Owner-occupation: at home with a hybrid of money and materials

This paper is about the changing character of housing assets, owned homes, and perhaps owner-occupiers themselves. It draws from two studies of UK homebuyers, whose lives are entangled in the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilisation of money. This mëlange is facilitated by a new generation of financial services that render housing wealth interchangeable with the cash economy, turning owned homes into a hybrid of money and materials. In total 150 qualitative narratives are interrogated to document three key trends. First, a shift of households' disposition, from opting for ownership by chance to banking on housing by design. Second, a change of financial orientation as property-holding citizens illapse into asset-accumulating investors. Third, an ethically charged encounter between the governance of housing and the micropolitics of home, which is prompted by the growing fungibility of housing wealth as it inspires new styles of, and imperatives for, consumption. DOI:10.1068/a38423 (1) Thanks to Boris Wiseman for this idea, which was discussed in our joint workshop on the Politics of Home in Durham University's interdisciplinary seminar onWriting, Culture and Identity in a Postcolonial World (March 2005). This is what gives rise to the complex, politically charged, and ethically challenging entanglements between the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilisation of money (the flow of cash and credit in market societies), which are the subject of this paper. In a country like Britainöwhich epitomises the drive to `financial marketisation' in housing, and so provides the setting for my discussionöowner-occupation grew at four times the rate of the housing stock as a whole in the last half of the 20th century. This part of the housing market currently accommodates nearly 70% of the population (rising to 85% among households in mid-life), and residential mortgage loans account for a high proportion of the consolidated assets of the financial system. Reviewing the strategies of government and the policies of transnational financial organisations, it is easy to read this as part of a necessary and inevitable drive towards mature (housing and financial) markets which work efficiently. However, a paradigm shift at the interface of economic and social research has exposed the extent to which markets are made, not given, and this is my point of departure. Owned homes are a hybrid of money, materials, and meanings. The question is, what makes this hybrid `work'ö financially, politically, socially, and domestically? What brings the financial and cultural materials of owned homes together; what accounts for their social and economic constitution; what products and practices help prise them apart; and what, more generally, energises their physical and financial fabric? I have argued before that one route into an appreciation of how (housing) markets work is via `small stories' embedded in lay practices (Smith, 2005b). These stories might helpfully inform the stylised facts of economists' models, but they exceed and revise these assumptions, often in surprising ways. So I shall stick with that approach here, drawing on the ideas and inspiration contained in two rather different qualitative studies of homeowners/buyers in the UK.(2) Both studies were completed during 1999 ^ 2000. One is a study of Housing for Health, which includes interviews with eighty-four households in three UK regions, all but ten of whom were either owner-occupiers at the time of the research, or had owned a home in the recent past. The other projectöThe Anatomy of a Housing Boomöis a study of house-price appreciation in Edinburgh, Scotland. This project includes interviews with sixty-six households who bought homes in 1998 ^ 99 within high-priced, mediumpriced, and low-priced urban neighbourhoods at the leading edge of Britain's most recent housing boom. In the discussion that follows, I draw from a total of 150 separate narratives to explore an encounter between two styles of politics. On the one hand, I am concerned with the `grammars of living' prescribed in the acts of governance that conspire to make homeowning what it is. On the other hand, I draw attention to the `home rules' these encounter, as the micropolitics of households animate the meaning and materiality of dwelling. In the first half of the paper, therefore, I chart what might be thought of as the emendation of an `investor figure' for the new financial order of housing. Here, I explore the technologies and practicalities of a politically inspired shift in households' disposition away from a tendency to opt for ownership by chance, towards an inclination to bank on housing by design. In the second part of the paper, I consider how home occupiers engage with this at a time when new options for mortgage-equity withdrawal mean that households' major source of wealth, which was once fixed in bricks and mortar, is increasingly available to spend. (2) The primary data were collated for ESRC-funded projects: R0000237960 and R000222902. Owner-occupation: at home with a hybrid of money and materials 521