Dual responsibilization for housing in a housing crisis: young adults in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Young adults in various countries are experiencing deteriorating access to homeownership and affordable rental housing. Whereas many studies have focused on the shift of responsibility for housing from the state to individuals related to a meritocratic ideology, only recently have certain studies identified the ambiguity and incoherence as a significant principle in housing discourses. Responding to these, we analysed 31 narrative interviews and survey data on Czech young adults (aged 18–35), providing unique evidence from a country where access to the housing market is significantly, albeit gradually, worsening. Our focus is on who they ascribe responsibility for housing provision, demonstrating how their strong calls for state intervention intermingle with a belief that individual solutions to the housing crisis are still possible. We illustrate how this ambivalent dual responsibilization is overcome through a complex interplay between moralities, rationalities and, importantly, through reference to emotions and the practices of intergenerational transfers which normalize the attachment to existing housing practices, ideologies and responsibilities.

Keywords:

• Housing crisis
• young adults
• responsibilization
• meritocracy
• ambivalence

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the anonymous referees for valuable feedback and comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank our narrators for participating in the research, Bradley McGregor for help with language proofreading, Petr Sunega for consulting on use of EU-SILC data and Martin Lux for feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (Grantová Agentura České Republiky) under Grant: Housing Paths of Millennials: Increasing Tension between Homeownership Normalization and Urban Affordability Crisis in the Czech Republic [19-07402S].

Notes

1 The categories we used when coding responsibility ascription were ‘individual’, ‘family’, ‘state’, ‘municipality’, ‘market’, ‘private owners/developers’, and ‘unclear/uncertain’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tomáš Hoření Samec

Tomáš Hoření Samec works at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is interested in critical housing and urban studies, and the analysis of discourses on housing debt and financialization. He currently focuses on forms of collaborative housing and its implementation. He has published research articles in Urban Studies, Housing, Theory and Society and Journal of Cultural Economy.

Petr Kubala

Petr Kubala works at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Petr does research in housing studies with a focus on young adults housing, housing careers, housing inequalities, housing exclusion and Housing First as well as in the sociology of time in the context of housing. He has published research articles in Time and Society, Critical Housing Analysis and European Journal of Homelessness.