A Driver of Societal Inequality? the Stratification Effects of Housing Policy

Despite the ever-present view of houses dotted along the landscape, and the near-sacred practice of using housing as a vehicle for wealth accumulation, contemporary scholarship and policy analysis place housing on the fringes of both welfare state research and policy making. This is to the detriment of welfare state studies, which seek to understand contemporary inequalities but neglect the role of housing as a key catalyst in shaping how societies stratify. It is also to the detriment of policy makers, who promote homeownership as a wealth-accumulation vehicle but largely ignore the distinct ways in which housing policy affects various societal groups. To fill a gap in the literature, this paper outlines two broad dynamics that link housing to social inequalities, and identifies the utility of using housing as a lens through which to understand the welfare state as a system of stratification. In the first dynamic, actors (e.g. individuals, groups, and governments) use houses and housing policy in an attempt to secure status and power that in turn leads to social, economic, and political inequalities. In the second dynamic, actors are constrained by housing finance and ownership policies that reproduce existing inequalities. In both cases, housing dynamics illuminate five inequalities that together constitute the largest social and economic divisions found in modern capitalist societies: inequalities in income and wealth, and inequalities across gender, race, and age. This paper uses policy examples from the rich OECD to develop an explanatory framework linking housing policies to these key inequalities.