Young people and life-course inequalities: The role of families and housing

Abstract

It has been argued that younger adults across Western economies have been particularly disadvantaged by the ‘de-institutionalization’ of the Fordist infrastructures that supported preceding generations as they transitioned to adulthood and formed independent family-households. Housing affordability, employment and income security, and welfares state structures are now considered more adversely aligned making adult transitions and the formation of new, economically secure households far more problematic. This commentary argues that this development is not particularly new and much more variegated and widespread than many analyses account for. Indeed, Japan began to evidence similar disalignment between generations more than three decades ago, making it difficult for successive adult cohorts to replicate the life-course transitions of their parents. It also argues that while analyses have focused on the individualization of life-courses, families have actually become more important to supporting early adult life-course transitions. It further affirms the role housing assets have played as both a driver of intergenerational inequality and also a means by which contemporary families help out their younger members.

Introduction

 At the beginning of the 1990s, following a prolonged period of intense economic growth, the Japanese economic bubble burst. What followed became known as the ‘lost decade’, and subsequently, the ‘lost decades’, with those transitioning to adulthood in this era similarly labeled the ‘lost generation’. This cohort was deeply affected by a sustained, negative realignment of market conditions stimulating parallel declines in marriage and family formation, and a corresponding surge in ‘parasite singles’ (Yamada, 1999), staying on into their 30s and 40s in their parent's homes (Hirayama and Izuhara, 2018), or indefinitely renting low-quality, low-cost micro-apartments, alone (Ronald and Hirayama, 2009). In the last two decades similar patterns have become evident across western economies (Howard et al., 2024; Maalsen, 2020), with a similar class of precarious young adults facing remarkably familiar challenges to Japan's 1990s ‘lost generation’.

Indeed, the ‘foreclosed futures’ of contemporary European youth described by del Río et al. (2025) eerily mirror a pattern of precarious employment and housing that has frustrated transitions into economically and ontologically stable adulthood. At the heart of their contribution is the assertion that there has been a dismantling of social and economic structures, or deinstitutionalization, at play across a wide range of contexts, albeit with diverse and geographically differentiated outcomes. The problems facing younger adults across societies in achieving basic life-course transitions thus, are not just a passing issue for contemporary youth. Rather, they reflect a broader historic shift in socioeconomic relations with deep and potentially enduring consequences.

The strengths of del Rio et al.'s (2025) consideration of this transition lie on the one hand, with their challenge of previous analyses that have associated diversification in the life-courses of younger adults with increasing freedom, life-style choice and the advance of ‘individualism’. On the other, they effectively outline key patterns of socio-structural change, identifying significant shifts in conditions of work, housing and family that have profound implications for early life-courses and the pursuit of ontologically and economically secure adult identities. The analysis is impressive, albeit somewhat gloomy. There are also some limitations. One issue is their more limited engagement with actual variegation and the role and impact of geographic differences. Despite the claims of the title, their approach is eminently more relational than geographic. In the analysis below, I explain these features in more depth and reflect on further possible steps in developing the approach.

Individualization or familization

For at least the last 50 years, social scientists have primarily emphasized decline, or at least the hollowing out of the family (Popenhoe, 1993), with the concept of individualization (e.g. Beck, 1992) providing a powerful explanation for shifts (declines) in family household formation. Similarly, changes in early life-course transitions have been explained by notions of delayed adulthood (Arnett, 2006) and demographic transitions (Lesthaeghe, 2014) that emphasize individual freedom and choice. del Rio et al. provide a strong critique of this understanding, drawing on Beck's own theories of individualization to implicate 21st century political economy in the erosion of stable transitions to autonomous adulthood and the subsequent reassertion of the role of the family.

Within Beck's approach, ‘deinstitutionalization’ involving the loosening of the Fordist structures underpinning postwar standardized life-courses supported an ‘institutionalization’ of individualism where a more flexible and self-reliant individual functions as the basic unit of social reproduction (Beck and Beck-Gersheim, 2002). Although this analysis provided a persuasive explanation of the advance of individualistic life-courses and life-styles as neo-liberalisation took hold in the late 20th-century, most societies have since seen a significant realignment. The hollowing-out of the welfare state alongside diminishing real salaries and employment security, key planks of austerity for del Rio et al., has in most cases been met by a revitalization of the family and family solidarities. Among poorer families, support has intensified for younger members, with, for example, increasing rates of generational doubling up and extended coresidency in the natal home, often prompted by boomerang returns (Burgess and Muir, 2019). Among wealthier families meanwhile, intergenerational wealth transfers have intensified – especially supporting the purchase of a first home – becoming a conspicuous feature of growing socioeconomic inequalities (Arundel and Ronald, 2020). As such, del Rio et al. argue that life-courses under austerity conditions better reflect an ‘institutionalized familization’. 

