After a succession of “crises de logement” (housing crises) over the last twenty years, French society is now deeply structured by housing inequality. The most vulnerable groups in society, including the youngest and poorest and those at the margins of the labor market, are directly impacted by the rising cost of housing. Most of them live in rented accommodation and must limit other purchases in order to pay the rent. In contrast, older homeowners tend, on average, to spend a smaller proportion of their household budget on housing (Bugeja-Bloch 2013).
In France, housing is one of the factors that distinguish different socioeconomic groups and is thus an important marker of social class. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to see if this is also true in other countries; second, to analyze how housing inequality relates to social class among people in employment specifically. To do so, I will compare how the housing situation of households with at least one member in employment varies with social class in four European countries: Denmark, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. These countries were chosen because they all have different types of welfare state (Esping-Andersen 1990) and different housing models. My aim is to compare the form and extent of housing-related social inequality in all four countries. The data used were collected in 2011 (Box 1) and the study context is thus the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis. In the housing market, lending institutions reacted to this crisis by imposing tighter conditions on access to credit and generally being more cautious…