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International Journal of Housing Policy

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How not to be an egalitarian: the politics ofhomeownership and property-owning democracy

James Gregory

To cite this article: James Gregory (2016): How not to be an egalitarian: the politics ofhomeownership and property-owning democracy, International Journal of Housing Policy

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616718.2015.1115224

Published online: 20 Jan 2016.

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How not to be an egalitarian: the politics of homeownership

and property-owning democracy

James Gregory*

Housing and Communities Research Group, School of Social Policy, Universityof Birmingham, London United Kingdom

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the narrative of ‘property-owningdemocracy’ (POD) in contemporary housing policy and in the political culturesof the UK and the USA. It describes and contrasts two competinginterpretations of POD. The dominant interpretation permeates the politics ofhousing in Britain and the USA. It is based on the assumption thathomeownership creates virtuous and independent citizens, is stronglyassociated with the conservative ideal of the small state, and is firmlyembedded in both policy and the accepted terms of political debate.

In contrast to this, there is a less dominant, egalitarian interpretation of POD,which seeks to promote a view of property and citizenship based more onsolidarity and interdependence. This interpretation of POD tends to viewproperty more broadly, including smaller savings and even extending to massownership in industry. But it also typically neglects the political reality of PODas a homeownership ideology and the anti-welfare dynamic it has created. Thispaper therefore argues that the egalitarian (re)interpretation of POD ispolitically and sociologically na€ıve, and that it is offers an untenable counter-narrative to the politics of welfare retrenchment. A more egalitarian housingpolicy needs to start from a different place.

Keywords: property; democracy; citizenship; independence; homeownership

Introduction

Property-owning democracy (POD) is firmly back on the agenda in British policy

and politics. With the election of a Conservative majority government, the politics

of homeownership is livelier than it has been for many years, with policy increas-

ingly matching rhetoric. In the previous coalition government potential buyers were

given help to raise a mortgage deposit under Help to Buy, and now the government

is pushing ahead with plans to extend the totemic Thatcherite policy of Right to

Buy to housing association tenants. Contrasted to this, we have seen the election of

Jeremey Corbyn � a signed up member of old Labour � as the new leader of the

*Email: J.Gregory@bham.ac.uk

� 2016 Taylor & Francis

International Journal of Housing Policy, 2016

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616718.2015.1115224

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Labour Party, now the official opposition to the government. At face value, it would

seem that we are back to an old polarity of left and right; of the social value of pub-

lic housing opposed straightforwardly to an alternative vision of the moral suprem-

acy of private property and homeownership.

Nevertheless, for the last two decades there has been a sustained attempt by the-

orists and politicians of the left to not just seek an accommodation with homeown-

ership and private property, but also to actively appropriate the language of

property-owning democracy. Successive ‘new’ Labour governments embraced the

Right to Buy and, taking Ackerman and Alstott’s ‘stake-holder society’ as a recent

starting point, theorists have advocated a variety of more inclusive accounts of

POD, where both property and a feeling of democratic inclusion are spread far

more widely (e.g.; Ackerman & Alstott, 2000). Yet, as this paper argues, this pro-

gressive attempt to colonise the language and ideology of POD is misguided: in

practice it legitimates, rather than subverts, a deeply regressive housing policy that,

in turn, underpins the ideology of the small state and welfare retrenchment.

This type of argument will not be entirely new to many housing theorists. There

has, for example, been extensive analysis of the ideology and policy of the Right to

Buy, the vanguard policy of POD in Britain (Forrest & Murie, 1988; Malpass,

2005; Murie & Jones, 2006). There has also been extensive critical analysis of the

related American vision of a homeownership society (Ronald, 2008; Shlay, 2006).

More recently, there has been a growing body of literature on the potential (and per-

ils) of a shift to an asset-based welfare system largely founded on private housing

wealth. This literature places due stress on the way in which homeownership has

been used as part of a broader transfer of risk from the state to the individual (e.g.

Doling & Ronald, 2010; Fox O’Mahony & Overton, 2015). What it does not do,

however, is explore the underlying ideology of this shift.

This paper seeks to provide this deeper understanding. It does so by drawing on

recent developments in political theory, which offers a systematic attempt to bypass

a negative critique of the inequities of POD by reconstructing it in egalitarian fash-

ion. This theoretical approach draws on both Rawlsian and republican political the-

ory, and intersects at a number of points with the literature and policy of asset-

based welfare that has developed in Britain and the USA over the last two decades

(O’Neill, 2012). The aim of this paper is to build upon the insights of these litera-

tures to address the specific question: is greater homeownership � the lodestone of

POD � a sound egalitarian strategy for those who want to see a more equal and

socially inclusive society? The conclusion of this paper is that it is not.

The order of argument

The first section sets out the case for a radical new approach to housing policy,

briefly outlining the place of housing, and especially homeownership, in entrenched

inequalities of wealth and opportunity in both Britain and the USA. The following

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two sections then set out the egalitarian vision of a POD in which a more equal dis-

tribution of property has a transformative effect on both the individual and society.

Here we will see that one of the weaknesses of egalitarian POD is that it neglects

the huge importance of homeownership in the countries (USA and Britain) that

could most reasonably be said to actually be property-owning democracies in prac-

tice. Nevertheless, the great merit of this literature is the way in which it directly

engages with the relationship between ownership and questions of citizenship; not

just in terms of more typical concerns with the distribution of property and material

inequality, but also with the hypothesis that ownership has a transformative effect

on the way in which individuals think about both themselves and their place in the

world. This, I will suggest, offers crucial insights for housing theorists.

