Housing market dualization: linking insider–outsider divides in employment and housing outcomes

Abstract

Past decades of economic growth, relatively widespread employment security and expanding mortgage markets promoted growing homeownership. Recent years have witnessed this growth undercut across advanced economies, evidenced by a rise in other tenures and increasing housing precarity. Studies have shown that these housing outcomes follow more fundamental changes in labour markets. By adapting the established concept of labour market dualization to housing, this paper examines how employment and housing positions are intertwined under late capitalism, and how their relationship has changed through the Global Financial Crisis. Examining the salient case of the Netherlands through household-level data from the LISS panel, we demonstrate that being a labour market ‘outsider’ vastly increases the likelihood of being an ‘outsider’ across housing market dimensions, in terms of housing equity, affordability and prospective asset accumulation. Comparing housing and labour dualization over 2008 and 2016, we further show that the share of multiply disadvantaged households has grown substantially, both among labour market insiders and outsiders.