Dualization in labour markets and housing outcomes: Insiders versus outsiders

Past decades of economic growth, relatively widespread employment security and expanding mortgage markets promoted growing homeownership sectors. Recent years have witnessed the foundations of this growth undercut across advanced economies, evidenced by a rise in other tenures and increasing housing precarity.
Various studies have shown that these housing outcomes largely follow more fundamental changes in labour markets. By adapting the established concept of labour market dualization to housing markets, this paper seeks to give a more precise view of how employment and housing positions are intertwined under late capitalism. Examining the salient case of the Netherlands through household-level data from the LISS panel study, we demonstrate that being a labour market outsider vastly increases the likelihood of being a housing market ‘outsider’ in terms of equity, security of tenure and housing wealth accumulation. Comparing housing and labour market dualization over 2008 and 2016 we further show that the share of multiply disadvantaged households has grown substantially, supporting the idea that the Global Financial Crisis has worked as a catalyst of rising socio-economic inequalities.