This paper then moves from the ideal of an egalitarian POD to an examination

of the actual practice and political reality of POD in Britain, comparing it with the

closely related ideal of a ‘homeownership society’ in the United States. In both

countries there is of course a clear tenure split, with far more owner-occupation

than any other form of housing, though this dominance of owner-occupation is

more historically entrenched in the USA than in Britain, and there is a racial dimen-

sion to the ownership question that does not arise in Britain to anything like the

same extent. What is particularly interesting in the context of the peculiarly British

political discourse of POD is that it cannot be fully understood without an apprecia-

tion of its essentially dyadic nature; whereas homeownership is presented as a

means of creating virtuous citizens, social housing is increasingly depicted as creat-

ing the vice of welfare dependence. Seemingly positive arguments for ownership

are often actually arguments against social housing. These sections therefore con-

trast two behavioural aspirations for POD: an egalitarian vision of greater self-

esteem for all and a sense of shared solidarity, and a more hierarchical and individu-

alistic vision of a small state. Crucially, it is this second, conservative vision of

POD that we actually see in practice, and which is already deeply embedded in pol-

icy and political culture. It is also, unlike the broader aspirations of egalitarian

POD, overwhelmingly a doctrine of homeownership.

The final two sections introduce a distinction between a minimal and libertarian

conception of independence, which sees homeownership as means of weaning indi-

viduals off the welfare state, and a more egalitarian and social conception of

‘interdependence’. The paper discusses the challenges of moving towards

interdependence in a democracy that is dominated by the aggregation of

consumer preference, which presents a further obstacle to the egalitarian vision of

POD as a practical strategy. The conclusion of these sections is that egalitarian

POD will be unable to supplant the deeply embedded political culture of a conser-

vative POD � either in Britain or the USA � and that it is therefore a poor egalitar-

ian strategy. The remainder of the paper outlines an alternative egalitarian strategy

that recognises the inherent limitations of homeownership as a welfare mechanism,

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and which highlights the importance of a strong welfare state, while also recognis-

ing the legitimate place of owner-occupation in a fair society.

The problem of inequality: housing wealth and social hierarchy

There is no doubt that, for anyone concerned with economic inequality, the current

pattern of property ownership is a serious problem. Some basic facts about the dis-

tribution of wealth illustrate this. We will see that this distribution is not solely a

result of individual endeavour or the hard work and good judgment of owners; there

have also been concerted efforts by central government to assist owners through a

range of subsidies.

From 2006 to 2008 the net total of individual wealth in the UK (assets minus

debts) was £9 trillion, 39 per cent of which was housing wealth (£3.5 trillion) and

39 per cent private pension wealth (Rowlingson & McKay, 2012). The good news

for POD advocates is that housing wealth has spread over the last 30 years, with the

rate of homeownership increasing from 57 per cent in 1981 to 63.5 per cent in 2013

(down from a peak of 70 per cent in 2003) (Department for Communities and Local

Government [DCLG], 2012). The bad news is that this still leaves a very large,

excluded, minority.

Moreover, the downward UK trend in owner-occupation is set to continue. In

2005, the last Labour government held an aspiration that 75 per cent of the population

would live in owner-occupied housing (HM Treasury and ODPM 2005). On current

affordability trends, however, this seems rather fanciful. Across England, the ratio of

median earnings to median house prices has risen from 4.21 in 2000 to 6.72 in 2013,

down from a peak of 7.23 in 2007 (DCLG, 2012, Live Table no. 577). This is largely

due to a chronic short fall of housing supply across all tenures in the UK, with an

average of just over 177,000 homes completed each year from 2000 to 2013, when

the consensus view is that we need to be building 240,000 homes a year to keep pace

with household changes (Barker, 2004). But there has also been a stagnation in wage

growth since 2003, and a continuing squeeze on middle income households.

At the same time, within the home-owning population, there has been a notable

trend that belies the superficial picture of a wider distribution of housing wealth.

Regionally there is a significant variation in net housing wealth amongst owner-

occupiers in the UK, with median net housing wealth standing at £205,000 in 2009,

while the bottom quarter of owner-occupiers held net property wealth of £85,000 or

less (Lowe, Searle, & Smith, 2012, p. 110). This is, in part, a reflection of

regional variations in housing values (the most recent available aggregated

regional data, from 2012, points to a contrast between median house prices in the

South East of £236,000, compared to £122,000 in the Northeast (DCLG, 2012,

Live Table no. 582). Moreover, increasingly we are seeing different types of hous-

ing wealth. Most obviously there is a difference in the degree of wealth stored in

the home, with some 95,000 properties (overwhelmingly in London) estimated to

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be worth more than £2 million (Giles, 2014). This has recently fed into political

debates, with pre-election calls from the Labour party for a mansion tax on high

value properties. This issue remains on the agenda with the new party leadership,

and it is an issue we shall return to in the concluding section of this paper. The

immediate point, however, is that the wider distribution of homeownership does

not straightforwardly imply greater equality.

In the USA the distribution of wealth is even more unbalanced. At the time of

the crash in 2008, housing wealth was roughly a half of all household net worth

($52.9 trillion), at 25.4 trillion dollars (Iacoviello, 2011). Between 1999 and 2005

new owners benefited from a median net wealth increase of between $11,000 and

$88,000. For those who owned before 1999 median wealth nearly doubled from

$152,000 to $289,000 (Schwartz, 2009). With a comparable rate of homeownership

(approximately 65 per cent) to the UK rate, the USA also contains a very significant

rump of non-owners.

