Over the last decade, evidence of a global housing crisis has triggered a growing interest in its causes and its differential consequences on people's well-being. While policy and academic debates have long primarily focused on housing unaffordability, an increasing number of publications focus on the broader concept of housing inequality by underlining the need to address the differential impact of the global housing crisis on different groups of people (CEB, 2018; James et al., 2024; Tayefi Nasrabadi et al., 2024).

Housing inequality is a complex topic as it can be both the cause and the consequence of income and wealth inequalities. James et al. (2024) define housing inequality as “the unequal distribution of housing opportunities and resources […] based on households' socio-economic conditions and demographic characteristics”. We adopt an operational definition of housing inequality referring to unequal outcomes in terms of affordability, accessibility, quality of housing, and security of tenure (Arbaci et al., 2026).

As residential choices are shaped by constraints – financial resources, social networks, availability, etc. (Karlen et al., 2022; Rérat, 2020) – those with less resources often have to accept a dwelling that does not satisfy the full bundle of their needs and preferences regarding size, location, price, and other qualities. A lack of adequate housing has spillover effects that exacerbate other inequalities, leading to poor socio-economic outcomes, which can result – among others – in an impediment to intergenerational mobility (CEB, 2018). Accordingly, even though housing inequalities are clearly associated with wealth and income inequalities, they address issues that go beyond affordability that are embedded in specific housing regimes, socio-economic and cultural contexts.

Precisely because of the embeddedness of housing inequality in housing and planning policies, market dynamics, and socio-demographic developments, Tayefi Nasrabadi et al. (2024) identify the need for comparative studies looking at housing inequality across different housing regimes, providing a better understanding of the links between aspects of policy and market (de)regulation, and housing inequality. This article aims at placing the development of housing inequalities in Switzerland within the wider European context by addressing the following research questions: What are the housing inequality trends in Switzerland? How do housing outcomes compare with other European countries? We focus our quantitative analysis on inequalities in the affordability and quality of housing, guided by a multidimensional conceptual framework of housing inequality and a thorough analysis of the Swiss housing system – integrating policies, tenancy law, market dynamics, and current debates. After a discussion of these results, we conclude by summarizing the trends in housing inequality development in Switzerland within the broader European context and outline policy implications.

Housing inequalities can broadly be defined with reference to four dimensions: affordability, accessibility, quality of housing (which covers qualities of the dwelling itself – daylight, heating, sanitary installations, mould, available floor space, etc. – and extend to neighbourhood qualities like noise, pollution, violence, crime, and access to amenities), and security of tenure (Arbaci et al., 2026). Typically, inequalities are discussed in relation to households' economic situation, ethnicity and race, tenure status, and location (James et al., 2024).

Affordability is at the core of related debates (Haffner and Hulse, 2021). There are several approaches to measuring housing affordability, each with pros and cons, but they all share considerations of income, housing costs, and some minimal standard of housing consumption (Galster and Lee, 2021). While affordability research usually focuses on attractive metropolitan regions (Haffner and Hulse, 2021), research from the US shows that not only increasing rents in tight, high-demand housing markets but also decreasing incomes in shrinking cities create an increase in the financial burden of housing costs (Seymour et al., 2020). Housing costs have been found to account for a larger and increasing proportion of household income for lower-income households versus higher-income households, for tenants versus homeowners, and for urban versus more rural contexts in many European countries (Acolin and Reina, 2022; Dewilde, 2018). As Haffner and Hulse (2021) show, affordability problems are not only connected to financial stress, poverty, and overcrowding but also to (i) wealth accumulation, with property owners – homeowners and landlords – accruing wealth thanks to the influx of capital into residential real estate (Wetzstein, 2017); (ii) difficulties in housing access for younger generations, depending increasingly on intergenerational transfers of property and wealth (Eurofound, 2023; Filandri and Bertolini, 2016; Tayefi Nasrabadi et al., 2024); and (iii) spatial inequality, with lower-income households being priced out of more central urban areas, thus bearing the costs of longer commuting distance and worse access to urban amenities (Bricocoli and Peverini, 2024).

Access to housing can be constrained by a lack of affordability, but there are other dimensions of access to housing that relate to the allocation of housing and are broader than the ability and willingness to pay (Wolfgring and Peverini, 2024). Eligibility criteria and allocation procedures of social or cooperative housing, information asymmetries, lack of social capital, language barriers, and discriminatory practices may render housing inaccessible even though it is affordable. Research shows that poor and marginalized population groups face difficulties in accessing affordable housing due to intransparency in allocation processes and long waiting lists in the social housing sector (Herrault, 2024; Wolfgring and Peverini, 2024), or because language barriers and a lack of social capital complicate access to social housing and less profit-oriented rental submarkets (Aigner, 2019). For example, the share of migrants in housing cooperatives is significantly lower than the overall percentage of migrants in the city of Zurich (Duyne Barenstein and Koch, 2020; WBG Zürich, 2021), hinting at information asymmetries and allocation processes that tend to work in favour of more established residents. Several studies show unequal access to the rental market and to mortgages due to racial, ethnic, and migratory discrimination (for Switzerland: Auer et al., 2019; Grotti et al., 2024; Lukes et al., 2019; Meloni and Debrunner, 2026).

