This article focuses on the topic of the young adult’s cleft habitus influenced by a housing affordability crisis in the Czech Republic and examines how this situation affects the young adult’s relation to the imagination of a temporally structured life course and synchronization of life spheres (housing, family, and work). This article is based on qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in the four cities most affected by the house and rent price increase. The general question addresses if and how social inequalities, sharpened by the current housing affordability crisis, affect the process of narrative life course coherence creation (the connection of past, present, and future) in relation to an orientation toward a vision of “the good life.” We furthermore complement the already existing ideal types of the young adult’s relation toward time— confident continuity and cautious contingency (Nielsen A (2019a) Levels of intersecting temporalities in young men’s orientation to the future. A cross-national case comparison. Time & Society 0(0): 1–22)—with two other two types— cautious continuity and total contingency—defined on the basis of our data. We argue that the ability of young adults to envision a coherent future is related to the feeling of secured housing and that the idea of the good life is depicted to a large extent through the ideal of homeownership, although the precarity of the housing market makes homeownership harder to reach for those from unprivileged backgrounds.

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The housing affordability crisis is one of the most pressing issues in urban centres around the globe, affecting especially young adults. Some theorists have in response begun calling for the provision of more public housing or less housing financialisation (free market). The goal of our article is to demonstrate the housing attitudes of Czech millennials towards state interventions that are designed to address the decline in housing affordability, using a quantitative attitude survey and a series of qualitative interviews. The results of our study reveal that young Czechs are sceptical about increased public housing provision as a solution, and on the whole their views align more with the neoliberal ideas, the very ideas that are criticised by critical theorists. We show that there are contextual reasons that explain why young Czechs are not calling for radical policy change - reasons such as familialism, which facilitates the intergenerational transmission of norms, habitus, and resources within families; the legacy of socialism and society transformation; a belief that more redistribution of resources could be unfair; and stronger support for competition, individualism and right-wing politics. There is also, however, some inconsistency and uncertainty in their attitudes, especially between their general worldview and their suggestions for concrete action. This study contributes to the research in the field of youth studies that looks at young people’s strategies for dealing with the problem of decreasing housing affordability, and to the discussions surrounding diverse housing policy responses to a common global challenge.

In recent years, in response to the increasing unaffordability of housing, many European countries have seen a renewed interest in forms of housing that emphasise elements of cooperation, self-organisation, and sharing (of space, organisation, or ownership between households). In the Czech Republic, we recently identified the first efforts of some municipalities and smaller groups of citizens to transpose this 'housing innovation' into the Czech context, which until now has predominantly favoured individual owner-occupied housing. Considering that these emerging forms of housing in the Czech Republic have yet to be conceptualised in theory, the goal of our article is to initiate a debate on a more precise conceptual understanding. To this end, we propose an overarching definition of participatory housing, which we present using three defining principles and five dimensions of participation. Reflecting on existing Western European conceptualisations and a historical contextualisation of (related forms of) housing in the territory of what is today the Czech Republic, we discuss the specific dimensions of the concept of participatory housing, the conditions of its existence, and what makes it distinct from other forms of housing.