How housing restructuring shapes social and tenurial inequalities in cumulative housing disadvantage

Housing has emerged as a primary concern across a wide range of countries. Moving beyond the dominant focus on affordability and tenure outcomes, this paper builds on an emerging literature to develop a measure of cumulative housing disadvantage, focusing on dimensions of affordability, security, quality, suitability and neighbourhood satisfaction. Through an empirical study of the Netherlands for the 2009–2021 period, this paper charts exposures to both single and cumulative housing disadvantage. It finds overall increasing exposures and social inequalities, underpinned by complex temporal dynamics. Trends furthermore point towards shifting intra- and inter-tenurial inequalities, as shaped by policies of homeownership polarization, social-rental residualization and private-rental liberalization. The paper’s findings trigger discussions about (i) the values and limits of composite measures of housing disadvantage, (ii) dynamics tenure relations rather than static binaries and (iii) the role of housing policy and institutions in structuring unequal exposures to housing disadvantage.