No abstract

International audienc

Price inflation has outbalanced the income of residents and buyers in major post-industrial city-regions, and real estate has become an important driver of these inequalities. In a context of a resilient inflation of home values during the last two decades in the greater Paris Region, it is critical to examine housing price dynamics to get a better understanding of socioeconomic segregation. This paper aims at presenting spatial analysis of the dynamics of segregation pertaining to inflation, analyzing price and sellers and buyers data. Using interpolation techniques and multivariate analysis, the paper presents a spatial analysis of property-level data from the Paris Chamber of Notaries (1996-2012) in a GIS (159,000 transactions in suburban areas, single family homes only). Multivariate analysis capture price change and local trajectories of occupational status, i.e. changes in balance between inward and outward flows of sellers and buyers. We adopt a method that fits the fragmented spatial patterns of suburbanization. To do so, we remove the spatial bias by means of a regular 1-km spatial grid, interpolating the variables within it, using a time-distance matrix. The main results are threefold. We document the spatial patterns of professionalization (a rise of executives, intermediate occupation and employees) to describe the main trends of inward mobility in property ownership in suburbs, offsetting the outward mobility of retired persons. Second, neighborhood trajectories are related the diverging patterns of appreciation, between local contexts of accumulation with a growth of residential prices, and suburbs with declining trends. The maturity of suburbanization yields a diversified structure of segregation between the social groups, that do not simply oppose executives vs. blue collar suburbs. A follow-up research agenda is finally outlined.

This paper advances a research agenda on how asset‐based welfare policies, residential market volatility, stratified accumulation and vulnerability impinge upon the geography of inequality in property markets. Since the mid‐1990s, housing prices have increased faster than the income of buyers, becoming a driver of social polarisation and household vulnerability. Few studies have however explicitly linked socio‐spatial inequality to asset capitalisation, instability and vulnerability in residential housing markets. We employ an empirically‐grounded investigation of the factors driving and reinforcing these dynamics, what we conceptualise as a feedback loop mediating particular housing finance regimes. Drawing on three French cities (Paris, Lyon, and Avignon) our study develops a comparative framework to interpret the relational effects of price, equity and homeowner vulnerability on the production of inequality across different geographical scales. Our approach puts into conversation debates concerning housing markets, social inequality, and ordinary financialisation in the period since the Global Financial Crisis.