The financialisation of the social project: Embedded liberalism,neoliberalism and home ownership

Introduction

There is an increasing disconnect between the lived experience of home ownership and its form as a financial asset – between the ‘social project’ of home ownership, which dominated much of post war political and policy rhetoric and the neoliberal economic project. Moreover, developments over the recent decades have created a common policy challenge regarding how to sustain the promise of home ownership (the social project) in circumstances where its ideological and economic foundations have been shaken. A core argument of this paper is that the relentless logic of commodification has served to undermine a key element of the social cement of contemporary capitalist societies: home ownership.

Much of the recent literature on housing systems and housing markets has been understandably focused on financial crises, most notably the so-called global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 and the earlier Asian financial crisis (AFC). This literature has pushed housing to the forefront of critical evaluations of contemporary capitalism and generated substantial academic commentary on the causes and consequences of the subprime crisis and its variants across the globe (see e.g. Friedman, 2009; Schwartz and Seabrooke, 2009; Stiglitz, 2009; Wade, 2009). The academic and policy discourse around housing markets in general, and home ownership in particular, has become framed with references to mortgage-backed securities, structured investment vehicles, reverse annuity, investor subjects and so on (see e.g. Langley, 2006, 2008). It is this language of financialisation which now occupies a central position in much of the housing and related urban literature; there is more focus on the increased integration of financial sub-markets, credit scoring and risk assessment, differentiated pricing and securitisation. Financialisation is, of course, a term applied in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts. It can be associated with Arrighi’s (1994) theorisations of capitalist epochs or with more prosaic concerns with banking practices. In general, and in this paper, it refers to the growing tendency for money to be made from the trading of money rather than from the sale of goods and services in contemporary capitalist societies (see Aalbers, 2012, for a useful and clear discussion).

This more recent wave of housing and urban literature has drawn analyses of the dynamics of the residential sphere into broader political economy debates and highlighted the growing significance of residential real estate in the evolution of contemporary capitalism. But the financialisation of the tenure and the associated financialisation of the discourse should not obscure the other dimensions of home ownership which have been of enormous importance in the shaping of post war societies. Home ownership has been the centrepiece of the spread of middle class lifestyles. The American Dream, the Australian Dream, the Japanese Dream, the British Property Owning Democracy and various other versions contain similar ingredients of stability, security and belonging, albeit with their distinct economic, institutional and cultural elements. Home ownership, or at least the promise of access to the tenure, was an important element of the social contract of what Ruggie (1982) labelled the era of ‘embedded liberalism’ or post war Keynesianism, corresponding closely in temporal terms to Aglietta’s (1979) Fordist regime – generally taken as a period stretching from around 1950 to the mid to late 1970s. For Ruggie, this phase in the development of capitalism was characterised by ‘a grand domestic bargain [in which] societies were asked to embrace the change and dislocation attending international liberalization, but the state promised to cushion those effects by means of its newly acquired domestic and social policy roles’ (1997: 5). The promise of membership of an expanding middle class was part of this bargain in societies traumatised by war and its aftermath. In many societies, the promotion of home ownership became a central objective of housing policy. The provision of social or public housing was also to varying degrees a core part of post war social contracts.

Home ownership as a social project

Bubbles, financial crises, asset deflation and inflation and new financial products have accentuated the economic and financial dimensions of home ownership. However, for much of the post war period, this was not how tenure was generally perceived and presented. Mortgaged home ownership can certainly be represented as essentially an economic relationship as it was in many of the Marxist critiques in the housing literature of the 1970s and 1980s (see e.g. Berry, 1986; Boddy, 1973; Lamarche, 1976; Merrett, 1982). But the tenure carries a substantial, pervasive and powerful ideological and social baggage (Ronald, 2008). And it is these social–political/ideological aspects of home ownership which have been prominent in the literature. Does home ownership alter class consciousness or political orientation? Does the growth of home ownership have significant implications for social stratification (Kurz and Blossfeld, 2004)? Are home owners cowed into political acquiescence by the preoccupation with maintaining their mortgage payments (see discussion in Merrett and Gray, 1982; Saunders, 1990; Winter, 1995). The promotion of home ownership was certainly believed, and clearly stated by many politicians and academic analysts, to encourage social stability, social responsibility, political conservatism and a stronger sense of territorial attachment (Rossi, 1955). Clark has recently observed that home ownership has been assumed to better integrate households socially and economically and that in local home owning communities ‘there will be greater social capital and over time individual household well-being and happiness will increase’ (2013: 5). Home ownership has been an important part of general social conditioning.

