Intergenerational householding under financialization: Parental assistance, first mortgage and classed experiences of housing in Warsaw

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Abstract

In Radom, a city 60 miles from Warsaw, Poland, and a major source of its young labor force, a concerned mother describes the metropolitan life of her daughter and son-in-law. They own an apartment, but “the bank lives with them.” She means by that the historically novel practice of domesticating mortgages, which over the last decades have emerged as devices transforming the housing pathways of the first postsocialist generations and mediating their life course transitions. Part of a larger research on practices of householding among young middle-class Varsovians, this paper explores the lived experiences of homeownership—already realized or still imagined—through the lenses of generational divides, housing classes, trajectories of migration, and the tectonic restructuring of housing regime since the fall of socialism. Based on ethnographic research in 28 young family households in Warsaw and on interviews with 18 parents supporting their adult children’s pursuit of homeownership, the paper shows how the incapability of young couples to manage on their own the mortgage on their first apartment embeds the process of financialization not merely in one, but in several kin-related households, most often parental and grandparental. Our analysis focuses on moral discourses justifying and regulating the flow of family wealth into the mortgage household, on the continued presence of parents in the householding practices in the mortgaged apartments of their semi-autonomous adult children, and on the emergent intergenerational middle-class economic imaginary, which increasingly centers on acquiring housing assets as a source of wealth, welfare, and social advancement.

Authors

• Mateusz Halawa, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

• Marta Olcoń-Kubicka, Polish Academy of Sciences