Housing and the New Welfare State: Wobbly Pillar or Cornerstone?

By P. Malpass. 2008

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is concerned with the question of how to depict the housing-welfare state relationship, with special reference to the present period. It begins with a discussion of how housing can be seen as both the wobbly pillar under the welfare state and a cornerstone. The paper then examines two different perspectives, variously giving explanatory weight to economic and cultural factors. The first, derived from the work of Michael Harloe, provides an explanation of the tendency of social housing to move towards a residual role, but has nothing to say about the growing significance of housing markets and housing wealth in relation to the contemporary welfare state. The second, originated by Jim Kemeny, is based on international correlations of homeownership rates and levels of welfare state expenditure. It is argued that this approach has limited, and diminishing, relevance in the context of the early 21st century. The paper suggests that in the present period housing, especially the housing wealth of owner occupiers, provides governments with the opportunity to pursue welfare restructuring. This idea is explored by reference to evidence from Great Britain, a country with a high level of homeownership and an active programme of public service reform.

Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a82475d08a58929dd26248705d6a24b85a2a4f26

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Finance

1. Jie Chen
2. Zan Yang
3. R. Ronald
4. J. Montgomerie
5. J. Yates
6. Ya Ping Wang
7. J. Doling
8. Mirjam Büdenbender

In Political Science and International Relations

1. R. Ronald
2. J. Montgomerie
3. J. Yates
4. Ya Ping Wang
5. J. Doling
6. Mirjam Büdenbender
7. B. Bradbury
8. Fulong Wu

Citations in the corpus

• Round the Houses: Homeownership and Failures of Asset-Based Welfare in the United Kingdom (2015, background): “…is a ‘really big trade-off’ between homeownership and welfare provision (see also Kemeny 1995, 2005), which is now used to explain why liberal welfare state privilege high homeownership rates over higher pension and welfare payments (Lowe 2004, Malpass 2008, Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser 2011).”
• Home ownership as a (crumbling) fourth pillar of social insurance in Australia (2010, background): “been discussed more recently in countries such as the UK where home ownership is becoming more prevalent ( Malpass 2008, p. 17 ).”
• Home ownership and asset-based welfare (2010, background): “Malpass (2008, p. 2) suggests that the more dominant the private housing market has become the more it has been perceived as a potential cornerstone of the new welfare state.”
• The New Chinese Model of Public Housing: A Step Forward or Backward? (2014, background): “However, as pointed out by Malpass (2008), the role of housing in reshaping welfare system is becoming increasingly significant in various economies.”