Inequality of Russian Households in Housing Wealth: Level and Dynamics

As mass strata accumulate property, its use, not just income growth, becomes a factor in the formation of socio-economic stratification. Housing occupies a special place in the range of assets that constitute household property, since the proportion of the value of housing assets in the total wealth of households is high, and inequality in housing wealth makes a decisive contribution to inequality in wealth in general. In Russia a house or an apartment is the most common object of private household ownership, but the conditions for the accumulation of housing assets in the post-Soviet period were inconsistent. The purpose of this study is to identify the degree of inequality of Russian households in the dynamics when it comes to housing wealth — the valuation of apartments and houses owned by household members. Data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey — HSE and the All–Russian Survey on Consumer Finance (Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, Central Bank of the Russian Federation) are used; the chronological scope of the analysis is 2006–2022; indicators of housing wealth are the cost of the household’s main residence and all apartments and houses belonging to the household. According to the RLMS data for 2006–2022, the highest housing inequality was observed at the end of the “aughts”, when the Gini coefficient for the cost of household main residence was in the range of 0.599...0.633; after a relatively stable level of housing inequality during the 2010’s (G=0.517...0.531), ever since the end of this decade it has slowly increased to G=0.551 by 2022. The differentiation in total housing wealth, measured on the All-Russian Survey of Consumer Finance data, shows the same trend. And by 2022 differences related not only to the cost of separate housing objects, but also to the number of apartments and houses owned by households began to make a greater contribution to the growing inequality. However, only analyzing the data from the next waves of surveys will make it possible to understand whether these trends indicate changes in the mechanism of housing stratification formation or whether these are situational variations in inequality indicators.