The social project, of course, took different forms and was rooted in different political and social histories. For example, Harold Bellman, a former president of the UK building societies, referred to home ownership as a ‘bulwark against Bolshevism and all that it stands for’ (Bellman, 1928). Lee Kuan Yew (2000) saw the state promotion of home ownership in Singapore as central to the task of building a nation. In Japan, immediately after the war, promoting home ownership was seen as an instrument to facilitate fundamental social reforms centring on democratisation, and subsequently politicians and government bureaucrats explicitly placed importance on the role of middle class property ownership in stabilising and maintaining the conservative nature of the country’s post war civil society (Hirayama, 2014). The general point is that historically the financial aspects of home ownership have often been background rather than foreground. The investment orientation of home owners has always been acknowledged but debates have focused more on ideas of home ownership as a natural and normal desire – the desire to have a place of one’s own, somewhere secure and stable – a key element of what Lasch (1995) referred to as a ‘haven in a heartless world’, a locale of ontological security (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998). If the financial dimensions were brought into the frame, the emphasis was more on saving rather than spending or about the relative size of state subsidies to different housing tenures. Indeed, there were various savings programmes for those who wished and planned to purchase housing, and diligent attitudes towards saving up for a house were considered to constitute a key element of ‘middle classness’. The focus was on access rather than investment. Home ownership was certainly seen as a store of wealth but was not generally perceived as a source of income (Forrest and Murie, 1995).

And in the social project, housing was special. This exceptional nature of housing as a commodity was reflected in the fact that loans for home purchase were accessed via privileged and protected public finance networks dependent on retail savings and preferential tax regulations, and often by institutions with charitable or quasi-philanthropic status (Blackburn, 2011). These protected financial enclaves, sometimes also benefitting from direct government subsidies, were a representation of the more intimate and special nature of house as home and the belief that buying a house involved a special kind of relationship between borrower and lender compared to the purchase of other commodities. The relationship went beyond the mere borrowing of money and involved a rather different, and often paternalistic, treatment of prospective borrowers by these kinds of institutions. Potential borrowers had to prove their reliability and commitment to the home ownership project by establishing a record of thrift and regular saving. Face to face interviews were usually required between borrower and lender. This kind of system certainly had all sorts of inefficiencies and prejudices associated with it but it did recognise the special social and financial significance of home purchase for the average household – as a rite of passage as much as an economic transaction. Moreover, it also recognised that for individuals, losing a home is rather more serious than having a car repossessed and that the political and social impact of residential property foreclosures on any significant scale can be socially and politically destabilising.

These kinds of institutions, use rather than exchange value oriented, were central to the growth and spread of middle class lifestyles in which home ownership was an essential part of the promise. They served the middle strata of the middle class, the group Sassen (2011) has described as ‘the historic subject that constituted Keynesianism’. Processes of neoliberalisation, however, progressively engulfed these home ownership focused financial institutions and in doing so contributed to the erosion of the special status of housing – or more accurately, its status shifted from being socially special in relation to status, stability and aspiration to being economically special as a source of income and magnet for investment. Shifts in public policy in the 1980s and 1990s reflected and fuelled these transformations. Hannsgen (2007) observes that by the early 21st century the relationship between home owners, prospective home owners and the institutions which lent mortgages had changed substantially:

A once sleepy industry, directed towards a social purpose, had given way to an industry in which profit, as opposed to home ownership and security, became important. Savings and loans shifted their attention away from making profits by supporting home ownership and towards profit-making as such. (Hannsgen, 2007: 11)

Schwartz and Seabrooke make a similar point contrasting the essentially ‘inert, immobile and illiquid’ nature of homes in the Bretton Wood period with their transformation into ‘live, cashable and liquid’ assets in the neoliberal period (2009: 210). Unfortunately, the abolition or transformation of these kinds of institutions and their assimilation into the commercial mainstream may have made some shareholders wealthy but also exposed them to a more volatile economic environment. Blackburn argues that institutions such as the UK Trustees Savings Bank (TSB) or the Spanish Cajas worked well ‘for decades as publicly owned and well-regulated institutions, [but] all got into difficulties once deregulated, privatized or demutualized’ (2011: 57). These institutional changes have been part of a broader depoliticisation of home ownership and the retreat by governments and other non-market providers in its direct or indirect promotion.

