The role of family help in the housing decisions of young-people

Recent debates about flows of help within the family have indicated considerable diversity according to the type of help (money, services), and ages and gender of those involved, and have shown that values are only a partial guide to the scale of such flows. This paper focuses on a particular occasion for help, young people's housing, and a particular region, South-East England, where one would expect family financial help to be high given the capacity to help of older generations (due to higher average incomes and wealth) and the affordability problems faced by young people. It is shown that contrary to hypothesis only 12% of a sample of young people had received financial help for housing purposes since they had left home, less than found in previous studies with different samples. The amounts involved were less than young people believed their parents could afford. The role of inheritance was also found to be minor. The results from the different studies are explained as due to changes in the housing market, changing values regarding financial help and differences among the samples. Intensive re-interviews with three households from very different backgrounds are used to show the different ways in which family help operates

Democracy and grassroots opposition in Eastern Europe: Hungary and Russia compared

The aim of the article is to show how the extent of democracy in two Eastern European societies has a strong conditioning effect on the development of social movements. Hungary and Russia are chosen as contrasting cases. The experience of environmental movements before and after the regime change is used as an illustration of grassroots movements. It is shown that environmental movements in Hungary are more numerous and more successful than those in Russia, and that this is linked to the extent of support they have (or lack) from politicians, nonelected officials, and the media. In Hungary, although ecological issues are not central, politicians and environmental groups mostly co-operate, whereas in Russia the relationship is either hesitant or sometimes even hostile. In both countries, however, apparatchiks are generally a lot more opposed to grassroots groups, such as environmental ones, but their weaker position in Hungary compared with Russia cancels out this effect. Finally, the media in Hungary have been sympathetic to environmental issues and they are also supportive of the environmental movements. In contrast, however, in Russia, after Yeltsin's arrival in power 'glasnost' has been largely reversed and the media have also been hostile to environmental groups. In sum, the position of the media, politicians and officials shapes the prospects for environmental movements and is an index of the differing degree of democracy in the two societies

Towards a Strategic Approach to Housing Behaviour: A Study of Young People's Housing Strategies in South-East England

A model is advanced of young people's housing behaviour as resulting from strategies regarding household type, child-bearing, work, expenditure and family help, which in turn are partly a response to housing constraints. The model is applied to a sample of 724 young people in South-East England and it is shown that between 3 per cent and 34 per cent of young people had adopted particular strategies in the previous year in response to housing constraints. Strategic behaviour was not limited to any single social category, but the first four types of strategy were more likely among households with manual or part-time workers; younger, unmarried people were more likely to put up with awkward household arrangements; and older, married people and owner-occupiers were more likely to adopt expenditure-related strategies and to defer having children. This approach rejects the view that housing decisions are made by pre-existing households with given characteristics. Rather, household structure and resource levels result from strategies, and housing decisions involve trade-offs between aspirations and the acceptance of sacrifice and dependency - features which are ignored by measures of 'ability to pay' such as affordability