East Asian Homeowner Societies

Abstract

While the consideration of ‘homeowner societies’ has been dominated by Anglo-Saxon contexts, home ownership has also expanded rapidly in recent decades across a group of newly industrialized East Asian societies. In the Asian Tigers, including Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, as well as the ‘big tiger’, Japan, levels of GDP per capita have reached levels comparable to Western societies while property values and home ownership rates have rapidly advanced since the 1970s (Agus et al., 2002; Lee et al., 2003). Housing policy orientated towards the expansion of owner-occupation has taken a privileged position within these regimes and become central to ideological relations in the process of economic growth and modernization (Ronald, 2007a). As in Anglo-Saxon societies, home ownership has been embraced as the ‘natural’ tenure, even though the achievement of high home ownership rates involved considerable policy manipulation. Just as an ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’ a Japanese home, for example, is talked about in terms of ‘one castle, one country, one master’. In both contexts such phrases have become emotive, associated with home ownership and mobilized in the normalization of tenure.KeywordsHousing MarketPublic HousingHome OwnershipHousing PolicyHousing SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.