Furthermore, within both Britain and the USA there is also a long established

and very substantial subsidy for these homeowners. For many years debt-financed

homeownership in Britain was subsidised through tax relief on the interest pay-

ments, and owner occupiers still do not have to pay any tax on the wealth that is

accumulated through increases in the value of the home as an asset. At its peak in

1990/1991 mortgage interest tax relief in Britain came to £7.7 billion (Malpass,

2008, p. 10), while in 2014 the same type of relief in the USA came to $71.7 billion

(JCT, 2010, 2014). Britain has since abandoned this form of subsidy, but it has

become almost inviolable in the USA, even during recurring bouts of attempts to

shrink the state, hence: ‘The mortgage interest deduction, uniquely among the pro-

visions of the Internal Revenue Code, was taken “off the table” by the Reagan

administration during the tax reform debate’ (Carliner, 1998, p. 301). All this, of

course, is to be viewed in the context of the long history of federal intervention in

the secondary mortgage market through ‘Freddie Mac’ and ‘Freddie Mae’.

Yet while continuing central support for homeownership in the USA is clearly

strong, it is in Britain that we have seen the most direct support, mostly notably

under the policy of the Right to Buy. Introduced by the 1980 Housing Act, the

Right to Buy obligated local authorities to sell public housing to sitting tenants at

discounts of up to 60 per cent of the open market value for houses and 70 per

cent for flats. The value of this subsidy has recently been estimated to total £150 to

£200 billion between 1980 and 2009, a period in which some 2.5 million council

houses were sold to tenants (Hills, 2013, p.187). This policy intervention seemed to

be dying a natural death over the last decade, as a majority of the most desirable

homes had already been sold off and remaining tenants were less likely to be able

to afford to buy (Murie & Jones, 2006). However, the previous Conservative led

coalition government introduced a renewed Right to Buy agenda with an increased

discount of up to £75,000 across England, with a range of additional discounts for

first-time buyers in the open market. At present the government is also seeking to

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extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants, threatening to further resi-

dualise the social housing sector as a whole. As a result, the inequalities of wealth

and property that worry egalitarian minded thinkers and policy makers are likely to

widen, presenting an even greater problem of inequality. The need for a nuanced

response to such government sponsored inequalities of wealth is therefore as press-

ing as ever.

The ideal of egalitarian POD: ends and means

As we have just seen, egalitarian POD has been developed against a background of

deep and entrenched inequalities of wealth and property, with negative consequen-

ces for social and economic equality. Egalitarian POD therefore calls for the wider

distribution of wealth. But in a sense this is a means to a more complex end. This

greater distribution is not just a means of sharing wealth and opportunity as a pre-

requisite of a fairer society, and nor is it simply a means of tackling poverty. Rather,

the distribution of wealth is to have a transformative role in creating a society based

on a more socially inclusive vision of citizenship.

Unsurprisingly there is no single theory or ideal of POD in the literature. More-

over, until relatively recently these more theoretical accounts would be unlikely to

use the language of ‘property-owning democracy’ as their main term of reference;

preferring, for example, the language of ‘basic capital’ or ‘stake-holding’. This pic-

ture is complicated by the overlapping language of ‘asset-based welfare’, which

can without undue distortion be subsumed under the label of egalitarian POD within

political theory, but which brings with it a range of different understandings in pol-

icy discourse, and especially recent housing policy. This is an issue we shall return

to in the final stages of this paper.

A key hero in ideal accounts of POD is the eighteenth century American radical

Thomas Paine, who advocated the provision � as a basic right � of a minimum

capital grant to all citizens, to be funded out of inheritance tax. The American wel-

fare theorists Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott pick up this tradition and argue, in

Stakeholder Society, that all citizens should be given a one-off gift of $80,000

when they come of age (Ackerman & Alstott, 2000). While Ackerman and Alstott’s

account is not explicitly framed in the language of POD, it has been picked up and

adapted by recent advocates of POD (a number of these positions are collected in

O’Neill 2012). Ackerman and Alstott’s proposal is to be funded by a wealth tax on

the richest 2 per cent of American citizens and can be spent in any way that the indi-

vidual chooses, thus adding a libertarian flavour to the debate. In some thinking,

however, this kind of proposal comes with restrictions on the ways in which the

stake can be spent or invested. Thus, Stuart White in Britain advocates a similar

scheme but also seeks constraints on behaviour (White, 2012). A typical restriction

would limit the use of the stake to spending on the acquisition of property (includ-

ing businesses) or investment in one’s own human capital; for example, using the

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stake to fund university education or training at a later stage (White, 2003). How-

ever, this conditionality was not borne out in policy practice. The (now discontinued)

Child Trust Fund gave all British children born after September 2002 £250 at birth

(with an extra £250 for children from low income households) and the opportunity

for the family to add to the fund. At the age of 18 the beneficiary could continue to

invest or spend the funds in any way.

POD, however, is not confined to personal assets, and there is typically a strong

emphasis in the theory literature on collective ownership and responsibility. We see

this when we turn to the relationship between property and democracy � with

recent calls for worker participation and more democratic control of the means of

production, including employee ownership or (less radically) wider commercial

ownership through greater public participation in shareholding (Roemer, 1994).

Recent market socialist literature offers further nuance: for example, the idea that

investment coupons be distributed to individuals, allowing them to invest in a num-

ber of competing mutual funds, thus allowing individuals access to the returns from

capital, as well as a degree of influence over the use of capital (Roemer, 1994).

