Beyond Home Ownership: Housing, Welfare, and Society

Abstract

BOOK REVIEW Richard Ronald and Marja Elsinga (Eds.), Beyond Home Ownership: Housing, Welfare, and Society (New York: Routledge, 2012). Homeownership has proven a remarkably resilient ideal in the twentieth century, notwithstanding market volatility and major financial crises. Researchers at the European Network for Housing Research’s Home Ownership and Globalization Group set out to examine precisely why this was the case: How and why did so many nations with such widely varying sociopolitical needs aspire to become homeownership societies? Some of the group’s findings have been previously published in Home Ownership: Getting In, Getting From, Getting Out, Parts I–III (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2005, 2006, 2010). This newly edited compilation by Richard Ronald and Marja Elsinga addresses the same theme, but this time with a particular emphasis on the relation of housing, society, and state. Housing policies, the editors argue, ought to be situated in the larger contexts of the welfare state, neoliberalism, family structure and function, and broad patterns of consumption and production instead of being examined solely as a tenure type. Ronald and Elsinga contend that scholars can only begin to unpack the “changing relationships between home ownership and welfare relations as well as the reshaping of social inequalities” (p. 2) by reaching beyond technical studies, national boundaries, and ideology—beyond simple home ownership, as it were. This slim volume asks hefty questions: Why did homeownership grow as a global tenure type, despite mounting problems with affordability gaps and excessive reliance on new construction? How should future policies address the costs of homeownership (including the disproportionate effects on low-income and marginalized communities)? How should we understand distinct, even idiosyncratic national trajectories and statistics in the context of broader neoliberal trends? What are the connections and disconnections between political regime, ideology, and housing policy? Clearly, all of these cannot be fully answered in one book, and Ronald and Elsinga make clear from the outset they do not intend a comprehensive treatment. Instead, the book is divided into three sections highlighting important themes: Part I examines “Demographic Change, Housing Wealth, and Welfare,” Part II, “Government, Markets, and Policies,” and Part III, “Housing Ladders and Fading Dreams.” Each chapter within the three sections contributes a separate national or regional perspective (specifically: Japan, New Zealand, England, Italy, the United States, post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe, and the Nordic region). Chapters within each subsection take independent approaches to the material, with some offering intriguing, exploratory hypotheses, and others bringing together generally accepted explanations into single, coherent narratives. Each of the chapters can be read singly or in conjunction with the introduction, which usefully sets out the broader issues involved. Of the three parts, the first is perhaps the most cohesive. In this section, John Doling, Teresio Poggio, and Srna Mandic address the relationships between family and home ownership, between welfare and demography. Doling begins by exploring the interaction between demographic structures and housing markets, suggesting that “increasing reliance is being put on the equity held in the form of home ownership [and] that this is in some ways substituting for pensions and other expenditures on older people” (p. 45), and that the “front-loaded costs of entry into homeownership . . . [can] mitigate against child rearing” (p. 38). Poggio and Mandic also bring family into the homeownership story: Poggio underscores the “key role” played by families in “both the production of home ownership and its funding” (p. 52), and Mandic explicitly points to the importance of more microlevel studies of the household and extended family as a way to understand home ownership, especially in post-socialist JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Volume 00, Number 0, pages 1–2. C 2014 Urban Affairs Association Copyright All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0735-2166.