Surviving the Housing Market : How Place Shapes the Housing Trajectories of Young Adults in Żoliborz, Warsaw

Sammanfattning

This thesis interrogates how young adults use place attachment and local identity tonavigate housing trajectories within one of Warsaw's most constrained markets. Focusingon Żoliborz, it explores how they explain their bonds to the neighbourhood and thebearing those bonds have on their housing strategies. Drawing on walking interviews andmental mapping with young adults aged 25-34, the research points out that placeattachment in Żoliborz is grounded in the district's spatial morphology, historical heritage,and social infrastructure. Together with familiarity and biographical memory, theyproduce a shared spatial framework that persists regardless of tenure. The central findingis that emotional bond to place overrides economic logic. To remain within the district'smental map, young adults adopt strategies of active immobility: accepting smallerdwellings, leveraging family-owned apartments, and relying on social networks overrelocating to more affordable areas. The thesis identifies family-provided housing as adistinct tenure category absent from conventional homeowner-renter binaries and locatesits emergence in a square-footage property tax that incentivises flat hoarding andsuppresses supply. It concludes that mental mapping is crucial for understanding howattachment affects housing trajectories and that cadastral tax reform is critical toaddressing housing precarity among younger generations in Poland.