing welfare regimes by default’. Here, markets are less financialized than in the West, but, at the same time, the pressure on young people to become homeowners early on due to insecure private renting and non-existent social renting seems to be stronger than in the West.

In less financialized markets, accompanied by insecure renting and weak (residual) welfare state of post-socialist countries, the most logical solution how to overcome increasing housing prices would be higher role of intergenerational resource transfers (Lux et al. 2018) but we do not know (1) in what way young people count on resource transfers; (2) what are the main transfer patterns (factors influencing gift-giving); and (3) whether these specific patterns could be a solution to increasing inconsistency between housing tenure norms and decreasing affordability of owner-occupied housing to all or only for part of society (e.g., only richer families); and hence, in the end, may end up with increasing inequality in access to homeownership.

In this respect, Druta, Ronald (2017) in their qualitative study conducted in Romania found that specific within-family resource transfer pattern, called indirect reciprocity, may play very important role in post-socialist societies: parents feel personal obligation to provide gifts to their children based on the fact that previous generation in the family had also supported them in attaining homeownership. However, as this research was conducted on very small sample we still do not know whether this specific pattern of gift-giving is marginal or really significant in post-socialist countries. This is very important question: if being significant, this would lead to the systemic and easy to predict exclusion of an important part of young people from access to homeownership and to a specific axis of reproduced (housing) wealth inequality.

We will conduct our research in the Czech Republic where there has been a considerable increase in the share of owner-occupied housing over the past three decades as a result of the privatisation of municipal housing, but where the housing tenure structure is not so markedly skewed in the direction of owner-occupied housing. In 2011 (last census), the homeownership rate was 56%, co-op housing made up 9%, public rentals 8%, and private rental housing 14% of the housing stock. According to hedonic price index on shared data of Czech mortgage lenders, the prices of apartments increased by 11% between 2016 and 2017 (2016/2015 by 9 %, 2015/2014 by 5 %, and 2014/2013 by 2.5%). The inter-annual increase in 2017 was among the highest in EU (Eurostat house price statistics). According to our initial analysis, the actual value of price-to-income ratio for the whole country in 2017 very probably surpassed long-term linear trend and geometric average. Moreover, it seems that in the Czech Republic there is no regional capital where long-term linear trend in price-to-income ratio would decline – in all major cities house prices grew quicker than household incomes. According to our analysis, the sharpest slope of this trend and the highest deviation of actual (2017) value of price-to-income ratio from this trend seem to be in four Czech cities: Prague, Brno, Olomouc and Pilsen. These four cities seem to be affected most by the Urban Housing Affordability Crisis.  

The mortgage market in CR is relatively developed when compared to other post-socialist societies (Lunde, Whitehead 2016); the outstanding residential debt increased to 21.3% of GDP in 2015 from zero in 1997, i.e. in 17 years. Despite this fact, it is estimated that about one-quarter of home sales are realised without mortgages and the typical loan-to-value was only 56% at the end of 2015 (Hypostat 2016). Personal savings and transfers thus continue to play a crucial role in the process of becoming a homeowner. For within-family transfers, according to the survey Housing Attitudes 2013, 30% of homeowners or co-op housing users (in Czech environment, coop housing has very close legal status to homeownership) had inherited their housing or received it as a gift, and of those who bought their first home at market price or built it themselves, 42% had received financial assistance from their parents. The biggest intergenerational assistance is observed among the youngest cohorts. The factors influencing the occurrence and level of within-family gift-giving and typical intergenerational wealth transfer patterns remain unknown.

 

Research objectives

The first goal of the project is to survey lifecourses, housing preferences and housing careers of young people known as millennials (born between 1985 and 2000), with main focus on their solutions of the increasing inconsistency between normative pressures put on them to achieve homeownership status and sharply decreasing affordability of this tenure in selected major urban centres of the Czech Republic – Prague, Brno, Pilsen and Olomouc.

The second goal of the project is to estimate potential long-term impact of these solutions (by focusing on within-family inter-generational resource transfers and policy interventions) on housing system dynamics and housing inequalities in the Czech society.

