The Impact of Ukrainian War Refugees on Rental Prices in Europe: A Panel Data Analysis
This study examines the impact of Ukrainian war refugees on actual rental prices in 27 European countries. Using panel data regression analysis for the period 2017Q1-2023Q1, the study found that inflation, house price growth, and interest rates were the primary drivers of rental price growth after February 2022. The study also showed that an inflow of Ukrainian refugees equal to 1% of the host country’s population translated into an increase in rental price growth of 0.2-0.3%, but this effect was not statistically significant at the 5% probability threshold. Auxiliary estimations revealed the statistical significance of Ukrainian migration when adjusting for the stringency of rent controls and size of the rental market.
How the War between Russia and Ukraine Caused a Multi-Cycle in the Polish Housing Market
We examine the effects of the war between Russia and Ukraine on the housing market in the six largest cities in Poland and explain how these effects emerged. Since Poland’s transition to a market economy and its accession to the EU, Poland has experienced normal cycles in house prices, i.e. relatively long periods of increases in house prices followed by similarly long periods of decreases in house prices. However, the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine created a situation that can be described as a multi-cycle. The pandemic initially halted nearly all transactions on the market, but after a few quarters of fiscal and monetary intervention aimed at saving the economy we observed a housing boom. Just a few quarters later, the Russian aggression in Ukraine caused significant inflation, which required a sharp increase in interest rates, and once again demand slowed down. This was followed just a few quarters later by a resurgence in house purchases in order to escape inflation, with many people using cash for these purchases. This situation has shaken the housing market, while the war has also generated a demographic shock. Construction and transportation workers began returning to Ukraine to help in its reconstruction, while women with children came to Poland from Ukraine seeking safety and creating a demand for rental housing.
Living in Large Urban Developments: A Critical Understanding of the Housing Experience
This article critically reviews international literature on the social aspects of vertical living. It identifies three research approaches – the built environment effect, the differentiated built environment effect, and the human-environment interrelation – and two focal social orientations of research – suitability and experience – as well as four spatial orientations – space, design, verticality and volume, and technology. The article emphasises the need to extend the scope of future research beyond the building to the residential complex, clusters of complexes, and the entire city in order to better understand relations between volume and experience. It also calls for a more complex investigation of the vertical dwelling experience that would include residential aspirations, new neighbourly roles, and identities.
Understanding Homeownership Rates: the Impact of Co-residence Patterns
The socio-demographic context, which includes the co-residence patterns associated with the decisions of young adults on whether to live in the parental household or enter homeownership or renting, is directly reflected in homeownership rates at the aggregate level as a consequence of these decisions. However, the way in which tenure statistics are reported also matters in this respect. This applies specifically to household-level statistics, which are most often used to characterise housing systems. It is therefore possible to ask whether countries with high homeownership rates and, simultaneously, high shares of adult children living with their parents are truly high-homeownership societies. This study identifies the countries for which the reported tenure statistics are more influenced by demographic conditions as compared to other countries. These are the Mediterranean countries and the Central and Eastern European countries (with some exceptions).
Social Movements against Housing Financialization: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Introduction to the special issue "Social Movements against Housing Financialization".
Housing Financialization and Community Wellbeing: Tenant Resistance in the Liveable City
Tenant movements are increasingly impacting urban governance and the development of housing in Canadian cities. Tenants resisting violent and ‘gentler’ forms of gentrification—through outright expulsion or being priced out of their communities—have demonstrated their unwillingness to allow financialized real estate to determine their housing futures. At the same time, tenants also have to contend with discourses of urban improvement that increasingly dominate the terrain of financialized rental housing (re)development. Community benefits agreements and other similar arrangements emphasizing neighbourhood liveability and wellbeing are increasingly deployed as devices to justify housing (re)development, but also work to facilitate gentrification. Through an examination of a struggle between tenants and a financialized real estate investment firm in Canada’s capital city Ottawa—which aspires to be North America’s most liveable mid-sized city—this article explores the implications of a Community Wellbeing Framework for a neighbourhood redevelopment project forged through tenant resistance efforts.
