Home ownership in Europe:policy and research issues
International Workshop
November 23-24, 2006, Delft, the Netherlands
Convergence? Home Ownership and Asset-Based Welfare Regimes
Richard Ronald OTB, Research Institute Delft University of Technology
Convergence? Home Ownership and Asset-Based Welfare Regimes Abstract
Recent analyses of changes in housing policy and welfare systems have identified the growing significance of home ownership as the basis of developments in welfare regimes toward greater reliance on the housing property assets that households own for the provision of pensions and old age care, as well as insurance against risks in the employment market. The idea of an asset or property based welfare system has not only been associated with societies that have established a strong owner-occupier sector, but has also been linked with changing approaches towards housing policy and housing consumption in social democratic societies that have historically nurtured integrated housing systems and strong social renting sectors such as Sweden and the Netherlands. While there is still strong evidence to suggest that housing systems will retain their distinctiveness in each society, there is an argument for potential convergence around such an approach based on the growing influence of market based ideologies in state strategies across western societies, the growing strains on welfare resources and expected shortfalls in future pension resources. The establishment of housing and welfare systems in industrialized East Asian societies around minimal welfare states and family orientated welfare provision supported by housing investments has also led support to the idea of convergence. This paper sets out to explore the relationship between home ownership and welfare regimes in terms of conflicting theories of convergence and divergence, and critically addresses the argument for growing conformity across advanced industrialized societies around home ownership orientated asset-based welfare systems. While we establish that there is some reason to argue that Anglo-Saxon homeowner societies have potential to develop along the lines of East Asian property based welfare, there are also substantial differences between the two systems of home ownership and the regime structures behind them. Furthermore, the likelihood of social democratic western European societies to follow the pattern of mass home-ownership established in countries like the UK is also suspect.
Richard Ronald
OTB, Research Institute
Delft University of Technology
Introduction
Theoretical discourses concerning convergence between industrialized societies have, historically, dominated social and economic research on housing and welfare systems (see Kemeny and Lowe, 1998, Stephens, 2003). Such approaches have become even more prominent in light of the apparent advancement of processes of globalization and the further quickening and deepening of integration between societies in terms of social, cultural and economic processes (Waters, 1995). Housing systems, as a dimension of the economy, social structure and welfare system, have had a rather ambiguous role in social development as there is strong divergence between contexts, traditions and practices, and policy pathways in each society. Furthermore, within welfare states, which have substantially mediated patterns of convergence and divergence between societies, housing has been considered a relatively wobbly pillar, or poorly integrated into the structure of social systems and welfare regimes (Torgersen, 1987; Wilensky, 1981). Nevertheless, in light of the recent growth of home ownership across many western industrialized societies, which has largely enhanced the accumulation of household property assets along with house price inflation, owner-occupation has been increasingly considered an emerging convergent feature of capitalist societies in the latest period of modernity. While there has been a presumption that growing levels of home ownership reflect growing affluence, it has been argued that recent changes in housing demand and welfare systems illustrate a structural change in the role of home ownership in welfare systems across societies (Kemeny, 2005).
Home ownership has arguably augmented in importance in the macro and micro economic structures of a growing number of industrialized societies at the same time as the legitimacy and viability of state provided social protection measures have come under increasing pressure. Home ownership is increasingly linking households to broader structures of global capital and risk, and has been perceived to provide a substantial asset with which to protect households against economic fluctuations (see Ford et al, 2001). In terms of accelerated globalization and the shrinking of welfare protection, therefore, it has been suggested that housing has taken on an advanced significance in recent years. In some societies, specifically those considered economically liberal and characterized by mass-home-ownership, there have been assertions that the home ownership system is a growing base for the restructuring of welfare provision around the housing property assets that large groups of households have built up (Regan et al 2001; Sherraden, 2003; Groves et al 2007). Essentially, such welfare systems are characterized by growing reliance in state welfare provision strategies on the augmentation of individual housing assets which provide the individual with a hedge against unemployment insecurity, unexpected welfare needs and potential pension shortfalls. Housing and related policies in such systems thus become more prominent and seek to enhance ‘choice’ and the ability of households across income-groups to invest in housing properties, which is achieved by greater marketization and deregulation of property markets and the privatization of housing in terms of stock transfers and housing consumption.
