Shifting Approaches to Housing Wealth and Welfare Security in Ageing Societies

In recent decades, home ownership as both a financial buffer and an ‘income in kind’ has come to assume a central position in both household strategies and state policies as a means to offset future retirement incomes. This chapter examines the relationship between home ownership and pension systems and explores how this has shaped welfare regimes and relations. Recent shifts in approaches to housing wealth and in particular their emerging salience as both a global investment class and as vehicles for achieving individual and household welfare security are also explored. Specifically, access to home ownership has recently diminished and distributions of housing assets have shifted in line with intensifying flows of capital seeking new kinds of (increasingly rent-based) returns from housing. The analysis illustrates new patterns of socioeconomic inequality that are inter- and also intragenerational in nature, that threaten the longer-term complementarity between home ownership and pension arrangements. These inequalities present a challenge for policy makers faced with growing conflicts between the social and economic objectives of housing policies in ageing societies.