Chris Foye

Lecturer in Housing Economics, University of Reading
Chris’s research interests are interdisciplinary cutting across economics, sociology and geography, and drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods. He has published in Urban Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Housing Studies and Housing, Theory and Society. He is particularly interested in the following topics;

Housing and subjective well-being
Chris’s PhD, also completed at Reading, involved quantitatively examining the relationship between housing and subjective well-being using large panel datasets from UK and Germany. He looked in particular at the effect of house size and housing tenure. Currently, Chris is working on a paper exploring the effect of becoming a social tenant on well-being and employment.

Housing consumption and social status
Another aspect of Chris's PhD drew on behaviour economics to explore how the relationship between housing and subjective well-being was mediated by social status. For example, this paper showed how the positive relationship between home-ownership and subjective well-being depended on home-ownership being perceived as a social norm and positional good. Since his PhD, Chris has become interested in how Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital can be incorporated into models of housing consumption.

Housing and planning policymaking process
Before starting this position, Chris worked for four years at the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE). It was here that Chris became interested in the role of politics (and evidence) in the policymaking process. He is currently working on papers which explore: i) depoliticization of betterment value capture policy in England (forthcoming), ii) the role of think-tanks in framing the drivers of housing unaffordability in England, and iii) the role of polls on private rented sector policy during the pandemic. He is also interested in the ethical and normative dimension of housing policy evaluation (e.g. see here)