The Domestic Politics of American Home Ownership

Abstract

Home ownership has more political significance in the United States than perhaps any other state in the world. This is both because of the sheer scale of the state’s involvement in sustaining and expanding home ownership and because the ways in which the federal government has structured that state intervention have been politically contested. For more than 70 years, the American state has supported home ownership institutionally and materially and in doing so has shaped the terms of the mortgage market that makes ownership viable for most households.1 The federal government during the 1930s created several federal agencies to reconstruct a collapsed mortgage market. One of those agencies, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is today the largest insurer of mortgages in the world. A second of those agencies, Fannie Mae, which was established as a federal mortgage association to develop a secondary mortgage market, enjoyed, as the privatised corporation it became for 40 years, privileged access to Treasury and Federal Reserve support and remained subject to a congressional charter that required it to meet public policy goals set by the federal government. Since September 2008 it is back under direct state control. Over an even longer period, the American state has supported home ownership through the federal tax code.