The purchase of housing thus moved progressively closer to the purchase of other commodities. It was part of the broader shift from the politically managed, embedded markets of Keynesian welfarism to the deregulated and reregulated contours of neoliberal globalisation. These home ownership institutions with a social purpose were incompatible with the prioritisation of financial speculation and capital mobility which demanded greater global integration and a borderless world in terms of capital flows (Brenner et al., 2010). The home ownership projects of embedded liberalism were distinctive and central to national social contracts. The home ownerships of neoliberalism are less distinctive and increasingly deterritorialised – certainly in terms of the financial structures which support them, their vulnerabilities and interconnectedness. They remain, however, distinctly territorial in terms of impacts and risks (Forrest and Yip, 2012). Meanwhile, from speculative investors’ viewpoints, securitising residential properties in the context of liberalised financial markets has meant the erosion of distinctions between real estate, stocks and shares among others. Solid residential buildings have been liquidised into securities and then been melted into the flow of the mixture of variegated financial products. Investors no longer have interests in what they want to invest in – real estate or shares – but buy anything as long as they obtain high levels of short-term yields.

It should be acknowledged that in whatever national context, the promotion and reproduction of home ownership has always been a shifting mix of economic, social and political objectives, and has involved different institutions, with the balance varying between different societies and over time within societies. Nevertheless, for much of its post war history it was widely presented and understood as a social aspiration with economic benefits (something to pass on to one’s children; not money ‘down the drain’ unlike renting etc.) and treated as such by the key institutions involved in its reproduction. This changed as neoliberal ideas took hold, coinciding with the maturation of the tenure as an asset base. ¹

Prime time: New fractures and exclusions

In post-crisis home ownership systems new fault lines have emerged between longer established borrowers and new buyers, between the high risk and low risk, between the well-resourced and the less well-resourced families and between those on rising incomes and those with stagnant or falling incomes. The home ownership systems which have emerged from the crises are ones which favour the financially privileged – the primes rather than the subprimes.

Mortgage lending strategies have been reoriented towards lower risk investment opportunities. Those in the strongest financial positions, typically on higher incomes, in relatively secure jobs and with high levels of equity and low loan to value ratios have been able to negotiate the most favourable terms as lenders have sought to cherry-pick borrowers. In Britain, as higher risk borrowers predictably sought to switch mortgages to take advantage of falling rates, the lending institutions introduced more restrictive terms and conditions and ‘repriced’ their products to protect and enhance profit margins. This involved such measures as the requirement for larger deposits and lower loan to value ratios. Similarly in Japan, the Government Housing and Loan Corporation (GHLC) had provided long-term, fixed-low-interest mortgages on standard lending conditions. However, the private banks that replaced the GHLC have offered primarily variable rate mortgages and lending conditions that have been increasingly varied in terms of interest rates, loan limits and guarantee fees. This has produced widening disparities in mortgage conditions between borrowers in secure employment with middle- to high-incomes and the increasing numbers of those in casual work with lower wages.

Arguably, the social project of home ownership was driven by an inclusive political agenda – or at least presented as such. The revised financialised one is unapologetically exclusive. Watson (2009) refers to the emergence of two distinct housing classes – the ‘market included’ and ‘market excluded’ in terms of past trajectories of housing wealth accumulation, market pricing strategies and future housing market resilience. There are those with substantial financial portfolios to creatively deploy and there are the asset poor, disenfranchised and financially illiterate (Watson, 2009: 44). Social class is becoming more important as a stratifying factor in housing conditions and opportunities but often across inter-generational lines. Those with family financial support have their bargaining positions enhanced. Those on lower incomes without family resources to call upon face the prospect of higher interest rates and higher deposit requirements. These developments can be seen as part of a more general process of fragmentation or ‘disassembling’ (Sassen, 2011) of middle classes which has accelerated since the global financial crisis – reflected perhaps in the disparate but growing wave of middle class discontent across the world.