convergence around asset orientated welfare arrangements have also been speculatively made concerning corporate and social democratic welfare regimes in Western European societies, where there has been some erosion of welfare measures, moves away from direct state management of social rental housing stock, and increasing demand for owner-occupied housing. The argument for convergence has also been strengthened by analyses of newly industrialized East Asian welfare regimes where a form of asset-based welfare mediated by state support of the nurturing of family owned housing assets.
The central aim of this paper is to question the foundations of the argument for convergence across a broader range of societies around home ownership and asset-based welfare. We begin our analysis by exploring understandings of the role of housing and home ownership in welfare systems, which have often been focused on as a force for divergence between social systems. Housing is more significant in welfare than traditional approaches have allowed as it has been conceptually difficult to locate within networks of welfare provision, where it interconnects family, market and state spheres, and the nature of this integration varies substantially from society to society. We then consider the impact of globalization discourses on the approaches of nation states to housing policy and international economic competition, as well as arguments put forward for convergence around asset-based welfare policies. Our critique begins by assessing the inequalities inherent in this system. We go on to question the potential for corporate and social democratic regimes in societies with traditionally strong welfare states and rental housing sectors to fall in line with trends towards home ownership and asset-based welfare provision. We also challenge some of the assertions concerning convergence between Western and East Asian approaches to asset-based welfare where the role of the state and family, the nature of welfare support, the hegemonic political base and the housing market system are substantially different.
The argument we put forward, while very skeptical of convergence around asset-based welfare structures, identifies an element of policy alignment in advanced industrialized societies around the logic of neo-liberal discourses. States have reacted to globalization as a cause to withdraw from policy regulation, reduce public spending and increase economic and labour market competitiveness. An acceleration of the supply and demand for home ownership, an erosion of employment security and a decline in welfare safety nets have been a result, which have effectively increased the influence of, and vulnerability to, globalized economic forces and fluctuations.
Housing, Divergence and Welfare States
the level of corporatism, in terms of the balance between working class interests and capitalist interests. It is thus suggested that the welfare state will be most developed, and welfare-state ideologies most powerful, where a centralized government is able to mobilize, and must respond to a large, strongly organized working class with only modest rates of social mobility (1975:68).
Esping-Andersen’s (1990) analysis of different forms of welfare capitalism has provided one of the most influential understandings of patterns of differential development. Critically, from this perspective welfare states have been definitive in the construction of different models of post-war capitalism orientated towards different policy regimes. He argues that three factors are of prime importance in determining which policy regime will emerge: class mobilization, class-political coalition structures, and the historical legacy of regime institutionalization (1990, 29). In this model societies are grouped into three worlds, each with ‘qualitatively different welfare-state logics’ (1990:5). These welfare ‘regimes’ generate ‘systems’ that can be described as de-commodified (social democratic), conservative (corporatist) or residual (liberal). Essentially, regimes are understood as the result of interclass alliances and power conflict resolutions in each society leading to social and institutional processes, and discernable and divergent structures of relations between the state, economy, legal organization and institutional structures, which are systematically interwoven.