South Africa’s Housing Financialisation Crises and Social Resistance
The world’s most unequal country suffers from various housing crises, especially when it comes to excessive reliance upon a private sector prone to market failures, especially affordability. State housing finance strategy during the transition from apartheid to democracy relied upon augmentation of formal banking finance so as to promote home ownership. But as macro-economic conditions changed in the late 1980s, the resulting mass defaults on individual families’ home mortgage bonds led not only to foreclosures by a (white) state, but (black) working-class resistance organised by the country’s leading urban social movement, known as the ‘bond boycott.’ Even after democracy, a worsening housing backlog coincided with resurgence of household debt crises in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. That generated a new housing finance strategy led by Mastercard and a local fintech firm (supported by the World Bank): collateralisation of welfare grants which in turn allowed debit orders for repayment of microfinance (typically used for minor home improvements). Again, social resistance played an important role, as the strategy caused even worse personal debt crises, and a welfare NGO’s successful fight to close Mastercard’s partner. But beyond periodic revolts of these sorts, a durable housing finance policy has remained elusive.
The Political Outcomes of Housing Movements: Participatory Governance in Mass Housing Programmes
Research conducted over the past decade examining the impact of social movements on urban politics and housing policy has significantly enhanced our understanding of how these movements resist housing financialisation through direct action, social protest, and advocacy. However, further investigation is still required to comprehend the influence of housing movements on policy design and implementation, in order to understand the paths taken and how social movements shape housing and urban policies. This paper focuses on the self-management branch of the My House, My Life – Entities (Minha Casa, Minha Vida - Entidades), a mass housing programme in Brazil. The paper has two objectives. Firstly, it identifies the strategies that nationally organised urban and housing movements employ to advocate for the inclusion of housing self-management in federal mass housing programmes. Secondly, it examines the policy implications of implementing a participatory governance model (co-management) in national housing programmes, with an emphasis on policy lessons learned. To accomplish this, policy documents, housing movement reports, and news media items were utilised to systematically trace the trajectory to success and examine the policy lessons for participatory governance. This paper makes two contributions: it enriches the literature on social movements against housing financialisation by analysing citizen participation in housing policy design and implementation and it contributes to the field of research on the consequences of social movements by examining the influence of social movements in shaping and housing policies.
Struggling with and through Knowledge Production: The Campaign ‘Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.’s’ Attempt at Housing Definancialisation in Berlin
The article looks at the role of knowledge production in conceptualising the impact of social movements, taking the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.) as an example. The campaign proposes to socialise the assets of all (financialised) landlords who own more than 3,000 apartments in Berlin. The article analyses how the campaign has developed and popularised strategic knowledge about housing financialisation and definancialisation. Empirically, the article analyses two phases of the political work. It discusses the beginnings of the campaign in the run-up to the 2021 referendum, where the campaign translated knowledge about the role of institutional financial investors in Berlin’s housing crisis into a demand for socialisation. The article also analyses the phase after the successful referendum in 2021, where the knowledge production shifted to the juridical field as the Berlin Senate set up an expert commission to discuss the constitutionality of housing socialisation.
Changing Social Movements in Lisbon? Housing Financialisation and Post-pandemic Activism
During the last decade, following years of austerity and rapid growth driven by tourism, real estate, and external investment, Lisbon has become a paradigmatic case of the financialisation/crisis nexus in the housing field. The simultaneous emergence and growth of social movements for the right to housing has been widely documented, with some accounts focusing on anti-financialisation struggles. In this article, we present the repertoires and claims of four activist groups and platforms born between 2022 and 2023 and discuss how Portuguese social movements are contending with the increasing centrality of financialisation in housing. In sum, we present three broad patterns of rescaling – intersectionality, internationalisation, and relations with political parties – in relation to the general endeavour to build a mass movement.
Fractured Mobilization: Miami’s Little Haiti Confronts Mega-Real Estate Speculation
Disenfranchised urban communities worldwide are increasingly vulnerable to land dispossession and cultural erasure as neoliberal regimes unleash intensified financial speculation within polarizing and splintering local/global class and racialized disparities. A dilemma of disenfranchised communities when confronting speculative intrusions where prospective allies have become marginalized or eliminated is whether, and to what degree, to resist such threats contentiously at the risk of zero-sum defeat versus accommodative negotiations seeking to rescue modest benefits while mitigating dislocations. The forms and intensities of community responses can be conceptualized as embedded within multiscalar state society and local politico-spatial configurations. From that perspective, I address a predominantly Black immigrant district, Miami’s Little Haiti, as it confronts mega-real estate speculation within a metropolitan political economy of corporate real estate hegemony and accelerating racialized expulsions. The contentious versus accommodative dilemma and local/supralocal political landscape fractured and neutralized the Haitian collective responses. I conclude by discussing the case’s theoretical/comparative implications.
