Ongoing research in the PROPEL project

A selection of projects we are currently working on:

• Barriers to take-up of rental subsidies
• Policy preferences among low-income tenants
• Housing unaffordability and political preferences
• Housing financial strategies of young people
• Housing and health across family types
• Differences in housing-driven inequalities by age, race, and gender
• Housing policy paradigms and their changes since the financial crisis
• Interest groups and lobbying on housing in the EU
• Housing regimes and their uses

Please get in touch for more information.

Housing Regime typologies and their discontents: A systematic literature review

Lindsay B. Flynn & Giuseppe Montalbano

Housing, Theory and Society

October 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2023.2265370

Acquisition capital: Using a new concept to explore housing outcomes among millennials in the United States

Lindsay B. Flynn & Sarah Kostecki

Housing Studies

August 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2023.2241841

How do We Talk about Housing Equality in an Increasingly Unequal Europe?

Lindsay B. Flynn

Europe Now, Special Issue on Homelessness and Poverty

July 2023, Online article

Lindsay B. Flynn and Herman Mark Schwartz

in Families, Housing and Property Wealth in a Neoliberal World (Edited by Richard Ronald and Rowan Arundel, Routledge)

November 2022, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003092117-2

What explains the ‘millennial’ cohort’s delayed attainment of emancipation and family formation? This chapter confronts the central role of changing housing markets and welfare state policy in delayed ‘adulting’. Housing is central to structuring the attainment of life-cycle milestones, yet is often side-lined in welfare state research. This chapter emphasizes the broad role of welfare state policy on housing as an enabling (or disabling) force affecting access to independent living. From the 1990s onwards, welfare state policy, particularly related to housing, became increasingly a disabling force inhibiting easy exit from the parental home. States largely ignored the effects of rising income inequality on the ability of millennials to afford independent housing. At the same time, housing market financialization affected the price and supply of housing. The chapter presents research on data from the Luxembourg Income Study to uncover how millennials (and their extended families) have responded to these welfare state developments through delayed exits into adulthood and the formation of non-traditional households.

Photo credit: Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Giuseppe Montalbano

Journal of Economic Policy Reform

May 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/17487870.2022.2076677

This contribution investigates the conditions and dynamics of a public-private regulatory partnership in the making of the Capital Markets Union. According to our argument, structural interdependence and the strategic use of market narratives in a low salient policy domain allowed the EU financial industry to frame their interests as a solution to Europe’s missing recovery. Under the pressures of the Eurozone crisis and the EMU constraints, the goals of critical financial industry sectors and EU policy-makers met together, leading to a renewed regulatory cooperation. Such a mechanism is unveiled through a process-tracing case-study analysis on the EU covered bonds framework.

Photo credit: Christian Lue on Unsplash

Lindsay B. Flynn

Current History

March 2022, https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2022.121.833.83

Housing is a flash point in many European countries, with protests erupting and citizens voting to wrench properties from big investors. Inequality is driving the explosive debate, as households across the income distribution face very different kinds of challenges and opportunities in today’s unequal housing markets. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the risks and rewards already present across different subgroups. This housing-generated inequality creates a conundrum for governments that must balance the interests of competing constituencies with complex housing markets, and points to fundamental questions about how to order society.

Post-crisis developments in young adults’ housing wealth

Caroline Dewilde & Lindsay B. Flynn

Journal of European Social Policy

December 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287211040443

How has housing wealth inequality changed for young-adult households in the post-financial crisis period, and what is driving such change? We chart a path for subsequent studies by analysing the previously unexamined post-crisis housing wealth profile of young adults via different angles and using multiple inequality measures. Using household micro-data for 11 European countries (Household Finance and Consumption Survey, 2010–2017) and the United States (Survey of Consumer Finances, 2010–2016), we find that the accumulation of housing assets for 22–44 year olds is unevenly concentrated among high-income homeowners, over and above what would be expected given the well-known decline in homeownership. We describe and assess several potential drivers for these wealth profile changes, finding that the current explanations offered in the literature do not adequately account for the unequal wealth profile of young people. We conclude that a mix of dynamics, including housing market volatility, housing market configurations leading to uneven capital gains and losses, and the increased social selectivity of homeownership intersect to shape the ways that young adults navigate the housing market in post-crisis times.