More radically, we could perhaps see direct voting mechanisms giving all workers

a direct say (Hussain, 2012).

It is not just modern incarnations of socialist thinking that have been driving the

development of egalitarian POD. In recent years egalitarian minded liberals and

republicans have also joined the debate. Famously, Rawls’ liberalism includes a

very strong account of distributive justice as a well as an account of political liberty.

The difference principle, chosen in the hypothetical original position, states that

social and economic equalities are just only if they are (a) tied to positions and offi-

ces open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, and (b) maximise

the wellbeing of the least advantaged members of society. For many years this was

read as an endorsement of welfare state capitalism; roughly speaking, the classic

post-war model of welfare, based upon income transfers and public services. For

many writers now drawing on Rawls’s critique of welfare state capitalism, a central

concern is the potential for traditional welfare models to create a dynamic of

stigma, in which welfare claimants are seen at best as grateful supplicants of cash

transfers (O’Neill, 2009). Rawls’ later repudiation of this model in favour of a vari-

ant of POD thus plays an important role in the egalitarian theory of POD.

In terms of this political theory, recent republican thinking is equally important,

though it differs from Rawlsian liberalism in seeing political participation as an

active duty of citizenship, rather than just a right. Nevertheless, the key similarity is

that republicanism sees a greater distribution of property as a condition of non-

domination, in which no one citizen is in a position � by simple chance of birth or

luck � to lord it over another (Lovett, 2010; Pettit, 1996, 1997; Wartenberg, 1990).

Property ownership is thus a condition of equal dignity and, by extension, the

avoidance of the stigma associated with traditional welfare models. The concern

with stigma is very important for the argument in this paper too. But, as we shall

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see, the shared Rawlsian and republican concern � and the broader egalitarian POD

concern with welfare and stigma � is misdirected: it misses the crucial role of

broader institutional structures, notably (and paradigmatically) clumsily targeted

social housing, in entrenching stigma.

There are, unsurprisingly, a range of complexities and disputes within this egali-

tarian literature. We can, however, distil the common essence to four core

propositions:

(1) Excessive concentrations of wealth threaten to (a) dominate politics and (b)

threaten equality of opportunity. With regard to (a) an obvious example is

the huge corporate sponsorship of presidential campaigns in the United

States; (b) manifests itself in the growing controversy in Britain in the

career advantages conferred by family wealth, allowing the lucky to finance

unpaid internships.

(2) Asset-ownership has a transformative effect: property is not just a useful

tool or a means to an end; it can change our ends and our outlook on the

world. In republican terms there is also a potentially educative effect: own-

ership can give citizens a stake in society and thus make them more active

participants in the democratic process. This, we should note, is not the

same as assuming that there is a pent up desire for participation that is

inhibited by a lack of property.

(3) Property ownership creates a sense of self-respect and greater respect in the

eyes of others. One of the central claims here is that, by giving the poor suf-

ficient capital, we avoid placing them in the position of grateful supplicant

reliant on regular state ‘hand-outs’. It therefore creates a virtuous sense of

independence. This claim has a mutually reinforcing dual edge: property

has a transformative effect on the individual’s self-worth because of the

greater control it gives them over their life, but it also changes the way that

they are seen by their fellow citizens.

(4) A final claim is that POD is a pragmatic strategy for greater equality. Thus,

Rawls tells us: ‘When a practical decision is to be made between POD and a

liberal socialist regime, we look to society’s historical circumstances, to its tra-

ditions of political thought and practice, and much else’ (Rawls, 2001, p. 139).

The assumption is that POD goes with the grain of a political culture in which

property has come to have paramount social and economic importance.

Of these four claims it is the last three that are of concern in this paper. I do not

address the first proposition primarily because I believe it to be largely correct,

diagnostically at least, to say that large concentrations of wealth distort the demo-

cratic process and hinder equality of opportunity. The political feasibility of the

level of distribution required to achieve this, however, is another matter. More trivi-

ally, there is insufficient space in this paper to pursue this line of enquiry.

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In contrast, the other three claims are all highly contestable � and yet largely

uncontested. Within the world of egalitarian minded policy makers, as well as in

the explicit articulations of POD theory, propositions (2) and (3) are nevertheless

something of an article of faith, based on the assertion of its most famous policy

champion, Michael Sherraden: ‘…income only maintains consumption, but assets

change the way people think and interact with the world’ (Sherraden, 1991, p. 6).

(See Prabhakar, 2008 for a full and fruitful discussion.) For Sherraden, this asset-

based welfare is a way of helping the poorest � or at the least the poorer � in soci-

ety not only to survive but to feel the sense of dignity, confidence and inclusion that

egalitarian POD aspires to. Yet, as we shall see in the following section, this notion

that ‘assets change the way people think and interact with the world’ is entirely up

for grabs: the point is that we need to know the nature of the transformation; we

need to know how new owners will think of themselves and the world they are in. It

may well be a positive transformation for the individual, but this does not necessar-

ily mean that there will be a new cohort of citizens sympathetic to egalitarian ideals.

Indeed, the conservative POD we are about to examine pursues a policy of asset-

ownership largely for the very opposite reason, as a means of creating a more indi-

vidualistic society with a residual welfare state.