In terms of understanding power relations, therefore, ‘labour movement theory’ is central to Esping-Andersen, with differences between societies shaped by how labour unions and parties have been more or less successful in shaping government policies. Social democratic welfare regimes are dominated by working class movements establishing alliances with other groups and classes while keeping conservative forces divided or isolated. Typical examples in this case are Sweden and the Netherlands where collective interests have been supported and social welfare programmes developed more comprehensively. Corporatist welfare regimes are effectively deadlocked power systems in which no interest can dominate with each party negotiating its own welfare sub-system from corporatist political horse trading. Germany is more typical of this case. Liberal regimes emerge in systems dominated by capitalist interests who oppose a divided working class. It is the reverse of a social democratic regime as the working class remains divided while conservative forces hold the middle as well as right-wing ground. The USA and UK are considered key examples of such societies where there is generally an assertion of market interests over collective ones in social provision. Consequently he argues that Sweden Germany and the USA, for example, are heading towards three diverse ‘post-industrial’ capitalist models (1990:229)
Three further criteria are used to distinguish Esping-Andersen’s worlds of welfare: the quality of social rights, social stratification, and the relationship between state, market and family (1990:29). Focus on the latter has led to the assertion that there are also South European regimes and East Asian regime types. In the ‘Southern European regime’ the family plays a very important role in providing welfare of different kinds, and is integrated within broad kinship networks among extended family members. Castles and Ferrara identify the key features of a South European system, with Spain and Italy as typical cases.
junctures of the life cycle (housing, employment, child minding, income), not infrequently as a consequence of defective public policies (1996:181).
By considering the sources of welfare provision in more dynamic terms greater subtlety can be added to the concept of diversity in welfare systems. While the family is often the main provider of welfare goods, the market also provides a means by which welfare goods can be bought. The state is thus only one of many service providers (see Rose and Shiritori, 1986). The relationships between welfare services, sources and providers is indeed complex, and housing itself, although often neglected from analysis of welfare systems is central to these relations between household market and state, as the south European case demonstrates. Housing is not just a form of welfare good in itself in terms of shelter etc, but also forms the basis of how the household or family procure, use and share other welfare goods. It acts as a store of welfare resources for both renters who are more concerned with its use value, and owners who may be more concerned with asset value. Such resources can also be carried across generations or be exchanged. Housing also situates the household in a market where people compete for and trade housing goods, and establishes more or less dependent relationships with the state for the satisfaction of welfare needs.
Welfare systems in economically developed East Asian, or Confucian, societies (see Jones, 1993; Goodman and Peng, 1996), where there is also an elevated role of the family in welfare, have also been identified as a welfare system type. Holliday (2000), moreover, attempts to identify criteria by which East Asian societies can be included into a welfare capitalism model as a distinct regime. Among the East Asian Tigers social policy is strictly subordinate to the overriding policy objective of economic growth, and everything else flows from this: minimal social rights with extensions linked to productive activity, reinforcement of the position of the productive elements in society, and state-market-family relationships directed towards growth (2000:708).
The cases of Australia and New Zealand also confound Esping-Andersen’s categorization to the extent that although the orientation of the welfare system appears liberal (a weak welfare state), the corporatist balance has historically been strongly influenced by union based collectivism. Castles (1985) argues that labour movements in these societies adopted a very different political strategy to those in Europe, which has not been based on expanding the social wage, but on ensuring that wage-levels were kept above the minimum, which in combination with low marginal tax rates, makes sure that living standards for workers can be maintained. Essentially, a high wage economy has emerged in which a strong working class has turned to a high private wage strategy over a social wage one. This strategy is called ‘the wage earner’s welfare state’ and is argued to be different from other societies considered welfare state ‘laggards’ due to the existence of a statutory wage regulation system which has generally provided a national level of needs-fulfillment below which the vast majority of wage-earners could not fall (1985:103). This approach casts considerable doubt on the concept that the measure of social wages is satisfactory in understanding the degree of welfare in a society. These cases also throw into question the assumed class, power bases of welfare systems, were an organized and mobilized working class is assumed to demand higher social wages through publicly provided welfare services.
of housing in relation to the state (1975:7). For Harloe (1995) the barriers to the de-commodification of housing are greater than for other forms of welfare, as so much is provided through the market, meaning that it largely exerts an exogenous influence on welfare systems. For Kemeny, however, the housing dimension provides a particular insight into processes of divergence between social regimes as it is so deeply embedded in social structure and is so difficult to disentangle from other forms of welfare (1992:80). Moreover, Kemeny states, ‘Housing, because of its central importance to the nature of the social structure and its pivotal role in state welfare provision, provides a crucial link between the welfare state and the social structure’ (1992: 111).
