Meanings of debt and credit in the post-socialist housing market: the issue of inter-generational financial transfers and mortgages in the case of the Czech Republic.

Abstract

Decisions regarding housing tenure are among those most important in our lives. Firstly, the character of housing (form of tenure, type of residence, location) significantly influences actors' identity.

Secondly, the purchase of real estate - as the highest investment in a lifetime - might bring several decades of indebtedness. In the majority of European countries, there is a prevailing cultural norm of homeownership as an ideal and socially preferred kind of tenure.

People are thus following different strategies in order to obtain the status of owner and the perceived certainty of homeownership. This article presents the analysis of the narrative reconstruction of meanings ascribed to certain practices in the housing market, specifically to the intergenerational financial transfers and mortgage use.

Set in post-socialist context of the Czech Republic, the research is based on the analysis of 58 interviews with people acquiring housing for the first time and 9 interviews with their parents. The conclusion suggests paradoxical nature of these actors' understandings of afore-mentioned practices.

People acquiring their first dwellings construct their identity as adult, responsible and independent individuals, which is in strike contrast with their actual dependency and obligation to their parents and/or banks. However these relations are by them perceived natural and non-problematic being taken-for-granted by the actors.

This article also describes the difference in generational understanding of mortgage debt and people's ambivalent relation towards mortgage as both enabling and disabling tool. Those findings might suggest that various kinds of debt and credit are devices to normalize and steer the people's identities and life projects in the certain middle-class and conform ways creating the implicit obligation to the parental preferences and to mainstream housing tenure choice promoted in public discourses.

Moreover, the findings contribute to the understanding of practice of the intergenerational commitments in the post-socialist context.