Traditional studies of social stratification have written extensively on the standard educational, occupational and earnings outcomes. Housing outcomes are relatively under-explored but play key roles in reproducing socioeconomic inequalities. This dissertation focuses on the overarching relationship between housing and social stratification, using UK and China as two national contexts for my three empirical chapters. The first chapter finds that various housing tenure processes individuals experience during young adulthood are persistent predictors of their midlife wealth disparities in UK. The second chapter further explores the earlier origins of life-course housing trajectories (as observed in Chapter 1) as outcomes, which are fundamentally structured by individuals’ extended family class backgrounds spanning multiple generations. My third chapter instead focuses on China, a semi-authoritarian country currently undergoing rapid market transitions and urbanization, which offers huge contrasts to typical capitalist contexts like UK. The chapter incorporates powerful government bodies into the broader social stratification system to assess housing as citizens’ property rights, a key dimension of economic wellbeing, and a potential source of political grievance.