So far we have tried to develop an understanding of patterns of social development and divergence within western capitalist societies along lines of understanding of the complexities of welfare systems. While the housing dimension has been largely absent from debates, housing systems may be critically influential in patterns of social change not only because they structure the pattern and orientation of welfare providers and users (in terms of levels de-commodification), but also because of the way housing tenure impacts the social structure and commodifies or de-commodifies relations.
The concept of de-commodification of services based on social rights in which people are allowed to meet living standards independent of pure market forces, is critical to Esping-Andersen’s understanding of welfare states (1990) He operationalises the concept of de-commodification in order to establish at what level different welfare systems enabled people to maintain their livelihood without reliance on the market. However, Groves et al (2007), among others, argue that such measures aren’t enough to provide an adequate base by which to compare different welfare systems as social security systems are designed to complement and integrate with other related measures. Critically, housing was not taken into consideration in Esping-Andersen’s de-commodification scale, but plays a crucial role in mediating forms and levels of welfare provision between the family, the state and the market. For example, non-profit-housing contributes substantially to the framework of state welfare and services in some societies, whereas home ownership grounds welfare more firmly with the family and the market in others. Arguably, the absence of housing and tenure in welfare models has lead to substantial underdevelopment in the understanding of the nature of regimes.
Kemeny (1992) introduces housing as a key element in understanding welfare regimes in his model of housing and society, Kemeny draws a distinction between private and collective forms of social structure. Societies with highly developed welfare states have more collectivised social structures reflecting a more collectivist hegemony. Poorly developed or residualised welfare states tend to be characterized by privatized social structures reflecting individualist and privatist hegemonies. Kemeny proposes the long-term viability of the welfare state varies in relation to the degree of collectivism or privatism contained in the ideology underlying the social structure. In understanding this relationship housing plays a key role. Essentially, ideologies leaning towards either collectivism or privatism are thought to have a substantial effect on housing policies and the organization of tenure, with privatistic societies being dominated by home ownership and collectivistic ones by renting. Home ownership in line with ideology thus has a considerable effect on social structures which become orientated toward privatistic policies and welfare frameworks.
home-ownership re-structures or redistributes wealth over the lifecycle from the young to the old, with the ‘front-end loading’ of debt. Essentially, in privatistic societies where home ownership dominates, younger households must save for a deposit in order to enter the mainstream, owner-occupied housing ladder. Housing costs are then heaviest in the early years (mortgage burdens on first time buyers can consume more than a third of household income) but diminish as the household ages, becoming minimal after the mortgage is paid off. Elderly households can thus survive on a smaller pension, as housing costs are minimal, and use their housing property assets as a reservoir of capital to cover the costs of extra welfare needs and possibly care. In societies with more collectivistic social structures, alternatively, where renting dominates, housing costs vary much less over the lifecycle and households rely more throughout on generous welfare and pension systems. For Kemeny then, there is an expected effect on orientations toward welfare in homeowner societies. The pressures put on a household to pay for private housing are thought to engender a strong resistance to public expenditure that necessitates the high taxes needed to fund quality universal welfare provision and provide for those who haven’t paid high housing costs to cover themselves in later life. Homeowners are thus thought to be more orientated towards individualized self-reliance and resistant to indiscriminate forms of welfare.
The effects on privatism and the lifecycle redistributive impact of home ownership may be considerable and, it is suggested, may be sufficient to create a symbiotic relationship between home ownership and welfare. In the early 1980s Kemeny thus predicted that countries where privatist ideologies prevail, rates of home ownership should be higher and relative levels of public spending should be lower than in countries where collectivist ideologies dominate. This was tested by looking at correlations between home ownership rates and welfare spending in a small number of countries, but was reinforced by later studies that tended to confirm the relationship (see Schmidt, 1989; Castles & Ferrera, 1996, Castles, 1998). Following Kemeny, understanding of relationships between welfare and society, and the organization of housing thus implicate housing tenure in processes of welfare and social divergence.
housing systems. The particular model of this convergence is a new type of asset-based welfare system. Before we specifically consider this welfare phenomenon it is useful to address the globalization discourses from which it emerged, and their interaction with policy and housing systems.