An affordability problem means that some households cannot live in housing conditions that fulfil minimal standards of housing quality. We focus on the quality of a dwelling and overcrowding, i.e. when the number of residents exceeds the number of rooms considered adequate (Eurostat, 2021). While earlier work assumed overcrowding to be rooted in cultural preferences, later work stressed that minority households' choices are significantly constrained through unequal access and affordability of housing (Coulter, 2025), and that overcrowding is associated with the degree of urbanization (Hick et al., 2022). However, there is clearly a trade-off between living space per capita and central, more expensive areas (Jansen, 2020). Overcrowding and housing of low structural quality lead to stress and poor mental health (Galster and Lee, 2021). Moreover, low housing quality in the form of poor insulation and heating contributes to energy poverty (Bardazzi et al., 2021; Chen and Feng, 2022; Riva et al., 2021). In extreme cases, substandard housing – overcrowding, darkness, leaks/dampness, and lack of basic sanitation facilities – is studied under the term of (severe) housing deprivation (Hick et al., 2022). Research found higher risks of housing deprivation among vulnerable groups – young people, people with disabilities, migrants from new EU countries, and one-person households – and in thinly populated areas (Grotti et al., 2024; Hick et al., 2022).

Security of tenure is discussed as a dimension of housing inequality mostly in relation to differences between homeowners and tenants (Fenelon and Mawhorter, 2021), and with regard to tenant protection potentially differing between countries and different types of tenants (e.g. long-term vs short-term rentals; Debrunner et al., 2025; Kettunen and Ruonavaara, 2021). Housing security is a pressing issue for tenants facing increasing rents and (threats of) eviction (Dimitrakou, 2025; Gehriger, 2024; Raymond et al., 2016). Research from Switzerland shows that lower-income households are more exposed to this risk (Kauer et al., 2026). Housing security is also discussed with regard to homeowners who – due to joblessness or low pension incomes – might have difficulties in keeping up with mortgage payments, property taxes, and saving for refurbishment and maintenance (Fenelon and Mawhorter, 2021).

A wide range of publications focus on factors that have enhanced housing inequality over the last decades, especially housing affordability. At a macro level, the commodification and global financialization of housing is considered one of the main trends that have led to hiking housing prices in many parts of the world (Aalbers, 2017; Wetzstein, 2017), besides other, more local, factors such as urban restructuring, local employment opportunities, and demographic trends (Haffner and Hulse, 2021; Lee et al., 2022; Nelson et al., 2024). In specific countries and contexts, it is recognized that housing inequalities have increased as a consequence of the gradual withdrawal of the state from the housing sector, the privatization of the social housing stock, and the deregulation of the private rental market (Arbaci, 2019; Dewilde and De Decker, 2016; Herrault, 2024).

In Switzerland, there is evidence that housing inequalities are growing as a consequence of multiple factors (Auer et al., 2019; Dimitrakou, 2025; Gehriger, 2024; Kauer et al., 2026). However, so far, housing challenges have not been discussed with explicit reference to the concept of housing inequalities and by covering more than one related dimension. We seek to fill this gap by focusing on affordability and housing quality (quality of the dwelling, per capita living space, and overcrowding) as access and security of tenure cannot directly be examined with the available data. We discuss inequalities by tenure status, income, and degree of urbanization – a choice informed by the literature – which identifies these as key determinants of housing inequality.

To study trends in housing inequality, we draw on EU-SILC data, i.e. the survey on income and living conditions that is carried out in the EU and other European countries, including Switzerland. SILC annually surveys 8000 households across Switzerland, which corresponds to roughly 18 000 people. The survey contains questions on topics such as health, quality of life, childcare, and housing conditions. Survey data for Switzerland are available from 2007 and were analysed up to 2024, the most recent year with available data at the time. However, some variables have been introduced later or were discontinued in 2021, which is why the range of years analysed varies.

We chose SILC as it provides microdata that are not available in register data, e.g. housing quality, total housing costs, and disposable income. Additionally, as SILC is carried out across European countries, using these data allows us to put Swiss results into a broader European perspective using Eurostat and OECD databases. SILC data allow us to assess housing inequalities through descriptive bivariate analysis, exploring relations between variables of interest (housing cost burden, overcrowding) and income quintiles or tenure status.

