The financialisation of housing and housing-related family support in Hungary

Abstract

Financial markets are making an ever larger impact on young adults’ access to housing worldwide. At the same time, housing-related family assistance also shapes young people’s housing conditions. Bence Kováts’s The Financialisation of Housing and Housing-related Family Support in Hungary examines how housing-related family assistance deeply embedded in Hungarian society transformed under the process of the rapid marketisation of housing following regime change in 1989. The historically informed analysis of a large variety of statistical data provides an intriguing insight into the transformation of family-assisted housing acquisition from the alternative of market and state-assisted housing access, available to wide strata of the population, into a market-driven process highly dependent on parental wealth. The book is a highly informative read not only for academic researchers, but also students and policy-makers looking to understand the processes fundamentally transforming housing prospects of the younger generations.