TOWARDS A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO HOUSING BEHAVIOR - A STUDY OF YOUNG PEOPLES HOUSING STRATEGIES IN SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND

A model is advanced of young people's housing behaviour as resulting f rom strategies regarding household type, child-bearing, work, expendit ure and family help, which in turn are partly a response to housing co nstraints. The model is applied to a sample of 724 young people in Sou th-East England and it is shown that between 3 per cent and 34 per cen t of young people had adopted particular strategies in the previous ye ar in response to housing constraints. Strategic behaviour was not lim ited to any single social category, but the first four types of strate gy were more likely among households with manual or part-time workers; younger, unmarried people were more likely to put up with awkward hou sehold arrangements; and older, married people and owner-occupiers wer e more likely to adopt expenditure-related strategies and to defer hav ing children. This approach rejects the view that housing decisions ar e made by pre-existing households with given characteristics. Rather, household structure and resource levels result from strategies, and ho using decisions involve trade-offs between aspirations and the accepta nce of sacrifice and dependency - features which are ignored by measur es of 'ability to pay' such as affordability.