Motives for Home Ownership: Before and After the Transition

Abstract

Regarding the dramatic shift towards home ownership in transition countries, the changing macro policy frameworks have been widely discussed, whereas the meaning of home ownership remains an under-researched issue. This paper examines the motives for home ownership and aims to identify any change in them parallel to the contextual transformations. An exploratory qualitative analysis of 25 interviews indicates a change in argumentation from a mostly detailed circumstantial consideration among pre-transitional entrants to mainly modest argumentation among post-transitional entrants, which took home ownership as a “normal tenure” and “the market” as a self-referential, self-justifying interpretative framework, as is typical of the neoliberal transitional discourse. Our specific data-driven categorization of the motives demonstrates the impact of contextual change on the meanings of tenures and the relative rise in attractiveness of home ownership. In contrast, public renting shared the destiny of many other public welfare institutions that had previously served as a hedge against individual risks, but were retrenched and restructured during transition. Public renting proved to be specifically exposed and highly vulnerable to political pressures.