Globalization and the Reorientation of the State
It can be assumed, following globalization debates that societies are increasingly synchronizing within an international network of economic and cultural patterns and flows. Globalization has been taken to denote the expanding, deepening and speeding-up of interregional flows and patterns of interaction, which represents a fundamental transformation in the scale of human organization expanding the reach of power relations across the world’s regions. On one hand, a globally comprehensive process of homogenization or ‘creolization’ of cultural forms and meanings is taking place (Hannerz, 1992). On the other, intensified convergence of management and institutional forms, along with the growing interconnectedness of markets and financial networks is evident. ‘According to the new orthodoxy, we are now entering a new phase in world history in which cross border flows in goods and services, investment, finance and technology are creating a seamless world market where the law of one price will prevail’ (Weiss, 1998:167).
A central argument has been that either real changes in global interactions, or discourses of globalization themselves have had a growing and transforming effect on the integrity of welfare states and the nature of national and international governance. In the early post-war era central banks and centralized institutions enabled governments to act with some degree of autonomy and enforce a local level of control over markets via levies, taxes etc. This was reinforced by high information, transport and communication costs. National governments also had the ability to redistribute market advantages and disadvantages between regions, groups and individuals. Such freedom was central to the development of separate welfare states and practices, and allowed many social democratic governments to redistribute substantial resources in de-commodified forms based on principles of equity. However, in the 1960s a period of de-territorialization of financial institutions and markets was initiated, and large companies began to redistribute their offices and power centres more internationally. Running parallel with the globalization of financial capital was the globalization of manufacturing capital. This meant greater standardization of products offering greater economies of scale alongside a new international division of labour with semi-skilled manufacturing increasingly moving to the developing world (Levett, 1983).
Since the 1970s the power and autonomy of nation states has been undermined by these new patterns of global economic interconnectedness and supra-national organizational relations. Essentially it has been argued that the powers of nation states have been limited through a complex displacement of powers upward, downward and outward (Jessop, 1996: 178). Globalization debates have thus considered the end of ‘national capitalisms’, which demonstrate characteristic welfare systems and national policies, and have alternatively emphasized the power of financial and economic forces to reshape and relocate boundaries and relationships between countries, cultures and communities.
with poor labour rights, the drive to maintain economic competitiveness and submission to the logic of globalization is characteristic of new state ideologies and approaches to socio-economic development. In terms of welfare strategies this had led to increasing deregulation, marketization and commodification of systems and services and an erosion of social safety nets and public provision with, consequently, an increasing focus on household self-reliance and market based forms of provision. In terms of labour, global shifts have brought about a less regulated and more flexible labour market with more low-paid work and job insecurity.
Variations in responses to global pressures illustrate differences in the degree to which countries seek to manage international competition by deregulating employment and markets to secure flexibility. Variations can be attributed to different national starting points, the scale of economic development, the ability of actors to exercise autonomy in a society, and the extent to which neo-liberal ideology has permeated each country. Although national governments cannot evade the risks engendered by globalized markets, they may be able to control its form and distribution (White 1996). Countries have some room to maneuver and can deal with increasing pressures, leading to more unemployment, part time employment and casualization of contracts in some societies rather than others. Indeed, many commentators are skeptical of economically deterministic, convergence based globalization approaches as there does not seem to be a simple mechanistic process or single cause that has led to similar effects in different societies associated with globalization. Recent analyses of globalization have suggested that the competitive demands of the same system could eventually reverse the trend towards homogenization (Mabett and Bolderson, 1999).
In the countries where the impact of globalization appears most substantial – normally assumed to be western liberal regimes – a key element has been the embeddedness of neo-liberal ideology and a globalization discourse endowed with meanings of a consumerist free market world (Steger, 2003). It is suggested that eo-liberalism has prevailed as a policy imperative as many governments have followed its directives in forming their relationship with the globalization of capital and markets. Critically, however, ‘globalization has developed through structuration processes in which actors have constrained, but never the less significant choices’ (Scholte, 2000:107). States have thus been able to use globalization as an excuse for their own failures (Waters, 1995), or as a convenient and convincing cover story for policies they want to promote anyway, and in doing so, may in fact be guiding globalization. Through deregulation of financial markets governments have mediated the penetration of agencies into areas in which they previously had no foothold (see Helleiner, 1995).