It is increasingly evident that if younger generations are to achieve home ownership, households and families will have to draw on private financial reserves in the absence of sufficient bank credit or supportive government policies. Crouch has characterised this development as a shift from Keynesianism to privatised Keynesianism: ‘Instead of governments taking on debt to stimulate the economy, individuals did so’ (2009: 390). Research for the UK charity Shelter estimated that parents were spending some £2 billion a year to help their children buy their first home – rather more than the government was investing in affordable housing (Humphries and Scott, 2013). In Japan, the government has recently expanded a tax-reduction scheme aimed at expanding inter-generational financial transfers to support children’s housing purchase, implying the intention of substituting family for government financing in facilitating home ownership. For relatively privileged younger people, this increased familisation of financial support will involve a greater degree of financial dependence on parents among younger generations still aspiring to greater independence in terms of lifestyles and attitudes – a paradoxical dependent-independence which is likely to lead to more inter-generational frictions and conflicts. Intra-generational contrasts in terms of housing opportunities and trajectories will be, of course, even more apparent (see Forrest and Yip, 2012, for an extended discussion).

In the post crisis world, different social groups also have different orientations towards the state and market with regard to housing policy priorities (although intra- and inter-generational dynamics and divisions are complex). With the middle class escalator of home ownership grinding to a halt, or in reverse, those on the outside may well have a different set of priorities in relation to state subsidies and housing policies. An older generation will continue to prioritise the maintenance of property values in order to protect their savings and prime asset, but younger generations will tend to celebrate their decline as easing deposit and cost barriers. These housing fault lines have different characteristics in different societies, but the generational dimension is particularly strong. In Japan and Britain, it is cross cut mainly by occupational class and generational linkage. In the USA, however, it has a much stronger ethnic dimension and is part of a broader ‘brown versus grey’ divide, with the former apparently favouring more government intervention and the latter favouring much less (Davis, 2013).

The promise of private landlordism

Post war housing policy constituted a mechanism that provided people with the ‘promise’ of access to mainstream society. Renters regarded themselves as potential home owners, and young people on low incomes were able to expect increasing incomes and possible future access to property ownership. In less benign and more polarising economic conditions and with failed neoliberal home ownership policies, increasing numbers will fail to realise the ‘promise’ of home ownership and social mainstream participation (Hirayama, 2010a). Tighter mortgage markets and a decline in expectations of property value appreciation are further delaying young people’s entry into the home ownership market. Moreover, income divergence has been particularly marked within the younger age groups. In Japan societal ageing accounts for much of the overall pattern of rising income inequality over the last 20 years, but it is the growth of ‘freeters’ and ‘neeters’ and the general declining bargaining power of the less educated which are the prime causes of more recent intra-cohort inequalities (Ohtake, 2008).

So what is on offer now? Policy preferences remain strongly market-oriented but with a distinct shift towards private renting given the difficulties of providing access to sustainable home ownership for lower income households. Home ownership suited the stability and security of the Fordist era. Private renting is better calibrated to the fluidity and ‘flexibility’ of the neoliberal and post-crisis eras. And the renewed policy interest and growing investment in private renting is symptomatic of the post crisis resilience of neoliberalism and the lack of any robust and convincing alternatives to its hegemony – at least outside Latin America (Therborn, 2012). Contrary to many expectations, the crisis of 2007–2008 did not mark a shameful retreat of neoliberal ideas but rather their reassertion in different forms adjusted for new times and new contexts. Brenner et al. remind us that policy failure and systemic crisis may reinvigorate rather than undermine neoliberalisation processes: ‘Crucially, then, endemic policy failure has actually tended to spur further rounds of reform within broadly neoliberalized political and institutional parameters …’ (2010: 333). In the housing sphere it is a reinvigorated private rented sector which is emerging from the ‘creative destruction’ of post crisis and post bubble housing markets. This development is being driven by three interconnected processes. First, there is substantial corporate investment in bargain basement, repossessed homes, Second, there is growing demand from younger and poorer households for private renting in the absence of affordable or available alternatives. Third, there has been the growth of smaller investors seeking safer havens than stock markets or pension funds for their savings, often encouraged by supportive government policies and specially tailored financial products. For those who can – Watson’s (2009) ‘market included investor-subjects’ – the sensible financial strategy is to own your own home and somebody else’s as well. Thus, private landlordism is itself becoming increasingly financialised with new corporate investment and as middle to high income households seek new ways to generate income flows and pensions. A new breed of private landlords has little interest in property other than as investment vehicles in a situation of low savings rates and volatile stock markets. Private renting for them is not some sideline family business or the result of property inheritance.