This brings us to proposition (4) in the egalitarian POD distillation. This is the

claim that POD is a pragmatic strategy for creating a more egalitarian society

because it goes with the grain of our political culture. There are two immediate

points to make before we examine this claim in greater depth. The first is that the

current political culture of POD is profoundly and intentionally inegalitarian. The

second is that, in marked contrast to both the policy framework of asset-based

welfare and the versions of POD found in political theory, the actual political cul-

ture of POD is overwhelmingly based on homeownership.

This clearly invites us to examine the potential for an egalitarian POD policy

programme to have a transformative effect on society as well as on the individual.

First, however, for the empirical claim that egalitarian POD runs with the grain of

contemporary political culture. In the following sections we will see that this is not

the case. We will also see some of the content that conservative POD gives to prop-

ositions (2) and (3).

The Conservative tradition of property-owning democracy

Property-owning democracy first entered the political stage in Britain as a slogan

when coined by the Conservative MP Noel Skelton in 1923 (Jackson, 2005). His

belief was that the greater distribution of property would foster greater indepen-

dence and self-reliance amongst individuals. Notably, Skelton’s POD included not

just personal property and homeownership but also agricultural small-holdings and

co-operative business models based on profit sharing. As we shall see, this quite

broad conception of POD is not the vision that came to dominate British politics

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later in the century. The end shape of what I am calling political POD becomes

clearer in 1946, when Anthony Eden tells the Conservative Party Annual Confer-

ence that, ‘ownership of property is not a crime or a sin, but a reward, a right and a

responsibility that must be shared as equitably as possible amongst all our citizens’

(cited in Jackson, 2005).

While there may have been a ‘One Nation’ element to this unobjectionable aspi-

ration, over at least the last fifty years the state led redistribution of property in both

Britain and the USA has been increasingly motivated by a commitment to social

hierarchy. A relatively brief examination of the language and practice of housing

and welfare policy in Britain over the last 40 years makes this clear. According to

Margaret Thatcher, council houses were ‘breeding grounds of socialism, depen-

dency, vandalism and crime’; whereas home ownership created all the virtues of

the ‘good’ citizen (Campbell, 2008, p. 234). This dyad is linked directly to another,

one that continues to have great contemporary salience: ‘the Victorians had a way

of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering � they distinguished

between the “deserving” and “undeserving poor”’ (Thatcher, 1995, p. 627). The

Victorians were also, famously, said by Thatcher to exemplify the ‘vigorous

virtues’ that made Britain great. These central virtues were thrift and self-help. But

there was also a direct link to the educative role of POD. Ownership was to teach

the virtue of independence, turning the citizen away from the state and to the

market. Nor was it to be thought of solely as an opportunity or a right; it was also a

duty.

A similar conclusion is to be found 30 years later in the continued conservative

assumption that homeownership should be a reward for good behaviour. Hence, Iain

Duncan-Smith gives us the following prescription for mending ‘Broken Britain’: ‘we

want to encourage tenants’ aspirations: we propose rewarding social tenants’ con-

structive behaviour with equity shares in their homes. With the privilege comes the

responsibility of maintaining one’s own assets; and in the long run this will transform

our estates’ (Duncan-Smith, 2008). Note here the assumption of a significant behav-

ioural change associated with ownership, though a less overt stress on responsibility

to exercise independence. This is provided instead by David Cameron:

Generations of families are trapped in social housing, denied the chance to break out orto buy their own property. I don’t want a child’s life story to be written before they’reeven born, and a responsible housing policy which helps people up and out of depen-dency can help rewrite that story. (Cameron, 2009)

That housing policy is one in which home ownership � the foundation the

political POD � stands at the top of a clear hierarchy of social status, with social

housing tenants cast as a burden on other citizens. In the context of current policy

there is a clear overlap between this attitude to public housing and other compo-

nents of the welfare state, notably the argument that income transfers ‘reward’

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unemployment. Taken together, this has led to public housing tenants in Britain

experiencing a form of welfare stigma probably experienced by no other group.

For all advocates of (egalitarian and inegalitarian) POD, the solution is to use

property ownership as a means of reducing reliance on the state, regardless of

whether or not the receipt of help is framed in terms of an unquestionable right, or

as a charitable gift. But what particularly marks out what I am calling the ‘political’

narrative of POD is that stigma serves a legitimate social function: you should feel

ashamed if you don’t work or rely on others to meet your housing needs. Indeed,

when we look beyond the more recent history of property and democracy it is nota-

ble that the poor law system that operated in Britain all the way up until 1948 (albeit

much amended in practice from the early nineteenth century) made an explicit link

between property and citizenship: one could only vote as a male property owner,

and that right was lost if an individual was forced to turn to the state for assistance.

This property-owning democracy was literally a democracy that included only

property owners � and its legacy lives on and reverberates through the language of

housing and welfare today.

Property-owning democracy and the American Dream

In the United States there is an equally strong tradition of property and citizenship

discourses. Until very recently, when it was picked up by John Rawls, this has not

been conducted in the language of POD, and POD is still largely confined to aca-

demic and theoretical discourse. If we were to seek an equivalent the American

Dream would likely be the most appropriate choice. This of course contains a range

of aspirations and cultural assumptions � but it is also clear that homeownership is

one of the most crucial goods of the dream. This is embedded in legislative history

from at least the late nineteenth century, when the 1886 Homestead Act explicitly

set out homeownership as the prize for immigrants to the USA, thereby embedding

strong associations between citizenship and ownership (Ronald, 2008, p. 138).

Indeed, so powerful are the associations between homeownership and citizenship

that some commentators even suggest that the right to own is regarded as being

more foundational than the right to vote (Shlay, 2006).