There is thus a ‘reflexivity in globalization’ so that effects are distributed unevenly (Waters, 1995:107). This can be seen particularly in housing markets where the impact of global changes and ebbs and flows in the fortunes of markets and capital, where the action of governments and local mediating agencies influence the level of impact and nature of interaction (Stephens, 2003). What is important for Steger (2003) is the strength of the discourse of globalization, which is difficult to resist as it has on its side powerful social forces that have already pre-selected what counts as ‘real’. There has consequently been an emphasis on the ‘reality’ and ‘inevitability’ of free flows of capital which has framed and shaped institutional structures and actions.
firstly, to the logic that the government is limited in its maneuverability because of global forces, and secondly, the need to retain the confidence of investors and capital flows by keeping both tight control over public spending and limits on taxation at the top-end of incomes. The effect has been substantial reductions in state spending on housing and deregulation of private housing markets. For Clapham this has led in the UK, for example, to a focus in housing policy on sustaining the flexibility of labour markets, which is thought to increase the productivity of labour and allows industries and individual companies to respond quickly to changing demands and tastes. Measures taken reflect this new perspective on the nature and purpose of housing policy, with steps taken to support supply side measures and withdraw selective regional assistance. The effect has been to enhance imbalances in the housing system. For Clapham the source of the problem has been the acceptance or complicity of all British political parties with discourses of globalization. This has ‘shaped housing policy through the creation of a new agenda of housing needs whilst also placing constraints on the ability of government to meet them. The response of successive governments to the challenges posed by the discourse has been to answer the neo-liberal discourses with a neo-neo-liberal housing policy’ (2006:62)
Changes to welfare systems have been, arguably, a central means by which governments respond to the neo-liberalizing pressures of globalization. While more social democratic regimes have sought to contain the exacerbation of risk through the rationalization of welfare systems, liberal regimes have embraced market processes and increasingly devolved the focus of responsibility from the state to the individual for welfare and socio-economic security. A number of theorists (Ford, Burrows and Nettleton, 2001; Doling, Ford and Horsewood, 2003) have emphasized the relationship between globalization and transformations in housing, welfare and work with the growth of a ‘risk society’ (Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1993) where risks are increasingly transferred from institutions to individuals whose situation is aggravated by the retreat of collective provision and the individualization of responsibilities. Home ownership has become more central to the relationship between forces of globalization, the state and the individual as the deregulation and marketisation of housing has pushed increasing numbers of households into owner-occupation, making people more dependent on the housing market and vulnerable to economic fluctuations in the maintenance of economic security. The risks of social and economic changes, and responsibility and accountability for coping with them are thus increasingly landed on the individual rather than the state and corporate institutions.
stability of households. Experiences of owner-occupation have become advancingly erratic and unpredictable, with rates of repossessions and failure to meet loan repayments becoming characteristic in some western homeowner societies (see Ford et al., 2001).
Despite the intensification of risk and economic insecurity, the role of home ownership has been enhanced by changes in employment and welfare, where owner-occupied homes, which function in most cases as the main reserve of household assets, are central to household strategies for social security in case of unemployment and retirement. Ironically, home ownership has become less stable and much more risky due to the same changes in welfare and employment which have destabilized the income basis of mortgage repayment. A significant outcome is the re-situating of housing in life-plans and economic strategies. Doling and Horsewood (2003) focus on how the position of homeowners vis-à-vis welfare states and economic strategies have been restructured, where housing assets accumulated over the lifetime facilitate early retirement or provide some financial insurance against unemployment and the increasing causualisation of work contracts. Home ownership may have also taken on a greater significance to ontological security and self-identity under increasingly individualized social conditions (Giddens, 1990, 1998).
