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Few sociologists treat housing as a key independent variable, despite the emergence of disparate bodies of research analyzing how housing affects outcomes that traditionally interest sociologists. Scholars across the social sciences have proposed and tested mechanisms whereby housing could shape subjective well-being, socioeconomic status, demography, and politics. We review the evidence for causal effects across these domains. Next, we make recommendations for research designs to advance this literature. Most studies only test effects of homeownership, and most are focused on the United States and Western Europe. The evidence for causation is often weak, although studies increasingly employ complex techniques for identifying effects. Throughout, we emphasize studies beyond the United States, and we conclude by discussing distinctive insights yielded by comparative research. We advocate for a comparative perspective and more expansive conceptualization of housing status as a means to build theory and evidence regarding the conditions under which housing exerts effects.

Research framework: Over the past decade, social science research has been profoundly renewed by the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities, which no longer takes into account only socio-professional status, labor income, or qualifications, but also wealth. Family matters for inheriting wealth, saving it, or accumulating it through returns on investments. The accumulation of wealth brings into play the three major dimensions of kinship: descent, siblingship, and alliance.Objectives: To establish a dialogue between the literature on socio-economic inequalities and the social sciences of the family.Methodology: This introductory article is based on a literature review of various social science disciplines in economics, sociology, demography, history, anthropology, political philosophy and law.Results: This issue of the journal Enfances Familles Générations is a plea for the social sciences to take into account both family ties and family assets, based on the concrete issues of inheritance, marriage, indebtedness and home ownership. Inheritance, its accumulation, preservation and transmission are, in fact, concerns within families of all social backgrounds.Conclusion: Family dynamics - in interaction with the multiple actors in the family field - play a part in structuring economic inequalities within the family (especially gender inequalities) and between families (especially class- and race-based inequalities). But exploring inequalities in asset and debt also provides a better understanding of family relationships, since wealth participates in the making of the family. Contribution: This introductory article affirms the importance of studying family wealth strategies across all social classes, and of multiplying the historical, national and cultural contexts of study.

In the late 20th century, homeownership became entrenched in a wider societal project that sought to transform the economy and increase social inclusion. This project focused on mortgaged owner-occupation as a means not only to acquire a stable home, but also to realise greater economic security via asset accumulation. The underlying ideology featured an implicit promise that homeownership would be widespread, equalising and secure. Despite transformations in market conditions, such narratives have continued to underscore policy approaches and housing marketisation. This article directly confronts this promise. It first unpacks its key tenets before investigating their currency across three classic ‘homeowner societies’: the US, the UK and Australia. Our empirical findings reveal declining access to homeownership, increasing inequalities in concentrations of housing wealth and intensifying house-price volatility undermining asset security. The article contends that the imperative of homeownership that has sustained housing policy since the 1970s may be increasingly considered a ‘false promise’. Our analyses expose contemporary housing market dynamics that instead appear to enhance inequality and insecurity. 在20世纪后期，房屋所有权在一个更广泛的社会项目中变得根深蒂固，这个项目寻求经济转型和提升社会包容度。该项目强调抵押房主自住，这不仅作为获得稳定住房的一种手段，也作为通过资产积累提升经济安全的一种手段。这其中潜在的意识形态所强调的是这样一个期许：房屋所有权将是广泛的、平等的和安全的。尽管市场环境发生了变化，但这种论述继续强调政策方法和住房市场化。本文直接质疑这个期许。在对这些主要信条在美国、英国和澳大利亚这三个典型的“房主社会”的现实体现进行调查之前，我们首先对这些信条进行了解析。我们的经验研究结果显示，获得住房所有权的机会在减少，住房财富集中的不平等在加剧，而破坏资产安全的房价波动则在加剧。本文认为，自20世纪70年代以来一直作为住房政策基石的房屋所有权必要性理论可能会越来越被视为一种“错误的期许”。我们的分析揭示了当代住房市场的动态，而这种动态似乎加剧了不平等和不安全。

Research framework: Over the past decade, social science research has been profoundly renewed by the measurement of socioeconomic inequalities, which no longer takes into account only socio-professional status, labor income, or qualifications, but also wealth. Family matters for inheriting wealth, saving it, or accumulating it through returns on investments. The accumulation of wealth brings into play the three major dimensions of kinship: descent, siblingship, and alliance. Objectives: To establish a dialogue between the literature on socio-economic inequalities and the social sciences of the family. Methodology: This introductory article is based on a literature review of various social science disciplines in economics, sociology, demography, history, anthropology, political philosophy and law. Results: This issue of the journal Enfances Familles Générations is a plea for the social sciences to take into account both family ties and family assets, based on the concrete issues of inheritance, marriage, indebtedness and home ownership. Inheritance, its accumulation, preservation and transmission are, in fact, concerns within families of all social backgrounds. Conclusion: Family dynamics - in interaction with the multiple actors in the family field - play a part in structuring economic inequalities within the family (especially gender inequalities) and between families (especially class- and race-based inequalities). But exploring inequalities in asset and debt also provides a better understanding of family relationships, since wealth participates in the making of the family. Contribution: This introductory article affirms the importance of studying family wealth strategies across all social classes, and of multiplying the historical, national and cultural contexts of study.

