This book examines the rise of private homeownership in the context of neoliberalism with a focus on the relationship between housing, housing wealth and welfare. There are nine chapters between the editors’ introduction and an epilogue by John Doling. Seven of these chapters cover countries: Ireland; Finland, Norway and Sweden; Northern Ireland; East and West Germany; post socialist countries; Russia and Romania. Two chapters, one on housing wealth over the life course, the other on asset-based welfare considered in relationship to social investment welfare state models, are cross-national.

In chapter one, Caroline Dewilde and Richard Ronald set out the main issues surrounding homeownership discussing the policy shift from housing ‘services’ – housing's use value – to houses as a commodity; the financialization of housing; housing's enhanced role in asset-based welfare and housing's importance to wealth accumulation. ‘Welfare regimes’ – with their varieties of ‘residential capitalism’ – and homeownership politics are also explored.

The salience of ‘path dependency’ is well-illustrated in the county-based chapters. Bo Bengtsson, Hanna Ruonavaara and Jadar Sørvoll identify strong variations in the role of owner-occupation in Finland, Norway and Sweden and they do not detect asset-based welfare as an issue in the politics of the three countries. Kathrin Kolb and Sandra Buchholz focus on housing wealth differences between East and West Germany illustrating how specific political history influences the social cleavages considered to be worth investigating. Michelle Norris, using Ireland as her example, demonstrates how tenure can be shaped by a number of complex government interventions and how, in Ireland, it was not a device to roll back the state. Alison Wallace's study of Northern Ireland's rollercoaster housing market – prices down over 50% from 2007 peak to 2013 trough – shows how households coped because the primacy of housing as a service over housing as a financial asset helped in managing adversity. Srne Mandič and Maja Mwzal, in their examination of the impact of homeownership on old-age welfare in the transition to post-socialist societies, identify a neglect of old age in the transition but with differences between countries under scrutiny. Jane R. Zavisca and Theodore P. Gerber, having examined experiences of home ownership and housing mobility post privatisation in Russia, conclude that access to homeownership after privatisation is still more a function of family support and private assets than market position. Adriana Michaela Soaita's exploration of owner-occupation in Romania from before 1945 leads her to the conclusion that home transmission down the generations may moderate broader economic inequalities. Romania has a 96% homeownership rate.

Christian Lennartz augments the introduction via examining trends across the OECD countries based on data ending in 2007. He identifies large differences in the increase in mortgage debt, noting that enlarged mortgage debt did not produce higher ownership rates because debt fuelled house prices. He also reflects on how welfare state resources, freed through the notion of future ‘asset-based’ welfare, are being rechanneled in some countries towards promoting a welfare model based on social investment in worker productivity.

Housing Wealth and Welfare is about homeownership and the underlying tone of some of the chapters is that homeownership growth is not a welcome tendency. This is most explicit in ‘Housing wealth and welfare over the life course’ by Stephan Köppe and Beverly A. Seale. This interesting chapter sets out the processes and impact of acquiring, managing, using and transferring housing wealth over the life span. It finds little empirical support for the claimed homeownership advantages and significant disadvantages in terms of weakened social protection and inequality generation. However, owner-occupation needs to be set in the context of other tenures. In the UK, for example, the percentage of households renting privately increased from 7% in 2001 to 19% in 2015. One in five households with children now rent from a private landlord. This trend has implications for wealth distribution. Many private landlords own a substantial numbers of houses with, in 2016, 19% owning four or more (Scanlon and Whitehead, Reference Scanlon and Whitehead2016). Homeownership tenure security is being eroded by this movement into the private landlord sector and, on current trends, it has been predicted that state expenditure on Housing Benefit will increase to almost £200 billion by 2065/6 as ‘generation rent’ moves up the age scale. Households in the private rented sector will take 63% of this total (Chaloner et al., Reference Chaloner, Dreisin and Pragnell2015).

Many compilations of country-based housing accounts lack a conclusion setting out the implications of the specific narratives but, in this book, John Doling's epilogue – ‘Housing wealth an welfare: spatially and temporally contingent’ – not only supplies a perceptive commentary, it also reminds us that the future may not be the same as the recent past. More privatisation and less state involvement are not inevitable.

This book stands well above most comparative housing policy accounts in that each chapter, although focusing on a different owner-occupation dimension, contains valuable insights and the cross-national chapters recognise both the nuances contained in the broad tenancy domain known as ‘homeownership’ and the complexity of the government interventions in the tenure.