Need for permanent supportive housing (PSH) units for unhoused individuals far outstrips supply. Understanding the factors related to positive PSH exits could help increase access to PSH units and close this gap. This scoping review identifies factors related to positive PSH exits. It draws on concepts from Gelberg, Andersen, and Leake's behavioural model for vulnerable populations and Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to provide a new theoretical framework that describes relationships between these factors. This new framework (PSH exit capabilities theory) posits that positive exits from PSH occur when the necessary means of affordable housing are available, and favourable conversion conditions shaped by predisposing and enabling factors identified through this review outweigh an individual's need for PSH. The resident then has the capability and choice to withdraw from these services and realize potentially better health and housing outcomes outside of homeless services. Implications for policy and research are discussed.
This article examines how UK political and financial elites construct and legitimize the marginalization of "mortgage prisoners" - homeowners trapped in closed-book mortgages and unable to remortgage. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis of 55 texts (2007-2025), it identifies three discursive practices that emerged sequentially and underpin policy (in)action. Initially, elites downplayed distinctions between active and inactive lenders, legitimizing privatization and obscuring structural drivers of harm. Subsequently, FCA-led segmentation by payment status and credit-scores gave rise to variegated debt moralities that differentiated "deserving" borrowers from those subject to default stigma. Finally, invocations of "moral hazard" framed intervention as unfair, reinforcing fiscal restraint and market primacy. Bringing housing-class theory into dialogue with financialized subjectivities and credit-score governance, the article shows how stigma and moral classification operate within the homeowners-with-mortgages class, reshaping hierarchies of responsibility and deservingness and deepening intra-cohort housing inequality.
This article explores how social structures shape landlord practices in a homeownership-dominated society, contributing to a deeper understanding of the private rental market. Despite knowledge of how the rental market isn't available for all groups on the same terms, research on how these inequalities is produced remain limited, particularly in sociological studies of landlord practices. Using a Bourdieu-inspired theoretical framework, this study analyses data from ten qualitative interviews conducted in Norway with representatives of small-scale landlords, professional landlords and tenants facing challenges in the private rental market. In Norway, where small-scale landlords dominate a rental market comprising only 20% of the housing stock, cultural values surrounding homeownership influence landlords' practices. Small-scale landlords demonstrate emotional attachment to their properties, emphasizing cultural conformity and relying on a "feel" for the right tenant. In contrast, professional landlords adopt more standardized, market-driven practices, reflecting their business-oriented approach and secondary socialization into the landlord role.
This paper proposes the concept of "Financialization of Rental Housing 3.0" to capture an emergent phase in the global transformation of rental housing into a financial asset. Building on earlier accounts of housing financialization 1.0 and 2.0, I argue that recent developments are characterized less by the consolidation of institutional investment in established markets than by the expansion of financial logics into new frontiers and granular niche asset classes. Drawing on international scholarship, I show how housing previously considered marginal or uninvestable-including student housing, single-family rentals, co-living, mobile homes, subsidized housing and informal rental markets-are selectively reconfigured as income-generating assets. Conceptually, I position financialization as a multi-scalar and partial process, complementary to assetization but offering a broader lens on changing political economies of housing. The paper advances a heuristic framework that shifts analytical attention from whether housing is financialized to how, where, and under what conditions financialization occurs.
Drawing on data from multiple methods, including 443 household heads, 71 transmigrants, and five key informant interviews, this paper unpacks the effects of translocal householding on rural housing transformation in Nkoranza South Municipality, Ghana. We report that housing constitutes a site through which translocal networks are enacted, negotiated, and materially expressed. Three distinct mechanisms underpin this process: (i) financial transfers directed towards housing investment; (ii) aspirational and normative influences linked to social status, prestige, and monument-building, which reconfigure housing functions and aesthetics and (iii) technical and informational transfers, including advice on sourcing architectural designs, materials, and skilled artisans. However, this transformation is not without contradictions. While aesthetically appealing, this change reinforces socio-economic stratification and raises construction costs, particularly for households without strong translocal networks. Although the findings are context-specific and do not claim statistical generalisability, the identified mechanisms provide a useful framework for understanding rural housing transformation in similar contexts. STATEMENT OF NOVELTY This research provides a new approach to comprehending Africa's rural housing change. While earlier research highlights diverse global forces driving a change in rural housing, this study highlights the place of translocal householding in reconfiguring rural housing in Africa. Unlike studies in Poland, Palestine, and China, which attribute housing changes to economic or political factors, this research examines how translocal householding - through remittances, frequent visits, and social exchanges between rural and urban areas - impacts rural housing in Africa. The novelty of this research lies in its focus on how translocal networks drive rural housing changes through resource transfers and social connections. This perspective deepens the understanding of translocality's impact and suggests targeted solutions for rural housing issues in Africa. This contributes to the broader discussion on rural housing and translocal studies.