As we shall see, there are echoes of this in G. W. Bush’s ‘ownership society’ of

the early 2000s. But, as in the British case, there is also a more egalitarian account,

starting with the New Deal of the 1930s and leading up to Bill Clinton’s explicit

1994 injunction to the Department of Housing and Development to widen access to

the American Dream of homeownership (Ronald, 2008, p. 148). In the USA, this

strand of thinking and policy action was inevitably influenced by its history of racial

discrimination, which not only drove much of the ghettoisation of American public

housing, but also allowed individuals and banks to systematically refuse to sell

or lend to black Americans or other ethnic minorities. A key moment in this history

is the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which made it illegal to refuse to rent or sell a

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property to someone on grounds of race. This, of course, could not itself break the

strong link between race, poverty and economic inequality, so ownership still

remained out of reach for a great majority of Black American and Hispanic house-

holds. To this end, the Clinton administration placed a special emphasis on the

needs of Black and Hispanic households when it pledged to create 8 million more

owner occupiers, bringing the rate of owner-occupation amongst Afro-Americans

(43 per cent in 1993) and Hispanic Americans (40 per cent) far closer to the rate

(70 per cent) amongst the white population (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban

Development, May 1995, p. 17). Following this, in 2002 George W Bush explicitly

pledged to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners within ten years (The

White House, 2002).

There are some practical policy questions about the merits of such a policy as a

means of social and economic inclusion. The clearest illustration of this is the fate

of sub-prime mortgages after the 2008 crash. But the deeper issue is the nature of

the transformation desired by advocates of homeownership for minorities. Of

course, some will have deeply held egalitarian beliefs. But it is safe to say that

Bush (and perhaps even Clinton) do not number amongst this group. When we

looked at the actual political culture of POD in Britain, it was clear that this is over-

whelmingly a conservative, small state culture. Ownership is to wean citizens off

the welfare state. A very similar picture emerges in the USA, where there has been

a slow but sure move to a capital investment state, based on the transfer of risk

away from collective provision and to the individual as a saver and consumer of

financial goods (Quadagno, 1999). The following comment on Bush’s homeowner-

ship aspirations neatly summarises the point:

Like Thatcher’s, his rhetoric about ownership is grounded in the idea that private prop-erty and personal savings represent the best and the most legitimate source of securityfor the individual. For conservatives, Social Security privatization has long been partof a broader neo-liberal agenda that aims at fighting economic redistribution whileincreasing the reliance of citizens and workers on individualistic, market-based formsof protection. (B�eland, 2006, p. 21)

The right of centre think tank, the Cato Institute, also expresses the ideology

succinctly: ‘…individuals are empowered by freeing them from dependence on

government hand outs and making them owners instead’ (Clark, 2013). And, less

directly, G. W. Bush asserted at the beginning of his second term that ‘… if you

own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more own-

ership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more peo-

ple have a vital stake in the future of this country’ (Bush, 2004).

Bush clearly made a positive and opportunity case for ownership, seeking to

expand it widely; but, just as conservative ‘property-owning democracy’ is ulti-

mately based on the duty of ownership, so too is ‘ownership society’.

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Two interpretations of independence

Let us now turn again, briefly, to proposition (3). This tells us that POD encourages

a virtuous sense of independence, self-respect and respect in the eyes of others. In

the account of conservative POD in the previous section this characteristic of POD

is indeed plainly present. But it should also be equally clear that the appeal in con-

servative POD is to a type of independence that egalitarian POD would eschew.

The lesson here is that proposition (3) is radically under-determined: it relies on

concepts � independence, respect, virtue � that can lead in very different directions,

depending on the precise normative content they are given. Egalitarians are likely to

respond with reference to a huge literature on precisely this topic, with finer and finer

detail on the meaning of these concepts (see Anderson, 1999 for a full discussion).

But this is not the decisive point in the context of POD as an egalitarian strategy.

The key issue is whether or not POD as it actually exists is compatible with the kind

of content given to independence by egalitarian theorists and policy makers. Without

entering into any detail, it is a reasonable economy to characterise the kind of inde-

pendence that egalitarians want in terms of Berlin’s ‘positive’ freedom; something

like the freedom to fully participate in society, to interact with others on equal terms.

In this crucial respect egalitarian independence is closer to a concept of equal interde-

pendence than it is to more literal, everyday uses of independence.

In stark contrast, the independence of conservative POD is more literal, and far

closer to the idea of ‘negative’ freedom. This is the independence of detachment, of

self-reliance, and of separation from the collective institutions of the welfare state.

In this vision the virtuous citizen is independent in so far as she is not a burden on

her tax-paying fellow citizens. Of course, this is something of a caricature. But it

drives home the point that proposition (3) is radically incomplete. We need to know

what type of independence POD is expected to foster. To just assume that it will

foster interdependence is to pre-judge the issue in favour of egalitarian POD, when

the compatibility of POD with (conservative) independence versus (egalitarian)

interdependence is precisely the contested issue at stake.

We have seen in the previous section that there is little reason to think that POD

as currently practised is favourable to the egalitarian interpretation of proposition

(3). Nevertheless, this does not rule out the possibility that we could move to a dif-

ferent political culture and a different type of POD. In the following two sections

we will examine one possible strategy for such a transition: a strong dose of demo-

cratic interaction � a curative for the atomising independence of contemporary

political culture in the USA and Britain.

