Membres

Pollard Julie

Projets

Autres projets

Wealth inequalities and the dynamics of housing market : Interpreting real-estate market-based regime of spatial inequalities
2019 - 2022
Requérant·e: Renaud Le Goix (Univ. Paris Diderot)
Autres collaborateurs-trices: Julie Pollard
The project analyzes growing socio-economic inequalities induced by property prices inflation. Housing prices have increased faster than the income of buyers in most of post-industrial city-regions. Real estate has become a major driver of these inequalities because the flows of household real estate investments are instrumental to the dynamics of asset capitalization. The project structures a multidisciplinary research group to investigate the systemic dimension of inequalities induced by the dynamics of French housing markets and their political and financial context since the end of the 1990s. In French metropolitan areas, the most salient dynamics for the last two decades have been a continuous and steep increase in property prices and a steady increase of homeownership, analyzed as a « resilient bubble », and therefore described as a new price regime.

The following paradox has emerged in the post-financial crisis era: while the evolution of both price to income ratio (i.e. affordability index) and rent to price ratio should discourage homebuyers and investors in metropolitan areas, housing markets have remained active and the price trend did not reverse. We assume this situation is linked to many parameters, from the national level (financial and credit affordability conditions, pro-homeownership policies, shift toward asset-based welfare) to the local level (pro-market housing policies, spatial differentiation of housing prices). Our research question stems from this analysis: to what extent contemporary social inequality is shaped by one's relationship to housing markets? We will examine it through three overlapping dimensions: urban policies to promote the production of residential real estate; local access and affordability to participate in that market; specific trajectories of wealth accumulated through home ownership - and its attendant effects on urban policies.

What is Governed in Cities: Residential Investment Landscapes and the Governance and Regulation of Housing Production
2019 - 2022
Requérant·e: Mike Raco (UCL)
Autres collaborateurs-trices: Julie Pollard
This project draws on a precise comparative, inter-disciplinary methodology to examine the inter-relationships between contemporary investment flows into the housing markets of major metropolitan centers and the governance arrangements and public policy instruments that are designed to regulate them.
Our case studies are the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, Greater London, and Grand Paris. The project asks what is governed in major cities and draws on two streams of analysis: mapping and explaining the types of investment that are shaping housing production in the 3 cities; and developing understandings of the effectiveness of public policy instruments that are in place to regulate them.
The project is timely as major cities have been faced with unprecedented development pressures as their populations and economies have expanded and their built environments have become highly attractive locations for global investment. These pressures have been particularly acute in the production and consumption of housing, where the impacts of investments on markets, citizens, and places are generating a widely perceived crisis and set of governmental challenges to produce affordable housing.