Owner-Occupation: At Home with a Hybrid of Money and Materials

By Susan J. Smith. 2008

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper is about the changing character of housing assets, owned homes, and perhaps owner-occupiers themselves. It draws from two studies of UK homebuyers, whose lives are entangled in the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilisation of money. This mélange is facilitated by a new generation of financial services that render housing wealth interchangeable with the cash economy, turning owned homes into a hybrid of money and materials. In total 150 qualitative narratives are interrogated to document three key trends. First, a shift of households' disposition, from opting for ownership by chance to banking on housing by design. Second, a change of financial orientation as property-holding citizens illapse into asset-accumulating investors. Third, an ethically charged encounter between the governance of housing and the micropolitics of home, which is prompted by the growing tangibility of housing wealth as it inspires new styles of, and imperatives for, consumption.

Subfields: Finance, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56ddc17b3e732ef2d14adfff0cfa4e6e3ec94d29

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Citations in the corpus

Sub-prime mortgage lending: a cultural economy (2008, background): “As I have argued elsewhere, the embodiment of extended mortgage borrowing over the last decade or so has entailed the re-making of owner-occupiers (Langley, 2006; also Smith, 2007).”
The Great Moderation, the Great Excess and the global housing crisis (2015, background): “The ideology of homeownership is constructed through supporting ideologies of wealth accumulation and markets (Kemeny, 1981; Ronald & Elsinga, 2012; cf. Smith, 2008).”
The false promise of homeownership: Homeowner societies in an era of declining access and rising inequality (2020, background): “Even given this transformation into an increasingly financialised commodity (see Aalbers, 2016; Rolnik, 2013; Smith, 2008), the notion of homeownership as a widespread means of economic security and stability mostly persisted (Forrest and Hirayama, 2009; Kohl, 2018).”
The globalisation of real estate: the politics and practice of foreign real estate investment (2017, background): “’ Increasingly, the home is viewed as repository for placing, storing and building capital (Rogers, 2016b), and this view of the home as real estate stands in stark contrast to other notions of home as a lived space (Rogers, 2013; Smith, 2008).”