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Housing has been unjustifiably neglected in comparative welfare state research. The banking crisis of 2007–08, however, revealed how important housing, especially home ownership and the institutional structures of the mortgage market, has become to welfare state change. Securitisation of mortgages created a new circuit of global capital, while national mortgage markets became the conduit through which home owners were connected to this wave of globally sourced capital. In the UK, equity stored in owner-occupied property became much more fungible because of the very open/liberal mortgage market. As a result home owners began to 'bank' on their homes using it not only for consumption but increasingly as a financial safety net, a cushion against adversity and a means for securing access to privately supplied services and supporting their family's welfare needs across the life-course. This welfare state change – a move towards asset-based welfare – was historically and today remains underpinned by the emergence of the UK as a home-owning society.

During the early 2000s, mortgage market innovation together with home price appreciation increased the scope for mortgage equity withdrawal. From a macroeconomic perspective, this proved to be an important transmission mechanism for the wealth (particularly collateral) effects of housing. Microeconomic accounts of equity borrowing are less well developed, since standard models of savings and consumption rarely take housing wealth into account. This paper, however, builds on a small but growing literature assigning a precautionary savings role to consumption from housing wealth. The analysis uses panel data sourced from Britain and Australia to model households' motivations for equity borrowing. Key among these motivations are pressing, uninsurable, ostensibly short-term, spending needs. In these contexts, it is proposed that equity borrowing assumes a welfare-switching role, substituting privately owned housing wealth for collectively funded safety-nets

"The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies is for academics, researchers, practitioners and postgraduates in Geography, Sociology and Cultural Studies. Organised into five sections, it maps the networks of connectivity that are anchored in social geography." "Difference and Diversity builds on enduring ideas of the structuring of social relations by examining the ruptures and rifts, and continuities and connections, around social divisions, bodily engagements and relational spaces." "Geographies and Social Economies is about the sociality, subjectivity and politics of economies. It is about ordinary economies, the risks they contain, their values and their futures." "Geographies of Wellbeing builds from a foundation of work on the spaces of fear, anxiety and disease towards newer concerns with geographies of health, resilience and contentment. Geographies of Social Justice examines the possibilities and practicalities of normative theory highlighting the central notion of social geography: that things always could and should be different. Doing Social Geography is about the 'how to' of research. It is partly a guide to methods, but mainly a commentary on the entanglement of practicalities with moralities, and politics."--BOOK JACKET