The Role of Neighbourly Relations and Cooperation in Residents’ Willingness to Renovate Multi-Family Buildings in Croatia
The inadequate legislation on multi-family housing management in Central and Eastern European post-socialist countries calls for the exploration of additional determinants of building renovation on the level of the community of residents in a building. To this end, we present here an analytical framework called the mediated-Renovation Decision (m-RD) model for simultaneously testing the direct and indirect effects that neighbourly relations, cooperation of the co-owners’ representative with the co-owners, and acceptance of the building co-ownership concept have on co-owners’ willingness to invest in building renovation. The model is based on assessments made by 325 co-owners’ representatives from multi-family buildings in Croatia. The results show that the quality of neighbourly relations affects the co-owner’s willingness to renovate not directly, but indirectly through the level of their acceptance of the building co-ownership concept. The other indirect effect of neighbourly relations – through the level of the representative’s cooperation with co-owners – was not significant. The demonstrated analytical value of the m-RD model advocates for more complex studies of the role of neighbourly relations in collective decision-making and actions in the housing domain.
The Role of Housing Costs in Central Banks’ Inflation Targeting Regimes: The Cases of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Bank of England
Since the 1990s it has become common for central banks to be charged with using interest rates to meet consumer price inflation (CPI) targets. This article examines the cases of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Bank of England (BoE) and finds that whereas the RBA’s CPI target includes a housing cost element, the BoE’s does not. Moreover, it finds that contrasting treatments of housing costs produce different results, depending on whether the index includes mortgage interest as a housing cost. Whilst central banks dislike CPIs that include an element of mortgage interest because of the apparently perverse outcome of increasing interest rates, they also lack credibility by excluding such an important element of the cost of living. Credibility demands that the 30-year consensus on inflation targeting by monetary policy be replaced by a broader set of tools – including fiscal policy – to control inflation.
Reframing Social Tectonics with the Sociology of Everyday Life: Insights from the Public Spaces of a Mixed Housing Neighbourhood
Social mix policies aim to integrate residents living in diverse forms of housing. While numerous studies have showcased the limitations of social mix in achieving this objective, explanations for this tendency remain incomplete. Accordingly, this qualitative case study adopts insights from the sociology of everyday life and interaction ritual theory to elaborate on academic understandings of (non)-interaction between disparate groups in mixed housing communities. It draws primarily from observational fieldwork and semi-structured interview data gathered in the public spaces of a transitioning mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. The findings report how everyday encounters among and between the urban poor and wealthier residents (re)produce patterns of group solidarity and conflict. The continued application of micro-sociological perspectives to housing mix research can chronicle and perhaps mend the gaps between government housing policy objectives and the experiences of residents living within relevant legislative jurisdictions.
Testing Housing Price Drivers in Santiago de Chile: A Hedonic Price Approach
Hedonic modelling is an empirical analysis technique that is widely used to review the housing market and unpack the main determinants of price. A correct determination of housing price drivers allows a weighted prediction of the value of each dwelling for sale or rent. This paper reviews the fundamental determinants of housing prices that have been published in the literature to see which ones have a better predictive fit for the case of the housing market in the city of Santiago, Chile. From a record of 456,000 property transactions, a dataset composed of 11 explanatory variables is elaborated. Through a semi-logarithmic regression, 4 variables that contribute to explaining the formation of housing prices in Santiago, Chile, are identified. The results indicate that the socioeconomic characterisation of urban areas where housing is traded, the price of copper on the London Metal Exchange, the mortgage interest rate, the age of residential buildings are the main drivers for the main drivers of prices in Santiago. Given the crisis of access to housing in Chile, the article provides relevant information for decision-makers in housing policy.
Institutional Formation in Tumultuous Times: Reforming English Social Housing Regulation Post-Grenfell
English social housing regulation theoretically exists to promote the social purpose of the sector, yet the success of regulation against this objective has been questioned amidst concerns with the quality of service provided by landlords. Following the Grenfell Tower fire, the government initiated a reform process to reverse a policy of regulatory passivity on consumer standards. This paper conceives of regulatory reform as a case of institutional formation; a dynamic process that shapes conduct via rules, practices and narratives. It fills an empirical gap on how regulatory practice has responded to an ambiguous institutional environment where the governmental narrative was committed to improving standards, but formal legislation lagged. Quantitative text analysis demonstrates that the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has re-emphasised consumer standards post-Grenfell. But the process of institutional formation has been punctuated by social, political and economic crises, and the power of the regulator to enforce improved standards has been limited by legislative delays.