The social stratification of homeowners’ housing wealth: Bringing a dynamic approach through the price gap index

The spatio-temporal variation of housing prices is central to unveiling the distribution of housing wealth (HW) across social groups. This paper presents a price decomposition framework to analyze the social differentiation of HW in terms of housing characteristics, location, and transaction date across labor-based occupational categories (OCs) of homeowners. Beyond variegated housing prices and capital gains, we highlight the importance of the concept of Price Gap Index (PGI)—the difference between average buyer and seller prices for each OC—to capture the redistribution of HW induced by housing transactions. Using data over two decades (1998–2017) for the French region Bourgogne-Franche-Comté , we find that static HW differences reflect the usual social hierarchy of the labor market. However, the PGI from a dynamic decomposition shows more regressive results of HW accumulation across OCs than the capital gains computed from the usual housing price index over time. These results confirm that spatial dynamics in the housing markets are an important generator of inequality, acting through the redistribution of HW during housing transactions.