Hysteresis: understanding the housing aspirations gap

Drawing on qualitative research on housing aspirations in Scotland, the objectives of this paper are three-fold. Firstly, this paper will contextualise the subject of housing aspirations within relevant research literature and situate it within wider debates which revolve around the relationship between housing and social class. Secondly, in order to understand the implications of the research, this paper uses Bourdieu’s notion of ‘sociodicy’ to help explain the ‘social’ reasons which incline people to have housing aspirations. Thirdly, the data will be analysed to understand the differences in ‘aspirations’ between groups, concluding that the generational differences, which correspond to the epochal changes in the economy, are more important than class differences when understanding the uneven distribution of housing outcomes and housing wealth in developed societies. This paper concludes that the Bourdieusian concept of hysteresis explains the gap between the subjective expectations of young ‘professionals’ and the objective chances of their realisation.