The main research questions elaborated from the research goals are the following:

  1. What are recent trends in housing affordability of owner-occupied and rental housing for young cohorts in the Czech Republic?
  2. What are individual lifecourses of millennials living in those Czech cities that are affected most by decreasing housing affordability? How housing careers of millennials interact with their labour careers and family behaviour (natality, family formation)?
  3. What are housing preferences of millennials in these cities and what are their attitudes towards traditional normative housing career that gave the highest status to homeownership? Do they perceive the recent situation as a real intergenerational conflict? What are the most common realized and expected strategies (solutions) of young people how to overcome tension between normative expectation concerning achieving homeownership and reality of decreasing ability to meet it (such as, staying longer in parental home, following alternative housing career or using intergenerational resource transfer)? What welfare/housing policy solutions do they suggest? What are socio-demographic, status and lifestyle differences between young people that opt for different strategies (solutions)?
  4. Concerning solutions within family, what are the patterns in intergenerational resource transfers for housing acquisition from parents to their adult children and is it possible to create a typology of transfer-giving? What are the main factors that may explain gift-giving? How significant is the specific motive of indirect reciprocity?
  5. Concerning solutions within state or local policy, what policy solutions are suggested by young people and what solutions are discussed on different levels of government? Is housing affordability for young people a part of agenda of political actors? If yes, which strategies are preferred and what type of sources are expected to be used? How much attention is paid to housing policy in election programmes, campaigns and coalition agreements?
  6. What long-term consequences the alternative solutions within family or within policy may have on future dynamics of housing system (such as, tenure structure) and future housing inequality among young people? Are there any policy implications or recommendations following from these trends?

The project aims to add to existing youth (youth transition), housing affordability and generational inequality studies but mainly to literature on trends in post-socialist housing systems, intergenerational housing wealth transfers and housing inequality. Concerning housing inequality, for example, the motive for gift-giving that derives from a sense of personal obligation based on an established pattern of within-family transfers may determine the ‘winners and losers’ for many generations to come. Finally, the project has clear policy implications that may represent useful basis for future applied research in this field.

Although the research will be conducted in the Czech Republic, the initial housing and living conditions of young people in the Czech Republic will be explored comparatively using international household survey datasets (microdata sets EU-SILC); these conditions include living arrangements, type of households, eligibility for different allowances, at-risk-poverty rate and other contextual data. To answer several research questions, we will use data from the Czech Panel Household Survey – such panel data are unique in post-socialist countries and thus offer the first possibility to compare conclusions made from similar surveys in the West with specific situation of transition economy. Finally, the project methodology includes application of innovative micro-simulation modelling in order to estimate future impact of different solutions of housing affordability crisis on housing system and inequalities; this may serve as a benchmark for similar models that may be developed in other countries in the future.

The careers and proposed solutions by Czech young people are context-sensitive; in other words, it may significantly vary in different housing contexts (as well as in different wider social contexts). The third, supplementary objective of the project, which is linked to the main project goals, but further amplifies its international scope, is a continuous assessment and comparison of housing systems, affordability, finance, markets and policies among different post-socialist and European countries. Differences in homeownership rates, housing tenure structures, housing affordability, the provision of social and private rental housing, and the accessibility of appropriate housing finance tools are especially relevant when predicting the impact of different solutions to recent tensions in the specific Czech context. The international comparisons of housing-system and housing-finance (market) contexts will be performed using the Critical & Context-Sensitive Housing Research Methodology (C&CHRM) that was developed in a previous Czech Science Foundation projects.

The C&CHRM concept will not only be applied in our research; we have already encouraged international researchers to employ it through publishing with new international journal Critical Housing Analysis, which we launched in 2013 (http://www.housing-critical.com). The editorial board of this journal is made up of outstanding junior and senior academics including several editors of mainstream scientific journals. In 2017, the journal has been successfully included into SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, NSD (Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers) and ANVUR (Italian database of scientific journals) databases. Its aim is to provide online discussion space, hitherto lacking, for housing researchers coming up with thoroughly new, innovative, critical and marginalized solutions in housing research. We will prepare a special issue on young people and housing in Critical Housing Analysis and will present the findings from our research there; but this project will help to encourage the publication of other housing-research papers using the C&CHRM concept in this new international journal.

 

Relevance of the project

Besides the fact that very little is known about new urban affordability crisis affecting young population in post-socialist countries, there are wider and more general implications of this research. Housing market and residential investments became very important part of wider economic growth and recent urban affordability crisis and potential inequalities that may arise from it may substantially influence its sustainability and volatility. Moreover, though it is not aim of this project to verify it, diverse literature confirmed that decreasing housing affordability among young people leads to delayed family formation and lower natality (Flynn 2017). More thorough research of young cohort housing pathways may contribute to this issue.

