Abstract

This paper (presentation) starts from the observation that, while income poverty  rates seem to have ‘stabilized at a high level’, policy and popular (media) accounts of housing unaffordability, homelessness, displacement and eviction, hunger (foodbank use), problematic debt, hardship, and ‘destitution poverty’ seem to be on the increase. I address this issue by combining different strands of research (policy reports, theoretical and empirical literature on the ongoing ‘commodification’ & ‘financialization’ of housing provision, older insights regarding the relationship between housing and the welfare state) and arrive at the following hypotheses: 1) the association between income poverty and life-style (material) deprivation is moderated by the organization in terms of its ‘redistributiveness’ of the housing system (role of markets vs. families and states, nature of housing policies); and 2) developments over time in the association between income poverty and life-style deprivation can be explained by macrolevel
features related to the housing system (e.g. ‘protective/redistributive’ policies, financialization and other changes in housing markets and related trends in housing costs). I investigate these hypotheses for Belgium and across Europe using multilevel analyses with data from EU-SILC (2005-2016).