Longitudinal life course perspectives on housing inequality in young adulthood

Abstract

In many countries, there is growing public concern about the increasing difficulties that young people face in obtaining secure, affordable, high-quality, and well-located housing. Much of the analysis and discussion focuses on the ways in which intergenerational housing inequalities have deepened over time as young adults' fortunes have deteriorated, most obviously through declining access to homeownership. In this review, we showcase how researchers are harnessing life course theories and rich longitudinal data sets, exploiting longitudinal modelling techniques, and developing new geographical data linkages to enhance our knowledge of a broader range of housing inequalities in young adulthood. We argue that incorporating these longitudinal perspectives more fully into geographical research and teaching will foster an enriched pluralistic model of quantitative human geography that is characterised by collaboration, critical engagement with policy issues, and sensitivity to the strengths and challenges of working in an integrated fashion with varied forms of numerical data.

The unequal geography of declining young adult homeownership: Divides across age, class, and space

“…This dynamic reproduces and exacerbates structural and long-term wealth disparities among young adults (Christophers, 2018), underscoring the increasing importance of wealth accumulation through housing in class stratification and inequality (Adkins et al, 2021;Arundel, 2017;Forrest & Hirayama, 2018;Hochstenbach, 2018). The findings of this paper thus stress the importance of considering increasing generational housing-market disparities not in isolation, but in their intersection with fundamental, persistent, and even widening class inequalities (Arundel, 2017;Christophers, 2018;Coulter et al, 2020;McKee, 2012).…”

Youth Attitudes Towards Their Future: the Role of Resources, Agency and Individualism in the UK

“…Students and graduates are aware of this, and this knowledge likely contributes to their optimism (Hitlin and Johnson 2015). Finally, accommodation status has been included because living independently from one's parents is an important marker of adulthood but it is a resource that is not available to all young adults because of the increasing cost of housing (Coulter et al 2020;Green 2017).…”

Population geography I: Epistemological opportunities of mixed methods

“…This follows the experiences of individuals (over the lifecourse), and their connections to others, to examine process, cause and consequence (e.g. Morris et al, 2018; Lei and South, 2020; Coulter et al, 2020), and how this has changed over generations (e.g. Champion et al, 2017).…”