The rising affordability gap and diverse solutions to affordability crisis may lead to social tensions and increasing social stratification of society according to housing conditions and tenure. As housing became major part of household welfare and in context of aging population, future housing inequalities will probably affect broader social inequalities more significantly than today (McKee 2012). These changes may impact social cohesion and wider economy but also sustainability of recent housing systems. They may also lead to new paradigmatic change of perception of home that will alter the existing status of private and social renting. This has clear policy implications, such as increasing pressure on improvement of regulation in rental housing and/or need for other incentives for diverse hybrid forms of housing tenure to emerge (shared ownership, coop housing) that are, however, not adequately reflected by recent policy (see special issue of International Journal of Housing Policy No. 2/2016).

 

Methodology

Each research question will be operationalized into a set of hypotheses, the full list of which is not presented here for reasons of space. In order to answer research question (1) we will use income/salary statistics/data of Czech Statistical Office (CSO 2018, EU-SILC surveys 2010 - 2018, Family Budget Surveys 2010 - 2018), price data from the dataset of main Czech mortgage lenders (2010 - 2018) and rent price statistics of Institute for Regional Development (2010 – 2018). The EU-SILC and Family Budget Survey, including international EU-SILC datasets, until 2017 have research team already at disposal. The house price dataset is drawn from property valuations during mortgage approval of main Czech mortgage lenders. Our long-term collaboration with mortgage lenders has made it possible for us to use these data free of any charge. We will also use rent price data collected by the Institute of Regional Information for 14 regional capitals already since 2000 – this data are continuously purchased by research team.

Using above described datasets, we will measure affordability of owner-occupied and rental housing for young cohorts using diverse approaches that we have already applied in the past (see Lux, Sunega 2006), such as costs-to-income ratio, rent-to-income ratio, price-to-income ratio or residual income. We will survey trends in inequalities in housing affordability among different social groups of young people using standard inequality measures. Besides overview of general trends, the affordability indicators will also be used to measure more precisely trends in affordability in four regional capitals (urban centres) where we saw the clearest signs of recent affordability crisis: Prague, Brno, Pilsen and Olomouc.

A quantitative analysis of data from large surveys is usually unable to reveal the significant qualitative contextual variables in the background of the formation of specific careers. In order to answer research question (2) concerning study of individual lifecourses of millennials (born between 1985 and 2000) in four cities affected most by decreasing housing affordability we will employ qualitative research. We will use biographic approach to survey past and prospective housing pathways of young people in these cities; both for more precise formulation of hypotheses for subsequent quantitative survey and for deeper understanding of mutual interlink between simultaneously changing labour, demographic and housing careers. For example, higher demand for renting may be an outcome of the desire of young people to be more flexible on labour market rather than consequence of decreasing housing affordability. Similarly, longer stay in the parental home may be caused by the preference to remain single and not to form a family, and not an outcome of decreasing housing affordability.

In this phase of research, we have chosen in-depth interviews as the best way how to study diverse lifecourse biographies. We assume that we will conduct 28 interviews (7 in each city) with young people (born between 1985 and 2000) hired through flyers, ads, Facebook and snow-balling. We will employ purposive sampling as our intention is to have young people of different gender, housing status (some of them already living independently, some still staying with parents) and social background (i.e. with different completed level of education). For homeowners, only those who bought housing after 2015 will be included. For the selection, the saturation of all possible life course patterns will be important. We will employ biographical methods (Merril, West 2009; Giele, Elder 1995) which focus on the personal perspective of the individual, his/her interaction, experiences with various roles, or future plans.

The results from in-depth interviews will be, in the second stage, confronted with the analysis of data from the Czech Household Panel Survey. The survey examines the dynamics of change in Czech society and includes four waves (first wave was conducted in 2015, fourth in 2018). The main advantages of the survey include surveying of all household members, long-term character of the study, broad thematic coverage and large sample size. Large sample size (5212 respondents in the first wave) allows for (1) quantitative analysis of housing conditions of urban young population and (2) more precise exploration of stability and variation in housing careers in time (though only in relatively short period). We will focus our research especially on unstable and changing housing careers, careers on the edge of homeownership (see overview by Haffner et al. 2017) or alternative housing careers, and main socio-demographic factors that may explain them. Similarly, we will survey how these housing conditions and careers interact with other labour (education, job, employment) and demographic (type of family, number of children) variables that are included in this household panel survey, unique in the post-socialist countries.    