1. Bringing democracy back in

Thus far, I have mainly described the political sociology of property ownership and

welfare in Britain and the USA. But, of course, POD is also about democracy. The

sensible principle that we should go with the grain of our political culture, rather

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than fighting it tooth and nail in the name of an ideal account of justice, therefore

requires us to consider the practice of democracy in America and Britain.

In Britain, the New Labour agenda also included a wholesale acceptance of the

role of markets in democratic decision making � the very means by which Thatcher

sought to ‘change the soul’. Indeed, the consumer-citizen arguably only really came

of age under Labour’s public service reforms of the early 2000s. Thus, the political

context of the left’s belated recognition of the role that the welfare state could play

in dispersing wealth and property is deeply enmeshed with the very same type

of democracy that I have associated with an inegalitarian and political POD.

The two features of this narrative � the dispersal of wealth and property and the

valorisation of consumer choice � are in principle distinguishable. But the fact

remains that the actual political culture of Britain is far closer to a consumer

democracy than it is to any notion of a ‘strong’ democracy � or to an understanding

of ownership and independence that is compatible with a recognisably egalitarian

account of society.

Indeed, the point of a market-based democracy is that it aggregates preferences

through individual consumer choices (and the occasional election of competing

elites). There is very little room for debate about the nature or desirability of these

preferences. For the early Hayekian adopters of this model, this was precisely the

point; governments and societies have no business in judging what individuals

want. To do so leads to the inefficiency and oppression of state socialism � now

vanquished in all quarters by the great public choice agenda in public services.

How far this principled defence of market democracy really is at play is, of course,

open to debate. Much of the history of POD in Britain has seemed to be more about

populist electoral politics, with a number of commentators seeing the Right to Buy,

in particular, as an overtly partisan (and largely successful) attempt to garner work-

ing class electoral allegiance to the Conservative Party (Jones and Murie, 2008;

Pattie, Dorling, & Johnston, 1995).

Leaving this short-term populism aside, however, there are, once again, two

serious and historic considerations that tell against the assumption of proposition

(4). First, our contemporary understanding of property does not fit the intuitions of

theoretical POD; and, second, the democratic culture of both Britain and the USA

is market-based and inherently atomistic, rather than being interactive and based on

mutual recognition.

Somewhat ironically, it is one of the strongest egalitarian advocates of POD,

Stuart White, who offers one of the most precise dissections of the social psychol-

ogy of the political POD I have just described. In the process he at least tacitly rec-

ognises the normative indeterminacy of proposition (3), with the social psychology

of property ownership potentially leading to what I have described as independence

rather than interdependence.

Thus, borrowing from Tocqueville’s analysis of the individualistic impulse of

modern democracies, White draws a distinction between two individualising and

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negative effects (White, 2012). The first effect is the cognitive error of over estimat-

ing one’s independence from the common resources and rules of a functional soci-

ety. The second individualising effect is effective; private ownership encourages an

emotional attachment to our immediate circle of family and friends and an indiffer-

ence to the rest of society. Unsurprisingly, White claims that there is a corrective to

this rather unattractive democratic culture � another dose of (strong) democracy �and suggests that the individualising tendencies of POD could be limited by a local

democracy, as ‘participation in local political bodies makes citizens more aware of

their interdependence, so correcting the illusion of self-sufficiency generated by the

wide dispersion of moderate wealth’ (White, 2012, p. 139). Other writers turn to

industrial democracy and workplace democracy for similar though less clearly

articulated reasons.

But the problem with this strategy is not hard to grasp: its direction is circular,

requiring sufficient democratic appetite to start the socialising process in the first

place, when the worry that led to the advocacy of more democracy was that there is

in fact very little such appetite. This kind of circularity, I should stress, is not in itself

objectionable or incoherent. The whole notion of path dependency � in which insti-

tutional and social outcomes are reinforced by self-sustaining processes � depends

on a similar circularity. For example, inadequate unemployment benefits undermine

support amongst higher income groups, and that loss of support can lead to even less

generous (and more targeted) payments. Likewise, the more public housing is tar-

geted on the poor, the more that the general population disassociate themselves from

this good � and the harder it comes to fund the greater supply (and coverage) that is

needed if public housing is to be viewed favourably by the general population. But

my point is that there needs to be some radical interruption of that path to set if off

in a more democratic direction, and there is little in the theoretical literature to sug-

gest that the egalitarians have really grasped this challenge.

2. Breaking the impasse: homeownership, interaction and ‘interdependence’

I have been arguing that the last of the POD propositions I listed in section 4 is

sociologically na€ıve. Far from being a pragmatic strategy for creating a more

socially inclusive and interdependent society, it runs hard against the grain of policy

and political culture in both Britain and the USA. This final section therefore argues

that a better strategy for achieving such ends would be to concentrate not on owner-

ship per se but the way in which it interacts with other tenures, as well as with dif-

ferent aspects of the welfare state.

This is not intended to be a defence of the status quo. Nor is it a denial that prop-

erty and wealth could, and should, be distributed more equitably. Rather, the point

is that the further distribution of property � and homeownership in particular � can

actually entrench inequalities. There are three points to be made here. The first is

that a wider distribution of homeownership may lead to something like a two-tier

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welfare state, with homeowners adequately insured against old age and the need for

a retirement income, but with an excluded rump having to rely on an ever more resi-

dualised traditional welfare state. This scenario has been suggested elsewhere (e.g.

Malpass, 2008) and, given the declining rate of owner-occupation, it is likely that

such a rump would be a large rather than a small minority. Moreover, within the

home-owning majority there could be very uneven welfare coverage, with some

households able to use greater wealth to finance better old-age provision and care.