Photo credit: Sandy Millar on Unsplash

The Young and the Restless: Housing access in the critical years

Lindsay B. Flynn

West European Politics

May 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2019.1603679
Republished March 2021, in Bricks in the Wall (Edited by Alison Johnston and Paulette Kurzer, Routledge),  https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003157182 

How do governmental housing policies affect the ability of young people to exit the parental home? This paper makes three claims. First and most important, governments that create accessible and liquid mortgage markets make it easier for young people to launch from the parental home. Second, even in those countries with more liquid housing markets, younger generations today still have an increasingly difficult time realising their preferences compared to prior generations. Third, increasing income and wealth inequality interacts with housing markets to create this uneven playing field both within and across generations. This paper examines these relationships in 20 high-income OECD countries. Fewer adult children live in the parental home in countries with deep mortgage markets, high levels of social rented housing, tax relief for ownership, low buyers’ transaction costs and high residential mobility. These countries cut across the traditional housing regime typologies, highlighting the need for additional housing-specific theory building.

I’ll Just Stay Home: Employment inequality among parents

Lindsay B. Flynn

Social Politics

July 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxy023

 

How does homeownership magnify existing gender disparities in the labor markets of the rich OECD countries? Men and women, and especially mothers and fathers, respond to homeownership differently. Owners work more hours than renters but mothers experience an ownership penalty while fathers solidify their market attachment. Both responses increase the gender gap. As such, governments pursuing dual policy objectives of promoting homeownership and greater gender parity in the labor market will find their policies working at cross-purposes. This paper analyzes the effect of homeownership on labor market attachment and explains why mothers and fathers respond to it in different ways.

No exit: Social reproduction in an era of rising income inequality

Lindsay B. Flynn & Herman Mark Schwartz

Politics & Society

September 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329217732314

 

What explains the unexpected, uneven, but unquestionably pervasive trend toward re-familialization in the rich OECD countries? The usual arguments about political responses to rising income inequality, unstable families, and unstable employment predicted that the state would increasingly shelter people against risk, producing greater individuation and de- rather than re-familialization. By contrast, we argue three things. First, re-familialization has replaced de-familialization. Second, unequal access to housing drives a large part of re-familialization. Rather than becoming more “Anglo-Nordic,” countries are becoming more “southern European” in the way that younger cohorts access housing. Third, this inequality-driven insecurity and unequal access is felt differently not only between generational cohorts but also within cohorts.

Delayed and depressed: From expensive housing to smaller families

Lindsay Flynn

International Journal of Housing Policy

Fall 2017, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616718.2016.1241936

 

Individuals face challenges in acquiring suitable housing at multiple stages of their life. Many stages – leaving the parental home, partnering, having children – have historically clustered in the 20s and early 30s. Increasingly, these stages extend into the late 30s and early 40s. This paper proposes a new framework to assess the role of housing in shaping the physical and financial space individuals have to meet their family goals. It identifies two links, one indirect and one direct, between housing and family size. Indirectly, later exits from the parental home correspond to delays in family formation and smaller families. Directly, housing costs compete with spending on children prompting tradeoffs and smaller families. The two links are supported utilising cross-national microdata from 18 countries in Europe and North America during the mid-2000s with an additional analysis of four focus countries: Austria, Germany, France, and Italy. This paper adds to a growing body of literature emphasising the importance of housing, family formation, and family size. It also emphasises a need to reframe the focus of the literature from housing tenure and the second half of the adult life course to housing costs and the first half of the adult life course.

Housing Crisis: How can we improve the situation for young people?

Lindsay B. Flynn, Guest Editor

Intergenerational Justice Review

June 2020
Editorial: https://igjr.org/ojs/index.php/igjr/article/view/793/698
Full issue: https://igjr.org/ojs/index.php/igjr/issue/view/105/33

 

“…All said, if fairness is about current generations having similar housing opportunities as their predecessors, access to affordable housing must be addressed. If progress is about ensuring that younger generations today have accessible housing paths so that one day they can help their own children launch, the intergenerational justice framework should push us to act even more quickly.”