The deinstitutionalization of Fordist structures in favor of greater neo-liberalization, they argue, did not simply advocate for the end of social institutions but rather, for elevating the role of the market. In this context, the family has adapted to the needs of more precarious individual members who are compelled to navigate (more adverse) market conditions. Rather than choosing an individualized route through life, many young people are increasingly being forced into flexible and more fluid (non-linear) life-courses in the face of unpredictable conditions. Individualized trajectories thus reflect diminishing capacities to follow traditional pathways through life involving marriage and child rearing that require affordable independent housing and regular incomes that are both important structurally and sustain the formation of adult identities. Under austerity conditions, parents are typically called upon to help their adult offspring, although pooling resources with similarly precarious others, like room- of house-sharing, also represents a means for young people to cope.

One could thus consider ‘reinstitutionalized’ individualization as characteristic of late capitalism and correspondent to ‘institutionalized familization’. This process does not represent an end to individualization per se, as indeed, the numbers of households with couples, especially ones with children, continue to stagnate. Arguably, individualization persists as an outcome of diminishing infrastructures – affordable homes and secure work – and not individual choice or freedom. Moreover, in the absence of such infrastructure, individualization – being on your own and delayed adulthood – increasingly requires the family, especially parents and older relatives, to help sustain it.

Housing and the intergenerational paradox

Understanding of the implications of shifting employment and welfare conditions for younger adults has been more conspicuously advanced (e.g. Standing, 2011). del Rio et al. take these analyses on board but also make important connections to the contemporary role of housing markets and assets in explaining the ‘foreclosed futures’ of many young adults. This is an important step. While there has been criticism of ‘generation rent’ debates to the extent they emphasize intergenerational inequalities over intragenerational ones (see Howard et al., 2024), the remarkable disjunction in housing conditions between different adult cohorts its critical to understanding the historical significance of shifting life-course transitions. Indeed, austerity and precarity are not just outcomes of diminishing welfare and employment conditions; they are fundamentally bound up with housing, which has become centerpiece of contemporary political economy.

While widespread homeownership is considered a relatively normal feature of liberal economies, it largely emerged in the late 20th-century with, for example, British people in their mid-20s in the early-1980s, more likely to be homeowners than those about to retire (Ronald and Kadi, 2017). Similar tenure transitions were further reproduced across Europe with even Sweden and the Netherlands (traditional social housing regimes) becoming majority homeowner nations by the mid-1990s. The subsequent emergence of housing equity rich generations sustained increasing demand for housing and a means of asset wealth accumulation and a container of family wealth, with homeownership – buying a home, repaying the debt and acquiring more property assets where possible – becoming critical to economic security in later life. The proposition of homebuying was thus anchored in life-course expectations and became critical to other transitions: how and when to form an independent household and produce children. However, since the early-2000s, rates of owner-occupation have deteriorated across advanced economies with the collapse in younger adults entering the tenure, an enduring driver of decline (Arundel and Ronald, 2020). Rental sectors and numbers of young renters meanwhile have ballooned with renting a room rather than a property an increasingly salient course for many (Maalsen, 2020).

In the austerity era, according to del Rio et al., diminishing housing opportunities have been critical to the foreclosed futures experienced by younger people. Policy regimes have supported asset appreciation and thus the practices of property wealthy families buying-up homes to rent out to young people locked out of the market (Adkins et al., 2021; Ronald and Kadi, 2017). Herein, I would argue, lies an intergenerational paradox: overall, older generations have accrued significant housing assets with high house prices a pillar of economic security and further property purchases offering a means to supplement retirement income. Their children, meanwhile, are often locked out of housing as a result of the same market conditions, requiring parents to draw on their housing wealth to help out so that offspring can form their own independent households. Where parents are renters or own low-value homes, however, opportunities to assist children are far more limited.

It is not just that chances of becoming a homeowner have faded along with wage stagnation and increasing property prices. Nearly all routes to independent housing have become more difficult, and few offer young people the chance to accrue the same stability and economic security as their parents’ generation.

Conclusion

del Rio et al. have formulated a compelling approach to understanding prevailing life-course transitions and diminishing prospects for younger adults. The contemporary reworking of the institutional basis of individualization and familization is particularly illustrative. The approach is also comprehensive, providing a way to meaningfully connect all sorts of struggles related to housing, work, and welfare across diverse contexts. The conditions of ‘Generation Rent’ in Ireland, the ‘Lying Flat’ movement in China and the ‘Los Ninis’ of Spain, for example, all share important characteristics that are captured within the Foreclosed Futures perspective. What is arguably less developed in their analysis is geographic sensitivity to actual drivers of variation between places and contexts.

While their focus is Europe, there is also a wider scope from which to evaluate this framework. Indeed, Japan's Lost Generation presents a more advanced case for a Foreclosed Futures approach. There, disrupted adult transitions have had over three decades to embed leading, in the longer-term, to significant increases in people not marrying (or even forming conjugal relationships) and remarkable growth in singles now entering their 50s living at home with their parents (Hirayama and Izuhara, 2018), not to mention the contribution to collapsing fertility and negative population growth. Moreover, Japan's example has been increasingly imitated across East Asian economies (see Naafs and Skelton, 2019), with variegated outcomes for young people reflecting differences in social, economic, and political structures, as well as housing, employment, and family practices. At the same time, analyzing more diverse cases and seeking ways in which frustrated younger people have acquired greater agency may also allow for a less gloomy perspective on the future.