Thursday 26 May 2011

Is home ownership the natural choice? Part 2

Yesterday I met up with my most sorted friend Katrin. Katrin is married, living in a lovely flat in Kew, with a really interesting and well paid job.  I had always assumed that she and her husband would follow the ‘natural’ next step and buy their own home in the next couple of years. Completely unprompted on my part (no really!) she started to question the pressure she was feeling to get onto the housing ladder.

She summed up the arguments pretty well:
  • Our obsession with owning a home in this country is just not normal
  • Buying a home isn’t necessarily a safe or sensible investment
  • There are benefits and downsides to owning a home and to renting that are different, not worse or better
  • At the moment they can afford somewhere bigger and better located if they rent rather than buy
  • They can save money if they continue to rent 
  • If they buy they will have to lock all of their equity up in the home
  • When they do buy it won't just be about a financial investment, but because they want to settle, re-orientate their lives to family or because its the perfect place for them in the right location.
From the outside Katrin seems like the perfect candidate to climb up on the housing ladder. The fact that she is rejecting it puts into question the idea that owning a home is necessarily desirable, even to those who could comfortably afford it. If other people feel the same way, and the tide turns away from home ownership as the default tenure type, do we need a different policy response?

    Tuesday 24 May 2011

    Is home ownership the natural choice? Part 1

    Peter Saunders, in his book A Nation of Home Owners, argues that we, as human beings, have a natural disposition for 'territory and possession' that can only be fulfilled through home ownership.  There's no denying that the vast majority of people in the UK aspire to home ownership but I’m not convinced this comes down to some primordial urge. To present home ownership as the ‘natural’ order of things denies the fact the new dominance of home ownership has been shaped by policy moves to extend the tenure to the majority, while at the same time pulling back on social housing provision, and deregulating the private rented sector.

    The reason that most of us aspire to own a home, is not based on some natural urge, but on the fact that there isn’t much of an alternative. Home ownership is meant to be about ‘choice’ but there isn’t really much of a choice to be made when faced with rip-off landlords who charge high rates for shitty flats, and a social sector that isn’t large enough to provide homes to meet a general need.

    Who really wins in the aggressive extension of home ownership to everyone? If the recent crash is anything to go by not even the banks and certainly not the public purse or low income home owners. The assumed benefits of home ownership such as personal control and autonomy as well as wealth accumulation just don’t ring true when people are faced with the social, financial and personal costs of mortgage possessions and arrears.

    In my view, there is nothing inherent in the benefits and rights attached to home ownership, or any other tenure for that matter, because they are created in law and laws can be changed. I for one would happily stay in the private rented sector if I had some security of tenure, if I could ensure that a certain standard was maintained and if there were some controls over rents so I’m not priced out every year and forced to move on.