Survey data that rely on self-reported information tend to be less accurate than register data due to recall problems, social desirability, and non-response bias. Additionally, SILC data also have their specific shortcomings. While income variables refer to the previous year, housing costs are calculated based on the current year. In case of, e.g., rent increases or fluctuations in income, this might not give an accurate representation of housing affordability. Furthermore, housing costs cannot be divided into “actual” housing costs (rent, mortgage payments, maintenance, etc.) and housing energy costs, making a quantitative investigation of energy poverty impossible. Also, SILC data remain superficial in several domains: variables on housing quality do not contain information on, e.g., the degree to which households are unable to keep their house warm or the severity of leaks. Most importantly, it has been pointed out that items might have different interpretations across countries (Haffner, 2015).

Our intention is to “make do with what we have” (Haffner, 2015) and provide a broad analysis of housing inequalities in Switzerland on which future research may build, exploring more specific research questions with other data to overcome these shortcomings. The comparison with other European countries should be interpreted with caution but nevertheless provides an important point of reference.

Key variables used in this paper are housing costs; disposable income; overcrowded household; the (in)ability to keep one's house warm; and the absence/presence of leaking roofs, damp walls, floors, etc. The variable housing costs refers to the total monthly costs associated with housing, meaning rent and utilities (water, electricity, gas, heating) for tenants, along with mortgage interest payments, structural insurance, costs for maintenance and repairs, and taxes for homeowners. Disposable income includes the sum of gross incomes, social insurance benefits, allowances, and incomes on capital (from which taxes, inter-household cash transfers, and social insurance contributions are deducted as a sum of personal incomes/transfers of all household members and at the household level). The variable overcrowded household measures whether a household has fewer than the number of rooms considered adequate at its disposal. To have an adequate number of rooms, a dwelling needs “one room for the household, per couple, for each adult single person, per pair of single people of the same gender aged 12–17, for each single person aged 12–17 and not included in the previous category, and per pair of children under 12” (Eurostat, 2023). The two variables (in)ability to keep one's house warm and absence/presence of leaking roofs, damp walls, floors, etc. capture answers about whether households are able to keep their house warm, and whether they live in a dwelling with a leaking roof, or damp or rot in window frames, floors, or walls.

We use weighted household data (vs individual data). While the initially drawn stratified sample is representative of the Swiss population, households and individuals differ in their probability of responding. Households resembling non-responding households are attributed higher weights, and households that are more likely to respond, lower weights (the same applies to individuals). In a last step, weights are calibrated so that socio-economic characteristics of the weighted sample and the Swiss population correspond (FSO, 2024).

This article set out to study housing inequality trends in Switzerland, with the aim of placing this development within a wider context of housing inequalities in European countries. We examined indicators of affordability and housing quality (by tenure status, income quintiles, and degree of urbanization), revealing a differentiated but relatively stable picture at the national level. First, although average shares of housing costs in disposable income have not increased significantly over the past two decades, there remains a marked inequality in the financial burden of housing – particularly between households of the lowest-income quintile and the rest of the population. Second, overcrowding is especially prevalent among households of the lower-income quintiles, indicating substantial inequality in the amount of living space available per person. Third, housing quality in Switzerland is generally high by European standards. Very few households report being unable to keep their homes adequately warm, although this share is rising since the Russian invasion in Ukraine in 2022, which has affected energy prices. However, problems such as leaking roofs and dampness are somewhat more common and tend to affect lower-income households more frequently.

In a broader European perspective, Switzerland performs well in terms of housing quality and overcrowding, but the share of the population experiencing housing cost overburden is fifth highest in Europe, suggesting that the financial strain of housing costs is particularly high in the lowest quintile. The finding of a relatively persistent income inequality in housing cost burden in Switzerland is concurrent with recent findings across nine European countries showing that the income gradient in housing affordability has generally intensified between 2005 and 2020 but is less steep and has increased less in Switzerland, Austria, and France compared to the UK, Norway, Italy, Spain, Hungary, and Poland (Marcińczak et al., 2025).

While key indicators such as housing cost shares and housing quality have remained relatively stable over time, public concern about a housing crisis has grown significantly. This discrepancy between measured stability and perceived crisis raises important questions. First, it should be mentioned that the data used here do not cover the last year (2025), and some indicators are only available until 2020. Second, due to the Swiss rent regulations (Debrunner et al., 2025; Kettunen and Ruonavaara, 2021), existing tenants are somewhat protected from rent increases, so the housing shortage as well as rent hikes following demolitions or extensive renovations affect primarily people newly entering the market (see also Meloni and Debrunner, 2026) or those in need of a change in their housing situation (because of events within their own life course or because of evictions). As a result, the effects of rising rents appear in the data only with a time lag. Most importantly, the housing crisis is very local (albeit spreading), and locally increasing inequalities might not be discernible in national averages.

