Although there is agreement that homelessness is an urgent problem, there are stark disagreements about what type of problem homelessness is and what should be done about it. Homelessness never simply exists as a phenomenon; it evokes diagnosis of the problem and animates suggestions for what should be done differently to address it. Drawing on frame analysis, this article examines dominant arguments presented for what type of problem homelessness is and what needs to happen to address it. Our analysis of the multiple and competing positions on what type of problem homelessness is and what should be done about it helps to identify and scrutinize these competing arguments about whether housing is the self-evident solution or a part of the problem. Our analysis demonstrates that not everyone agrees that homelessness is a housing problem, and not everyone agrees that housing, certainly housing from the state, is the solution. These opposing views reflect normative ideas about a right type of society and right way of living. Our analysis speaks to the value of engaging multiple voices, perspectives, and social worlds to promote change in how we think about social issues and build a shared vision for how to live together.

Using gender-targeted housing subsidies, Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program has significantly expanded homeownership among low-income women. However, the latter often face unexpectedly high costs upon becoming homeowners. While existing research shows that burdensome housing costs have adverse socio-economic impacts on beneficiaries of MCMV and similar subsidy programs, this article looks ethnographically at their gendered and disciplinary effects. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in an MCMV-subsidized housing estate in São Paulo, it reveals three effects of cost-burdened homeownership. First, high costs produced deep anxieties and necessitated new budgeting and income-generating practices, augmenting homeowners’ existing burdens of paid and unpaid labor. Second, management of housing costs was experienced as a specifically gendered burden, conferred on women by an avowedly ‘pro-female’ state policy. Third, rather than critique MCMV for imposing high costs, women invoked maternalist state discourses to frame payment as a legitimate obligation that made them respectable citizens and responsible mothers. Bridging the feminist sociology of welfare states with recent work on the disciplinary role of housing policy, this study reveals how programs promoting women’s homeownership can both expand and legitimize unequal gendered burdens.

This article examines how housing unaffordability in Luxembourg drives displacement and contributes to the emergence of cross-border gentrification along Luxembourg’s borders, examined here through the case of two neighbouring French towns. Housing pressures push some Luxembourg residents to relocate across the border and lead other workers employed in Luxembourg to settle there as well. From economic, exclusionary, and social forms of displacement, cross-border gentrification emerges as income disparities and restricted housing access reshape local housing markets. These dynamics are further reinforced by French state-led redevelopment operations designed to accommodate cross-border demand, where higher housing prices risk exacerbating existing inequalities. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with residents, landlords, and housing professionals, the study identifies cross-border gentrification as a mechanism through which housing inequalities and residential mobility operate across state boundaries, reproducing persistent centre–periphery interdependencies in a European context.

Affordable homeownership schemes aim to mitigate housing inequalities and broaden access to homeownership among low-to-middle-income households. In urban China, affordable homeownership governance followed a path-dependent market logic institutionalised since the late 1990s, frequently generating dysfunctions and conflicts. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these governance failures and necessitated renewed state intervention, constituting a critical juncture. Building on a case study of Xinjia Yuan, a state-led affordable homeownership scheme in Shanghai, this article examines how governance practices evolved and adapted to China’s broader governance transformations before, during, and after the pandemic. The study draws on historical institutionalism to analyse how grassroots actors developed informal practices amid the path dependence of state entrepreneurialism and the critical juncture of state reassertion. The findings reveal how informal practices among grassroots actors gained legitimacy over time. While direct state intervention sustained market-oriented governance frameworks, the pandemic outbreak reasserted grassroots party-state authority, further facilitating the state-led mobilisation of active residents to address market limitations in the post-pandemic era. This article offers critical insights into governance transitions in affordable housing management by highlighting the grassroots state’s role as an essential safety net and extending the analytical lens to grassroots adaptive practices.

The housing careers of young people provide significant insight into the housing system they enter – its opportunities and limitations. There is a strong history of work in housing studies to understand the progress of individuals through the housing market. This paper assesses the value of housing careers and housing pathways as analytical devices at a time when uncertainty marks young people’s movement through the housing markets of developed economies. This paper considers the movement of young people as they progress through the housing system from the family home in twenty first Century homeowner societies. Younger people’s pathways are shown to have slowed, often not end in homeownership, and are not simple linear progressions towards homeownership. Movement through the market is now more dependent on factors external to the housing system. While the concept of a housing career remains relevant, questions of unequal housing outcomes need to be addressed from a wider perspective, one that acknowledges generational schisms as well as the differences between individuals even in one generation.

While existing literature has explored the relationship between various housing submarkets from the supply and demand sides, few have examined the impact of commercial land (CL) housing on residential land (RL) housing. CL housing, a novel form of informal housing in China, violates land management regulations by converting commercial buildings for residential use, whereas RL housing constitutes the formal market. This study develops a theoretical framework and introduces the CL housing regulation to analyze the relationship between these two housing submarkets. Using a difference-in-differences approach and second-hand micro-housing transaction data from Beijing (2011–2020), we find that CL housing exerts a greater crowding-out effect on RL housing than a complementary effect. Following the implementation of the CL housing regulation, CL housing supply declined, prompting an increase in RL housing supply and a shift in some demand back to the RL housing submarket, resulting in lower RL housing prices. In addition, a regression discontinuity design reveals that the regulation curtailed investment demand while consumer demand persisted. To enhance the efficient use of CL housing, we propose policy recommendations for its repurposing. Our findings provide new evidence from China’s housing submarkets and offer a conceptual framework for other countries considering housing submarket dynamics in building use conversions.

From the perspective of prospect theory, this study employs a discrete choice experiment (DCE) analyzed with mixed logit models to examine how housing affordability prospects influence youth’s residential decisions. The DCE was conducted with undergraduate students from local universities in Shanghai through hypothetical scenario-based choice tasks simulating housing market entry decisions. The results show that: (1) mixed logit models incorporating reference-dependent prospect values substantially outperform conventional models relying on raw debt-to-income ratio (DTI) and rent-to-income ratio (RIR) in both statistical fit and behavioural realism. (2) Debt-to-income ratio prospects (DTIP), rent-to-income ratio prospects (RIRP), housing support policies, and school district quality positively influence young people’s residential decisions, while commuting time and neighbourhood circle attributes have negative effects. (3) High-income scenarios strengthen young people’s preference for DTIP and weaken their preference for RIRP. As income levels increase, young adults will show greater aversion to longer commuting times and poorer neighbourhood accessibility, exhibiting stronger preferences for high-quality school districts. However, income scenarios do not significantly moderate the effects of housing support policies. These findings provide empirical evidence on the decision-making mechanisms of youth in the housing market and offer valuable policy implications for designing interventions to address youth housing affordability challenges.

In Australia, social norms and policy assume that home ownership protects low-income older people from housing stress and poverty. Yet increasing numbers of older people rent privately. While there is ample evidence of the risk of poverty and precarious housing for older private renters, an understanding of the social, policy and personal conditions across the life course that contribute to being a private renter in older age is limited. This study uses a life course approach to explore the interaction of critical life events, and social and policy conditions that result in cumulative disadvantage and later life private tenancy. The qualitative analysis of 76 life history interviews with older private tenants identified four trajectories: lifelong constant struggle; loss of housing and assets due to a single critical event; repeated losses from multiple critical events; and life choices that deprioritized home ownership but led to vulnerability in later years. Gender, single parenthood, and experiences of violence notably economic abuse were key vulnerabilities. The findings highlight failures in the retirement income system and housing policy. They also suggest that early interventions at earlier life stages across multiple policy domains are needed to address the long-term housing impacts of accumulated disadvantage.