Family debts and intergenerational giving: Supporting Transitions to homeownership in Europe

This chapter examines homes as a locus of intra-family welfare provision, the increasingly financialized role of property towards wealth accumulation and changing family strategies surrounding housing. In the face of increasingly restricted individualized access to housing, there is a growing importance of inter-generational transfers in securing property purchase. This is apparent across both traditionally more and less family-oriented welfare contexts. The chapter argues that in order to understand support for homeownership, it is vital to understand the role of gifts in the everyday negotiations of contemporary families and how these help mediate debts, expectations and welfare strategies. The chapter builds on an extensive original dataset of 166 qualitative interviews conducted with young adults and their families in Birmingham, Bucharest, Amsterdam and Milan. The findings provide broader reflections on contemporary kinship, the meanings of homeownership within increasingly financialized housing markets and new family solidarities under welfare state restructuring.