You are warmly invited to a seminar with Emanuel Wittberg, Centre for Local Government Studies (CKS), Linköping University.
Family ties and rental housing access: The value of insider connections
Abstract This paper examines whether having family members who own or are employed by rental housing companies increases the probability of acquiring access to a rental apartment. We hypothesise that having family members employed in the rental sector increases young adults’ chances of acquiring housing tenure and examine this using detailed register data on kinship and housing tenure in metropolitan regions of Sweden for the period 1998–2016. Our results show that for young adults, the probability of moving to a rental apartment is much higher if they have a relative in a strategic position within the rental sector. This result holds for both public and private landlords. The paper highlights the importance of family ties to strategic positions within organisations that are gatekeepers for scarce resources. An additional empirical contribution is that strong ties are not only central in the private sector, but also provide an advantage in relation to public housing companies, institutions in which impartiality is supposed to be a core value.