Homeownership is a key marker of economic stability, yet rising housing costs have made it increasingly difficult for young adults to purchase homes. Parental financial transfers can help offset these barriers, but such support is unevenly distributed across social groups. Although past research has documented gender disparities in intergenerational transfers, little is known about how these patterns extend to sexual minority individuals or how gender and sexuality jointly shape parental support. Using data from the 2020–2021 Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity, Socioeconomic Status, and Health Across the Life Course study, the authors examine the need for and receipt of parental financial support for home buying across gender and sexual identity groups. Logistic regression models adjust for family background, socioeconomic status, and partnership characteristics. The results show substantial variation in parental support for home purchase across intersecting categories of gender and sexual identity. Gay men and straight women are less likely to receive parental financial assistance for home buying, even after accounting for socioeconomic resources, financial need, and partnership-related factors. These findings suggest that parental support for home buying may reflect heteronormative and gendered expectations, reinforcing social inequalities through unequal intergenerational transfers. Limited access to parental support may constrain homeownership opportunities and contribute to cumulative disadvantage over the life course.

Emerging affordability problems in British housing have accentuated the role of parental support in facilitating entry to homeownership, with financial transfers and in-kind support smoothening transitions for many. This article explores housing trajectories, focusing on how dependency and autonomy are negotiated within and across generations in relation to gifts, loans and in-kind transfers for home purchase. It draws on the experiences of a group of young adults aged 25–35 and those family members who supported them in acquiring a home. We consider the nature of support, and how those giving and receiving it understand this exchange. We show that gifting for homeownership is an ‘ideal gift’, allowing givers to exercise moral control over the receivers by supporting a normalized tenure choice. Managing relationships of indebtedness between kin presupposes negotiations in which the maintenance of autonomy is paramount. The article examines four types of negotiations and their impact on intergenerational relations.

For decades, it was taken as a given that an increased homeownership rate was a desirable goal. But after the financial crises and Great Recession, in which roughly eight million homes were foreclosed on and about $7 trillion in home equity was erased, economists and policymakers are re-evaluating the role of homeownership in the American Dream. Many question whether the American Dream should really include homeownership or instead focus more on other aspects of upward mobility, and most acknowledge that homeownership is not for everyone. We take a detailed look at US homeownership from three different perspectives: 1) an international perspective, comparing US homeownership rates with those of other nations; 2) a demographic perspective, examining the correlation between changes in the US homeownership rate between 1985 and 2015 and factors like age, race/ethnicity, education, family status, and income; 3) and, a financial benefits perspective, using national data since 2002 to calculate the internal rate of return to homeownership compared to alternative investments. Our overall conclusion: homeownership is a valuable institution. While two decades of policies in the 1990s and early 2000s may have put too much faith in the benefits of homeownership, the pendulum seems to have swung too far the other way, and many now may have too little faith in homeownership as part of the American Dream.

Why do mortgage subsidies vary across countries? Until the 2000s, the U.S. and Germany provided large-scale subsidies for homeownership. Yet, their paths diverged when they faced deep economic crises at that time. While the U.S. doubled down on government support by quasi-nationalizing its mortgage market, Germany retrenched homeowner subsidies. This article argues that growth regimes shape coalitional logics that explain these contrasting outcomes. In the U.S. demand-led regime, where housing is key to growth, a bipartisan coalition entrenched mortgage subsidies to stimulate household credit and consumption. Germany's export-led regime, where housing is less central to growth, produced a broad-based coalition that retrenched homeowner subsidies to boost competitiveness. Detailed case studies contrast the quasi-nationalization of U.S. government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) with the retrenchment of the German \"homeowner subsidy\" (Eigenheimzulage).

We study temporary fiscal stimulus designed to support distressed housing markets by inducing demand from buyers in the private market. Using difference-in-differences and regression kink research designs, we find that the First-Time Homebuyer Credit increased home sales by 490,000 (9.8%), median home prices by $2,400 (1.1%) per standard deviation increase in program exposure, and the transition rate into homeownership by 53%. The policy response did not reverse immediately. Instead, demand comes from several years in the future: induced buyers were three years younger in 2009 than typical first-time buyers. The program's market-stabilizing benefits likely exceeded its direct stimulus effects.

Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life and the economy that we term tessellated neoliberalism. The book considers the nucleus of the domestic home as part of a much larger archipelago frontline of homes and gated communities that appear as a new home front set against diverse sources of social anxiety. These range from questions of invasion (such as burglary or identity theft) to those of security (the home as a financial resource in retirement and as a place of refuge in an unpredictable world). A culture of fear has been responded to through increasingly emphatic retreats by homeowners into fortified dwellings, palatial houses, concealed bunker pads and gated developments. Many feature elaborate security measures; alarms, CCTV systems, motion-sensing lights and impregnable panic rooms. Domestic Fortress locates the anxieties driving these responses to the corporate and political manufacturing of fear, the triumph of neoliberal models of homeownership and related modes of social individualisation and risk that permeate society today. Domestic Fortress draws on perspectives and research from criminology, urban studies and sociology to offer a sense of the private home as a site of wavering anxiety and security, exclusion and warmth, alongside dreams of retreat and autonomy that mesh closely with the defining principles of neoliberal governance.Even as the home is acknowledged to play a vital role in sheltering us from the elements so it has now come to be a locus around which many anxieties are shut-out. The home allows us to lock out the daily hardships of life, but is also a site from which we witness a wide range of troubling phenomena: the insecurities of the workplace, plans for our future welfare, internationalized terror, geo-political warfare, ecological catastrophes, feelings of loss and uncertainty around identity, to say nothing of the daily risks of flood, fire and other disasters.The home now plays a complex dual role that slips between offering us protection from these worries while also offering the nightmare of its own possible invasion, erosion or destruction. On top of these concerns entire industries have been built that sell a war against strangers, dirt and disaster. This of course includes the insurance industry itself, but also the use of technologies that both protect the home and make it effectively more impregnable to casual social contact as well as the proliferation of products devoted to domestic cleanliness. Domestic Fortress considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants and details the wide range of actions taken in the pursuit of total safety.