The Role of Housing Wealth in Young Adults’ Imagined Futures: Investor Subjectivities in the Minskian Household

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholarly interest in assets has grown over recent years, with housing receiving particular attention. At the same time a related body of work has focussed on intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership, considering how proximity to assets may lead to direct assistance with purchasing property. In this article I draw on interviews conducted with 80 donors and recipients of family financial assistance with first home ownership in order to consider the role of assets (specifically property) in the imagined futures of the recipients, focusing particularly on ambitions to own investment properties. I argue that the provision and receipt of financial assistance of this type is underpinned by shared investor subjectivities. I then consider how these investor subjectivities may lead to specific orientations to property investment in the recipients’ imagined futures, finding that many of them aim to use property wealth to meet some of the costs of social reproduction in ways that recreate the gender dynamics that they experienced during their own childhoods. I ultimately draw together these claims to contend that the Minskian household is perhaps best thought of as a kinship network, and to identify some of the empirical features of these networks.