Homeownership Habitus and Residential Practice of Highly-Skilled Chinese Migrants in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a “homeownership habitus” concept to understand the residential practice of highly-skilled young Chinese migrants in the Netherlands. Using 41 interviews, we show how and why they typically become homeowners soon after securing stable employment. Even without planning to stay in the Netherlands long-term, buying properties was taken for granted, sanctioned by the Chinese value framework whereby homeownership is not only a status-marker and rational economic choice, but integral to adulthood transitions. Homeownership was often enabled by familial intergenerational support, also functioning as a transnational investment strategy. Such rapid tenure transition included spatial strategies to buy in “good” suburban locations or more affordable lower-reputation localities. The historic city centres of Amsterdam and Utrecht were deemed expensive and housing stock old, while Rotterdam’s modern city centre was popular among them. This paper contributes to literature on highly-skilled Chinese in Western cities, residential practice of migrants and transnational materialization of habitus across fields.

KEYWORDS:

• Homeownership habitus
• residential practice
• highly-skilled Chinese migrants
• Dutch housing market
• field

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp; accessed 20 Dec 2022.

2. https://www.sohu.com/a/609828479_121249238; accessed 20 Dec 2022.

3. https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp, accessed 20 Dec 2022. Price-income ratios here are calculated as the ratio of median apartment prices to median household annual income.

4. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/housing/bloc-1a.html#:~:text=In%20the%20EU%20in%202021%2C%2053%20%25%20of%20the%20population%20lived,and%20Croatia%20(both%2077%20%25). Approached Dec 2022.

5. For the purpose of anonymity, our interviewees are identified by a letter and a number, the letter representing the city of residence (A, R and U for Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht), while the number indicates the order in which interviews were conducted.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam .