Housing: Saunders’ A Nation of Home Owners

Abstract

In the prologue to his book, A Nation of Home Owners, Peter Saunders provides a brief housing history of his parents and himself to demonstrate the growth of home ownership and the associated accumulation of wealth in the last 50 or more years. For both of the authors of this book, a similar story could be told of their parents’ participation in the housing market. Owning their own home was the source of much personal satisfaction because they had ‘bettered themselves’ in comparison to their own parents. Saunders (1990: 3) acknowledges that his book is informed by a particular viewpoint which is ‘generally favourable towards the spread of home ownership’. This view, he notes, is much at odds with the existing sociological literature on home ownership which has been dismissive of such bourgeois aspirations. Such views among the academic left, he argues, have become ‘divorced from the lived reality of most people’s daily existence’ but are popular for reasons to do with a cultural lag (a persistent loathing of private landlordism), intellectual snobbery (a disdain for property ownership), a commitment to social engineering (a desire for a radical uniform ‘mass’) and the values of left academics (radical posturing against a bourgeois way of life). Against this background, Saunders sees his book: As a deliberate attempt to confront this left academic orthodoxy. It is not, I hope, a polemical confrontation, nor is it a theoretical one. Rather, I have selected what I take to be some of the key sociological questions raised by the growth of home ownership in Britain and in each case I review evidence collected in my own research and in other studies to evaluate the claims which have been advanced in the academic literature. (1990: 7)