Title:	Demographic Change and Housing Wealth
Authors:	John Doling Marja Elsinga
Keywords:	Housing Wealth
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The ageing of populations and the growth of individually owned housing assets are macro-processes of change that, during recent decades, have been common across what are now the member states of the European Union. Of the two processes, the former has probably attracted far more policy-related interest, being both a cause for celebration of longer life expectancies as well as a cause for concern in the fi scal challenges of meeting the pension and social care needs of an increasingly large retirement population. Certainly, what has come to be known as the ‘pension crisis’ has generated many hours of debate and many pages of report; currently, there is at least some agreement across member states about policy objectives in which the elongation of working lives has been central. An almost entirely separate set of policy issues has related to the second process of change, the growth in the size of homeownership sectors in most of the member states, to the point where some two-thirds of European households now own their homes. Partly because of the tendency for house prices to increase in the long run, housing has become the single largest item in the aggregate wealth holdings of European households. The aspiration of people to share in the wealth potential of homeownership and the possibilities that the wealth provides have a signi fi cance in the social and economic lives of European citizens. The coincidence of the two processes suggests the intriguing question of the extent to which homeownership provides a potential cure for some of the consequences of ageing populations, as well as contributes to the causes. More speci fi cally, housing had become an increasingly important element in the composition of household wealth across EU member states. Currently, housing equity considerably exceeds total GDP, offering the opportunity for housing to be viewed – by households, by governments and by fi nancial institutions – as an asset that might be realised in order to meet consumption needs of older people, needs that have gained added poignancy as the nature and extent of the ‘pension crisis’ and the public expenditure implications of paying for health and social care become clearer. In that way, housing wealth may be seen as a potential solution for challenges later on in the life cycle.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/51345
ISBN:	978-94-007-4384-7
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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