Household perspectives on risk and homeownership across the EU (draft version)

Workshop 3. Session A. Abstract. Home ownership sectors in most European countries have experienced a strong growth in recent decades and by the mid-1990s the majority of EU households were home owners. Whilst a great deal of attention has been paid to the rise in home ownership per se, the extent to which households in different European countries strategise about the positive and negative risks of home ownership, particularly in relation to other risks in their lives, has not been researched. Contemporary debate suggests that society is a riskier one than in earlier times and home owners face a number of risks associated with changes in labour markets and national social security systems. This paper draws on interviews with households across eight European member states and examines households\u92 perceptions of the security and insecurity aspects of home ownership and their responses to perceived risks. The assumption underlying this paper is that while home owners may all face insecurity to a greater or lesser degree, their perceptions of, and responses to, risk will be determined to some extent by the institutional context of each country