Research questions (3) concerning the recent housing attitudes and preferences of young population, and strategies how to cope with urban housing affordability crisis, will be transformed into hypotheses, operationalized into questions or batteries of question, and surveyed by a new quantitative survey of housing preferences and attitudes of young people in four selected Czech cities. We expect to have 250 respondents in each city, 1000 respondents in total. The survey will be conducted by opinion poll agency selected in tender. The fact that the survey will be conducted in different cities should capture for specific spatially contextual effects. The respondents will be selected using quota design and the result should be a representative sample of people in the respective age cohort (born between 1985 and 2000) by sex, age and education, with homeowners who bought their housing only in 2016 or later. The research team has an extensive experience with conducting housing attitude surveys on national sample of households since 2001; it managed both Housing Attitude Survey 2001 and Housing Attitude Survey 2013.

The results from this quantitative survey will be again (like for research question (2)) confronted with qualitative study: we will employ four focus groups, one in each selected city, to discuss prospective changes in attitudes, preferences and housing careers, as well as proposed solutions, with young people in-depth. We assume to have about 10 young people in each focus group. The focus group method was chosen because it has the capacity to reveal the specific conditions that influence attitudes and preferences, and at the same time it allows different views and perspectives to be confronted during discussion (Puchta, Poter 2004; Lux et al. 2017). All focus group discussions will be recorded, transcribed, and processed using qualitative sociological research techniques.

The extent and form of intergenerational transfers on housing acquisition in the CR (research question (4)) will be studied using again data from the Czech Household Panel Survey, which contain detailed information on people’s sources of financing for purchasing housing and on the use of intergenerational assistance (across several generations) to purchase housing; no additional data collection on this this subject will therefore be necessary. In order to test the distribution of intergenerational housing wealth transfers and create a typology of main transfer patterns we shall use logit models. In this way, we will follow on our work on intergenerational assistance that we already conducted in the past for the purpose of other project (see Lux et al. 2018).

Research question (5) concerns policies suggested by young people themselves and other policies that may appear in public discourse, political agenda on both central and local level of administration, in policy concepts and programmes of political parties. (Welfare, Housing) policies have significant but contextually dependent impact on prospects of young people to entry homeownership and on housing pathways in general (Forest, Hirayama 2009). In selected regional centres we will study programmatic statements of electoral parties and coalition agreements with special attention to housing policy using combination of quantitative content analysis and qualitative discursive analysis. We will study portfolio allocation and political career of those politicians who are responsible for housing policy. In the next step, politicians as well as higher ranked municipal officers (usually 1+1 in each city) will be interviewed to prepare more complex picture of local housing policies. Documentary research will serve as a supplementary technique for analysing municipal housing policy systems. We will prepare alternative settings of selected main policies (using varied forms and scope of particular selected policy) for the purpose to estimate their long-term impact on housing system and housing inequalities in the Czech society; with methodology used to address research question (6).

Research question (6) represents the main added value of the project for European research. Here, we will employ dynamic microsimulation techniques (structural model) that we had already developed to explore the impact of housing asset-based welfare policy on dynamics in housing wealth inequalities among elderly population till 2050. We will adjust this structural model in order to measure an impact of different policy and family solutions on housing system dynamics (tenure structure) and trends in housing/wealth inequalities among young households till 2050. The model will simulate impact of alternative policy settings but also impact of alternative development of within-family resource transfer behaviour, including scenario counting with cuts in transfers due to higher need to use housing wealth for own welfare by elderly parents. This discrete-time model operates at the level of both individuals and households. The model integrates results of several processes that are simulated step-by-step. The model is primarily based on micro-data obtained by the Czech 2012 wave of EU-SILC (the starting-point) and for parameterization of the simulated processes data from the demographic Population Projection up to 2100 of the Czech Statistical Office were applied. The individuals are nested within families (households) and marriages are simulated between the singles of distinctive households. Secondly, the economic activity and employment-unemployment status are simulated, taking into account socio-demographic attributes of the individual (gender, age, education). The third part of the processes incorporates modelling of housing conditions. Here, both the housing conditions associated with the socio-economic characteristics of the household and possible intergenerational resource transfers are simulated together. The model was built in the STATA 15 data programming environment and the research team already has software application and model itself at its disposal.      

The methodology for the project’s supplementary objective (the assessment and comparison of housing contexts in different countries) will consist of standard methods of international comparative research applied, for example, by the research team in Hegedüs et al. (2013) or Hegedüs et al. (2017). Qualitative research will be underpinned by the principles of informed consent and other ethical rules applied in the time of the research.

 

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