For younger generations it is private renting which is therefore more likely to be on offer than new routes into home ownership. England provides a particularly striking example of this transformation. In 1991, 60% of 16–34 year olds in England were home owners. In 2011, the comparable percentage was 36%. In 1999–2000, some 40% of new households went into private renting and 34% went into home ownership. In 2008–2009, however, only a fifth of new households entered home ownership and close to 70% entered private renting (English housing survey, 2010–2011). This turnaround in the fortunes of rentier capital in the housing sector is remarkable. An article in Roof magazine in the late 1970s titled ‘The private landlord is dead, but he won’t lie down’ (Finnis, 1977) expressed a widely held view that the tenure was merely a lingering anachronism in relation to property rights and housing conditions. In 1992, the sector reached its lowest point when only 9% of English households rented from private landlords. By 2011–2012 this percentage had almost doubled to 17.4%, nudging private marginally above social renting. At the same time, home ownership has declined from its high point of 71% of households in 1993 to just above 65% in 2011–2012 (DCLG, 2013). Private landlordism is now the fastest growing tenure in England albeit from a low base and after almost a century of decline.

Moreover, England is not exceptional. Across a wide range of societies there has been a marked increase in the proportion of younger households especially entering private renting (or remaining in the parental home well into adulthood). In the USA, the home ownership rate at 66% is the lowest since 1998 and low income households have been increasingly channelled into the private renting sector which grew by some 4 million households between 2005 and 2010 (National Low Income Coalition, 2011). Big corporations, hedge funds and the private equity firms are buying up properties in the hundreds as undifferentiated commodities. The miseries encouraged by the mainstream and shadow banking sectors in one phase become a new business opportunity for other capital fractions in the next. The Economist (2012) referred to one company buying ‘100 houses a day in selected markets’. It continued: ‘Such is the pace of investing that its agents do not even step inside all the properties it buys’. The same article comments: ‘Huge investors like Blackstone have credit ratings that the public cannot match. If America is moving towards a rentership society, they will rake it in’. It is these developments which largely explain the modest revival of house prices in the USA.

In Japan, young home owners have also been on the decline while young households living in private rented housing have been increasing. Between 1983 and 2008, among households with heads aged 30–34, the percentage of owner-occupiers decreased from 46% to 30% while that of private renters rose from 33% to 56%. Declines in home ownership as well as public and company rented housing have been paralleled by the expansion of private landlordism. Furthermore, the financialisation of the sector is also evident in government policies aimed at ‘modernising’ the private rental system. Not only has security of tenure been reduced and eviction made easier but the government has sought to establish a rental-property-security market. This requires yields from security investments to be more predictable. As a consequence, rental dwellings financed by more professional investors are expected to replace those provided by non-professional landlords.

There are similar developments in Australia driven by unaffordable house prices and lack of social housing. Over the last decade, the proportion of households aged between 25 and 34 which are renting (almost all private) has risen from 45% to 50% and as the baby boomer generation age and die off, the overall level of home ownership is expected to fall substantially. The most recent report on supply and affordability from the Australian government’s National Housing Supply Council (2013) states that, ‘as time progresses, it now seems certain that the aggregate rate of home ownership will drop and the proportion renting will increase significantly’ (see executive summary: http://nhsc.org.au/publications/housing-supply-and-affordability-issues-2012-13/executive-summary/). Commenting on this report, the Financial Review (2013) suggested it showed that ‘Australians are headed to be a nation of renters, living increasingly in apartments, and, for the poor, crammed into more crowded homes’ and a spokesperson for the Residential Development Council claimed that the projected increase in renters signified ‘the end of the Great Australian dream of home ownership’ (Kakas, 2013).

Even allowing for the hyperbole, the shape of housing opportunities is clearly changing with a much greater emphasis on private renting for new households, certainly in these mature home ownership societies. So where does all this leave the logic of asset-based welfare given the centrality of residential property in some conceptions of self-help, state-lite regimes? Home ownership has been increasingly intertwined with the formation of asset-based or property-owning welfare states (De Decker and Dewilde, 2010; Groves et al., 2007; Malpass, 2008). The growing number of home owners with appreciating assets to deploy has been seen as offering a key policy means of reducing increases in public spending on welfare associated with demographic changes. A high level of owner-occupation among older groups has thus been an underpinning mechanism for stabilising society. In mature home owner societies, many of the current older generation are established outright home owners, and the majority were not directly affected by the global financial crisis or its predecessors (although some saw savings and asset values severely depleted). However, current younger generations may languish in private rental sectors for some time. Thus, future older cohorts may be more stratified with regard to property ownership and fewer will be able to rely on housing assets.

