The Role of Housing in Youth and Young Adulthood

The fields of youth studies and housing studies converge on their shared concern with the role of preferred tenure types and experiences in normative transitions from youth to adulthood. The normative, linear transition to adulthood bears a striking resemblance to the normative experience of leaving the family home, spending a short period of time in the private rental sector, and then settling into owner occupied housing (at least in societies with traditionally high rates of home ownership). Studies of young people’s experiences of housing can thus provide key insights into contemporary experiences of young adulthood. Social anxieties about young adults failing to successfully transition to adulthood are encapsulated in terms such as “yo-yo” or “boomerang” children and the moniker Generation Rent. These anxieties are also manifested in housing conditionality, in which young people must conform to specific behavioral expectations in order to maintain their tenancy in the social housing sector. This chapter provides an overview of research at the intersection of youth and housing studies. It begins by discussing topics that have attracted significant scholarly attention in recent years, before addressing the changing role of conditionality in young people’s access to and maintenance of housing, and the effect of housing insecurity and homelessness on young people’s lives. Notably, the topics raised in this chapter are animated by a shared focus on the notion of home, and how it may be shaped and undermined by increasingly financialized property markets and precarious and conditional forms of housing.