This means that, in practice, egalitarian minded advocates of homeownership need

to develop a policy framework that uses housing wealth in a way that does not open

up new inequalities. One way of doing so would be something like the idea of a

mansion tax, which could be used to shore up more traditional forms of welfare pro-

vision. We should not, however, forget that the challenge for egalitarian POD is to

create the kind of political context in which this is a realistic proposal. Overt redis-

tributive polices such as a mansion tax (itself a relatively modest proposal) are per-

haps best viewed as end-point rather than a starting point.

The second point is that the political culture of POD, though deeply engrained in

Britain and the USA, is historically contingent. It could in principle be challenged

and changed. But in order to so it is vital to recognise the nature of this contingency,

and in particular the place of what this paper has referred to as proposition (2) of

egalitarian POD; the claim that property ownership has a transformative effect

on the individual, changing ‘the way people think and interact with the world’

(Sherraden, 1991).

Earlier in this paper it was argued that this claim is under specified. How prop-

erty changes the way in which people think and interact with the world is in fact the

precisely the issue that is up for grabs. Indeed, we have seen that the political cul-

ture of POD tends towards a world view that encourages a particular self-perception

of independence, which creates a certain type of (minimal) interaction with society

and the welfare state. This is clearly a very serious difficulty for advocates of egali-

tarian POD. Yet there is a sense in which it is made more difficult by the way in

which the egalitarian account of property is framed. For their major mistake is to

share the conservative assumption that it is the ownership of property itself that has

a transformative effect on individuals, rather than the relationship both between

owners and between owner-occupation and other tenures. This gives us reason to

believe that there is a necessary and intrinsic asset ‘effect’ that comes with owner-

ship. But if this is the case it becomes very hard to challenge the POD status quo.

To do so, we would need an account of why the intrinsic effects of homeownership

have not in fact led us in an inegalitarian direction.

In fact, there is no need for this. Thankfully there is no actual evidence of such

an intrinsic effect. A long-running debate seeking to identify a pure asset-effect has

failed to yield any convincing empirical evidence (see Kleinhans & Elsinga, 2010;

McKay & Kempson, 2003; McKnight & Karagiannaki, 2013; Richards & Thyer,

2011; Shlay, 2006; Zielewski et al., 2009). The key point at issue here is that, while

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there are strong correlations between homeownership and a range of positive out-

comes, there is no real evidence that it plays a true causal role. This may be bad

news for egalitarian advocates of POD, but it is good news for those who want

homeownership to form a significant part of a fair and progressive society. Recog-

nising the contingent impact of homeownership allows a more nuanced egalitarian

strategy, based not on ownership per se but on the different ways in which it can

structure social relations.

This brings us to the third and final point. The democratic component of an

egalitarian housing strategy need not be framed in the terms set out by the compet-

ing versions of POD we have examined in this paper (on the one hand, a demanding

participatory democracy, and on the other hand a minimal and rather thin

consumer or market democracy conservative POD). In the previous section we saw

that one of the central challenges for egalitarian POD is to create a form of demo-

cratic culture that offers more than the individualistic atomisation and self-interest

described by Tocqueville. We also saw that the proposed solution �more participa-

tory local government � relied on what it sets out to create, an appetite for interac-

tion and collective decision making. But Tocqueville was famous also for his

assertion that democracy is cultural as well as institutional. It is a culture, when

(and if) it really exists, of equal respect and equality of status. In this vision welfare

goods and services would be distributed in a way that does not create stigma � or

the republican’s domination � for the beneficiaries. In part this will come from a

more universal approach to welfare provision that avoids the creation of poor out-

sider groups (see Esping-Anderson, 1990; Larsen, 2008; Rothstein, 1998), and in

particular an outgroup of social renters. But it will also need to come from a clearer

articulation of the social subsidy that has assisted so many owner-occupiers, break-

ing down the binary distinctions that make for social hierarchy rather than a culture

of democratic equality.

Conclusion

This democratic equality of status does not come from out of the blue; it too is con-

tingent. But it is a contingency that housing policy is well placed to shape. There are

two clear candidates for a policy framework in which homeownership could play a

positive role in this regard. The first is through a policy of social and economic mix

within neighbourhoods. This is a path well-travelled in housing policy debates, and

there is a large literature on the potential benefits of neighbourhood effects on pov-

erty, with social mix often suggested as a means to the end of greater social exclusion

(Tunstall & Fenton, 2006). As we have just seen, there is also a well-known applica-

tion of the framework of welfare regimes to questions of welfare and stigma. But to

date there has actually been very little attention paid to the way in which a mix of

relatively affluent owner-occupiers and lower-income renters may shape broader atti-

tudes to welfare, and of the possibility that such a mix may change the ways in which

the affluent owner ‘thinks and interacts with the world’. The second candidate is the

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extension of shared ownership (currently less than 2 per cent of all housing in the

UK). The aim here would not simply be to offer a thin slice of the POD pie to more

people, but to shape a policy narrative around shared ownership in such a way that a

positive story is told about its hybrid nature, bridging the often binary distinction

between ‘independent’ owners and ‘dependent’ social tenants. These, of course, are

only the briefest of suggestions. It is unlikely that even taken together they will have

a transformative effect on society. But taken in conjunction with other structural

reforms � for example, greater security and something like a living wage at the bot-

tom end of the labour market � such an approach to homeownership may indeed

form part of a coherent egalitarian strategy.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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