These developments raise fundamental questions regarding the extent to which an asset-based welfare approach can be an effective means of societal integration (Hirayama, 2010b). The spread of home ownership was a powerful representation of the aspiration for asset egalitarianism (see the interesting discussion in Gamble and Prabhakar, 2005) with homes supposedly providing the asset platform for further social mobility, resonant of the social project rhetoric of ‘a stake in the system’. But that was a version of asset-based welfare which promised growing property ownership for an expanding middle mass and reaching into poorer sections of society. The new version involves a greater concentration of residential property assets with the property-poor paying market rents to the property-rich.

Concluding observations: The end of the social project?

In the post war Keynesian era of embedded liberalism, home ownership systems were set within frameworks of public policies aimed at enhancing social cohesion and protecting people’s lives in volatile, uncertain and precarious economic conditions. In this sense, problems in home ownership sectors not only impact on housing situations but are a potential catalyst for undermining wider, established social contracts. Neoliberalism thus undermined the integrative and stabilising dimensions of home ownership. But this is an inherently contradictory process. The social and economic ‘projects’ were inextricably connected. Indeed, it was often the social project of home ownership which provided the rationale for the rapid expansion of subprime mortgages. Some of the key actors in the debacle believed sincerely that they were part of the social crusade to extend home ownership to low income households – in the USA they were helping to realise George W Bush’s Blueprint for the American Dream which promised higher levels of home ownership (Cohan, 2010; McLean and Nocera, 2011). As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the key institutions in the extension of home ownership to lower income households in the USA) became increasingly powerful and profitable through the issuance of mortgage backed securities, their social purpose protected them (for a time at least) from their commercial and political critics. Attacks on Fannie Mae could be easily portrayed as attacks on home ownership, even though ‘the bulk of its profits were being generated from an activity that critics said, correctly, had nothing to do with helping people buy affordable homes’ (McLean and Nocera, 2011: 47).

The essential contradiction is that the neoliberal logic which propelled the latter, undermined the former. The ‘moral project’ of the neoliberal era in which the superiority of markets is ‘articulated in the language of economics’ (Mudge, 2008) collided with, and eroded, the Keynesian home ownership project articulated as social purpose. However, the economic project needs the social project if market mechanisms are to be promoted and extended into new areas of housing and social life – this is a paradox at the core of laissez-faire political economy. ‘Markets and market principles have a tendency to over-reach themselves, undermining the very social fabric in which they are embedded and are consequently dependent on’ (Davies, 2013: 33).

The development of the new financial products which enabled poorer households to take out mortgages seemed to be an elegantly conceived market solution to the break on the extension of home ownership to lower income households which was always going to come (in that sense ‘the dream’ for many was always going to be only that) – the neoliberal fix for the affordability problem. Moreover, rising property values were the means to maintain living standards via private debt. Unfortunately, policy driven and policy supported house price inflation created major problems of access for the next generation of home owners.

As has been argued, there are still no strong competitors to neoliberal ideas in policy formulation and implementation although in some parts of the world, and particularly in the dynamic growth regions of Asia and Latin America, more ‘social’ approaches to both home ownership and renting are currently finding new political momentum. Whether or not this is the beginning of a new policy paradigm or short term rhetoric remains to be seen. Moreover, neoliberal housing policies have evidently found new expression and new energy in revitalised private rented sectors driven by a combination of speculative investment, household and corporate, and the lack of housing alternatives for the young and the poor. There is little of a housing social project here. Private landlordism offers mobility (and sometimes lifestyle) but market rents tend to erode rather than enable saving. If a new platform for asset based welfare for poorer households is to be constructed, new forms of social renting or social home ownership would seem to offer more potential.

The recent decades of economic crisis and instability have seen a narrowing of home ownership opportunities and the renewed importance of occupational status and family resources as stratifying elements within the tenure. These developments raise fundamental questions regarding the future role of home ownership in post crisis social contracts of Japan, Britain, USA, Australia and elsewhere. The neoliberal solution to the housing affordability problem involved the progressive financialisation of home ownership and the distillation of the tenure to its essential monetary elements – a commodity to be traded in myriad forms. The ensuing financial crisis not only compromised this means of expanding home ownership but undermined the tenure’s role as a pillar of social integration.