Housing inequality of the population as a reflection of social stratification (a case study of three cities in the Kirov region)

Today, in the heyday of consumption and materialistic values, real estate can be seen as an adequate marker of an individual’s position in the social hierarchy. At the same time, housing as the good has a number of characteristics that can be interpreted in terms of prestige and subjective assessments of comfort and quality. Therefore, it was important for us to identify and characterize housing clusters of the population according to the typical practices of administering and using real estate and to determine the correlation between the socio-economic and housing status of citizens. The empirical base of the study was the results of a semi-formalized survey of citizens conducted in 2018 in three cities/towns of the Kirov region: Kirov, Vyatskiye Polyany and Kirovo-Chepetsk. The paper presents the author’s classification, sociological «portraits» of the main housing strata of the townspeople and estimates of their fullness in towns of different size. Factors in the formation of the housing status include scarce resources both of housing itself (living space, novelty, comfort indicators) and of residents (housing investment opportunities, education and mobility levels). The regional center can be considered the most successful in terms of the housing subjectivity of the population, since almost half of the citizens have a housing status above the basic and demonstrate a balanced ratio of economic, housing and socio-cultural resources. The size of the city affects the prestige of districts, the availability of housing comfort indicators and the fullness of housing clusters. In smaller towns, proximity to the center does not practically affect the quality and prestige of housing. Representatives of the most successful housing clusters are characterized by social reservedness. Normally, the educational, economic and housing status in all clusters directly correlate with each other.