Housing Affordability and Urban Inequality In an Era of Demographic Change

Across the world, access to affordable housing has become a defining urban question. Rising prices, escalating rents, and growing housing insecurity are deepening inequalities in residential opportunities, especially for young adults, low-income households, migrants, and older people. Yet these pressures are unfolding in different demographic contexts. Japan and South Korea are among the most advanced cases of rapidly aging societies with regional population decline, while parallel developments are increasingly visible across Europe and East Asia. In these contexts, changing household structures, housing vacancy, and uneven regional development are reshaping housing markets in ways that existing affordability debates, often framed around urban growth and financialization, do not fully capture.

This open session brings together researchers examining housing affordability, housing access, and urban inequality across diverse national contexts and theoretical traditions. We particularly welcome work that connects affordability and exclusion to demographic change, but contributions need not be limited to it. Relevant themes include housing markets and tenure structures, including affordability, homeownership, rental markets, and housing regimes; urban restructuring and exclusion, including gentrification, displacement, socio-spatial inequality, and migration; demographic transformation and regional change, including aging, shrinking households, vacancy, depopulation, and regional decline; and policy and political economy, including housing policy, welfare institutions, financialization, and state responses to affordability crises.

By placing different national trajectories in dialogue, the session aims to advance a comparative and theoretically grounded understanding of how the relationship between housing and inequality is being reconfigured, making it a fitting contribution to the Congress theme, "Global Sociology in Turbulent Times."