Mind the bricks

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

Raising mortgage costs and rents across Western countries have increased the salience of housing among the public. While housing matters for the politics of redistribution as a form of wealth, its role in informing perceptions of the fairness of the economic system is understudied. As unaffordability increases, people may perceive that even playing by the rules of the economic system is not enough. A local context of wealth inequality, exposing the disparity of rewards, may make salient the sharp differences between winners and losers. We focus on inequality linked to housing prices as an example of wealth acquired through mechanisms of accumulation based on booming property prices, disconnected from individual effort. We study whether individuals in places where wealth inequality has increased most are more likely to see inequality as unfair and demand more redistribution. We find this is the case in the British context, using survey data and supervised machine learning methods on Twitter data. Where the Gini of housing prices has increased the most, individuals are more likely to advocate for fairness when discussing economic issues. This shows housing matters not only on a material level, but also for structuring beliefs in the fairness of the economic system.

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