We examine how gender and lone parenthood influence access to rental housing opportunities. We outline theoretical mechanisms through which gender and parental status may shape landlord decision-making and hypothesize that women fare better than men overall in the rental housing market, but that the gender advantage reduces once lone parenthood is present. The hypotheses were tested through a correspondence test field experiment where inquiries from fictitious applicants - varying by gender and parental status - were sent to 2,000 landlords in Sweden. We found a negative effect of lone parenthood on responses, but no evidence that gender affected access, regardless of parental status. This contrasts with previous literature, which has predominantly reported advantages for women. We discuss potential explanations for this divergence between our experiment, our theoretical predictions, and prior research.
Despite increasing international uptake of trauma-informed care in the homelessness sector, practitioners' experiences remain underexplored. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 staff from homelessness organisations in a London borough, and four national experts, this article is the first to explore how professionals in the homelessness sector manage their own emotions amidst the complexities of a fractured homelessness system and housing crisis. Employing the concept of emotional labour, it asks how staff feel implementing trauma-informed care, while facing reduced funding, heavier workloads, and increasingly complex client needs. While staff attempted to shield themselves through containment of emotion, engagement in riskier practices was evident as staff internalised failings which were inherently structural. The findings provide much-needed knowledge about the implementation of trauma-informed models, disclosing ways in which their endorsement in the homelessness sector demands new forms of highly precarious emotional labour.
The widening generational divide in housing access and security raises urgent academic and practical questions about growing urban inequities and solutions to them. In response, this article proposes the new conceptual and empirical lens of Intergenerational Housing Solidarity (IGHS). Drawing on scholarship on kin-based housing support, urban social movements and cooperative housing, IGHS provides a multidimensional framework to analyse the relational practices that emerge when different generations collaborate to challenge housing precarity through collective forms of living. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research with UK student housing cooperatives, I show how IGHS is a dynamic, contested and political concept that explores how solidarities are forged across generational boundaries in material, spatial, relational, institutional, subjective and resource-dependent ways. This article contributes to debates on community-led housing, cooperative subjectivities and urban housing struggles by theorizing IGHS as a complex phenomenon whose potential lies in redistributive outcomes and transformative housing relations and imaginaries. STATEMENT OF NOVELTY This article proposes Intergenerational Housing Solidarity (IGHS) as a new conceptual and empirical framework for understanding intergenerational housing dynamics. While existing research on intergenerational support for housing access and security predominantly focuses on kin-based financial transfers towards private homeownership, this article expands this focus by analysing urban and cooperative solidarity responses to housing precarity. The article introduces a new six-dimensional IGHS framework, encompassing material, spatial, relational, governance, subjective and resource dimensions, through which to understand how solidarities are actively constructed across generations within student housing cooperatives (SHCoops) in the UK. Grounded in long-term engaged ethnographic research with student housing cooperators and their supporters, this work presents original empirical data on the establishment, governance and institutional embedding of SHCoops, which are under-researched in the academic literature. The article also foregrounds often neglected perspectives of young people, not as passive recipients of intergenerational support but as active agents of solidarity-building, cooperative interdependence and institutional innovation. It also extends the theoretical literature on urban solidarity and commoning as well as cooperative housing by articulating the dynamic and contested character of intergenerational solidarity in the housing domain. My article is thus novel in both its conceptual synthesis - bring-ing together intergenerational solidarity, cooperative housing and urban solidarity movements - and in its empirical richness, offering new insights into the practices, challenges and transformative potentials of IGHS as a framework for addressing structural housing inequalities through SHCoops. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first article proposing IGHS as a stand-alone concept and devel-oping a framework to operationalize it. The article thus opens up important new directions for research and practice in critical hous-ing studies.
Neighbourhood impacts on older adults' social isolation and loneliness are gaining global concern. High-rise, high-density housing environments can both support and constrain social lives, yet their role in shaping different forms of social ties remains unclear. Guided by Person-Environment Fit (P-E Fit) theory, this study examines how neighbourhood in-between spaces shape older adults' social ties in a Hong Kong housing estate through semi-structured photo-elicitation interviews and Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). The findings show that strong and invisible ties are more often associated with sheltered, formal social settings, while weak ties are more likely to emerge in informal social settings. Physical comfort, natural elements, and organised activities deepen social engagement, whereas pest infestation, inadequate age-friendly facilities, and reduced community programmes post-pandemic hinder interaction. These findings offer a contextualised extension of P-E Fit theory and contribute to emerging debates on population ageing and housing design in dense East Asian cities.
China's ongoing crisis of unfinished residential developments (URDs) exposes structural vulnerabilities within its housing sector, with profound implications for social stability and urban development. This article conceptualizes URDs as systemic outcomes of pro-growth urban regimes operating within weak regulatory frameworks, most notably the pre-sale system. Drawing on urban regime theory, we develop a risk-integrated regime analysis examining how non-completion risk is institutionally promoted, unevenly distributed, and externalized onto vulnerable consumers. Our findings reveal that growth-prioritized agendas, skewed resource mobilization, and tacit cooperation schemes among coalition actors - comprising local governments, banks, and developers - collectively enable risk externalization onto homebuyers, culminating in widespread housing production failures. This study provides an empirical basis for improving pre-sale-driven housing systems, and contributes to understanding urbanization in under-regulated, financialized contexts. It calls for strengthened homebuyer protection and renewed attention to the social dimensions of housing in the context of rapidly urbanizing economies.
