Owner-Occupation: At Home with a Hybrid of Money and Materials

Susan J Smith
Additional contact information
Susan J Smith: Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, England

Environment and Planning A, 2008, vol. 40, issue 3, 520-535

Abstract: 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 mélange 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 tangibility of housing wealth as it inspires new styles of, and imperatives for, consumption.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a38423 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:40:y:2008:i:3:p:520-535

DOI: 10.1068/a38423

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().