An additional explanation for the apparent disconnect between measured stability and perceived crisis lies in the nature of the housing system itself, which has remained relatively constant – also in its processes of generating housing inequality. In the 21st century, no changes in housing policies that would have alleviated or deepened housing inequality have been introduced at the national level. The current tenancy law dates from the 1990s, and multiple attempts to revise the law have failed (Rohrbach, 2014). Also, because of neoliberalization processes “avant la lettre” (Müller, 2021), there have been no further liberalization processes as, for example, in France and England, where a marketization and privatization of social housing has resulted in a situation where access to social housing for lowest-income households is becoming increasingly difficult (Furman and Hadjri, 2025; Herrault, 2024). However, it should be kept in mind that, historically, only a minor share of dwellings in Switzerland are public and non-profit housing (see Sect. 3.1), so there was hardly any social housing that could substantially be cut. Against the backdrop of a weak but stable national housing policy, it is also not surprising that recent initiatives in parliament from the left and the tenants' union calling for stricter enforcement of rent regulation or more transparency when setting rents in new contracts to strengthen tenants' rights have all been dismissed (Duyne Barenstein et al., 2025). Right-wing members of parliament, the construction sector, and the homeowners' association, however, are strongly lobbying for less regulation in the housing sector. Switzerland thus shows a housing system that relies primarily on the regulated provision of housing through the private market and only to a small extent on public and non-profit provision. Like other corporatist systems (e.g. France and Austria), it has preserved a certain degree of decommodification in the housing system through rent regulation and tenant protection, with tenure structure and tenancy law undergoing only limited changes over the past decades (Arbaci et al., 2026).

However, this path dependence of the Swiss housing system does not render it immune to the influence of other sectors, namely spatial planning and financial markets. Spatial planning policies limit the supply of buildable land and promote densification in existing settlements, thus providing incentives for demolition and total reconstruction in heated housing markets where neither greenfields nor brownfields are available for development. The financialization of real estate markets has increased enormously since the early 2000s (Theurillat et al., 2010). The share of units owned by private companies grew from 30 % of all rental units in 2003 to 43 % in 2025 (BFS, 2007, 2026a). It is well documented that among the private companies acting as landlords, there are players whose portfolios have the size of mid-sized cities (Young, 2019); and Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, has multiplied its investments in Swiss real estate companies by a factor of 20 in the past two decades (Zeier, 2022). While institutional investment by pension funds, banks, insurance companies, and the like is still concentrated in the metropolitan cores, financialized actors are increasingly seeking investment opportunities outside the larger urban centres (Crevoisier et al., 2025). In many instances, they are maximizing their returns on investment by displacing incumbent tenants with new tenants paying higher rents through complete renovations or demolitions (Debrunner et al., 2024; Gehriger, 2024; Kauer et al., 2025; Kaufmann et al., 2023; Lutz et al., 2024), a trend that is not yet fully captured by the data used here. Through this form of “financialization 3.0” (Aalbers, 2026), they circumvent rent regulation in existing contracts and further commodify housing. As institutional investors primarily invest in apartment buildings (Crevoisier et al., 2025), they are driving up rents. Their high willingness to pay for land, however, indirectly also affects house prices, especially in areas where zoning regulations allow building additional or larger units. We argue that there is a time lag between these structural changes in the housing market and their reflection in national indicators because households that do not (and are not forced to) move are somewhat protected from rent increases, which might result in these dynamics being reflected in national statistics only at a later stage. As population growth persists and financialization most probably intensifies – intersecting with densification policies and a tenancy law which make demolitions and extensive renovations profitable – it is likely that housing inequalities will become more pronounced in the future. Renovations are undoubtedly needed to maintain housing quality, improve it for the sizeable share of households encountering problems with leak/damp/rot, and not least reach the climate targets of the Paris Agreement (FOEN, 2026). However, there remains a fundamental tension between promoting renovations and the regulated but uncontrolled passing on of costs to tenants, which motivates many landlords in tight housing markets to renovate and subsequently increase rents to the maximum possible in the area (B,S,S and Basler & Hofmann AG, 2014). Also, ethnic and racial discrimination, despite not being captured by statistical data, is observed in the access to the housing market and reinforces existing inequalities (Auer et al., 2019; Meloni and Debrunner, 2026).

Based on these findings, we advocate for more fine-grained analyses of housing inequalities in Switzerland and also on different geographical scales. Moreover, research could contribute to the public debate by discussing policy options that could mitigate the risk of rising housing inequalities. By anticipating future developments and contributing to evidence-based policy-making, research can help to ensure that Switzerland's housing system remains socially inclusive and sustainable in the long term.