The picture we have painted of globalization and risk so far is perhaps an exaggerated one, and there is substantial evidence to suggest that the decline of ontological conditions and social relations identified by Beck are not so extreme (Mythen, 2005). Similarly, the way each individual society has responded to the restructuring of global production and changing economic conditions is far from convergent and has been critically influenced by indigenous political relations, geo-historical conditions, policy pathways and socio-cultural welfare practices and traditions. While housing policy frameworks appear to have realigned across a range of industrialized societies towards home ownership, systems of owner-occupied housing have been identified as a substantial variant which have helped maintain the distinctiveness of policy regimes and welfare approaches. Lending patterns and mortgage systems have remained notably parochial in the face of international flows of finance (Stephens, 2003; Doling and Ford, 2003), and, indeed, governments have actively intervened in markets in different ways to ensure their development. In some countries, like Japan, there has been reliance on government housing loan provision and an underdevelopment of mortgage finance. In the Netherlands the growth of owner-occupation has been supported by state backed guarantees on mortgages and tax subsidies for homeowners. Housing systems in other countries like Britain have been characterized by the intensified development of mortgage products and the privatization of social housing. Contextual differences, differentiated labour market trends and the diverse nature of social security frameworks also contribute to a pattern of diversity in welfare development and social outcomes (see Elsinga et al., 2007).
The Asset-based Welfare Regime
In western homeowner societies the idea of a ‘property-based’ or ‘asset-based; welfare system has become increasingly central to debates on the restructuring of welfare systems (Regan and Paxton, 2001). Sherraden (2003) points to changes in welfare policy in some developed economies as a shift away from a welfare state to a social investment state, where the role of government is to build up individual capacity. Such approaches emphasize choice and opportunity, individual accountability, the superiority of the market in welfare provision. They are reliant on the investment of individual households in properties and financial products which augment over time, and thus provide a base from which to procure welfare services from the market. The expansion of individual owner-occupied housing assets are a central target of asset-based welfare systems and fundamental to strategies to re-orientate welfare systems in these terms. Considering more than two thirds of European and North American households are now homeowners and that house prices have boomed over the last decade, it is has been argued that governments across western regimes will turn more and more to individually held property assets in re-orientating their economic strategies and welfare systems in conditions of intensified global competition (see Doling and Horsewood, 2003; Kemeny 2005; Groves et al., 2007).
A particular factor in the shift towards asset-based welfare is what has been referred to as the pensions ‘time-bomb’ (see Doling and Horesewood, 2003). This is based on two developing features of advanced industrial societies. The first is demographic. The nature of social ageing has become particularly exaggerated as post-war baby boomers head towards retirement. Moreover, age distribution over the whole population will become increasingly and more comprehensively top heavy in the following decades. The median age of the European population was 37.7 in 2000 and is expected to be 49.9 by 2050. In the USA it is estimated that the population aged over 65 will increase from 37 million to 75 million by 2035 and to 95 million in 2075. Life expectancy for people currently age 65 is estimated to be 83 years. In 2035, it is estimated to be 85 years, and in 2075, 87 years. The rate of ageing is most exaggerated in Japan where over 19 percent of the population is already over 65 (see UN, 2005; World Population Prospects). Social ageing is having a critical effect on the economic balance of societies as the working population shrinks and the population dependant on pension incomes increases.
The second feature is determined by the failure in many societies to develop adequate welfare and pension systems to cope with demographic changes. In Britain, for example, in the 1980s the government began encouraging private pensions in response to poor expectations concerning the sustainability, or desirability, of the pension system. While private pension schemes are not proving to be as effective as hoped in coping with growing needs of the ageing population, state pensions have not been adequately increased and no longer effectively function as a primary means of subsistence in retirement. Indeed, the government has ostensibly abandoned the idea that state pensions and state care facilities can form the long term basis of old age care and support (the Pension Credit scheme was introduced in 2003 as a means-tested measure to top-up state pensions). Another factor that has exacerbated the stability of pensions is the erosion of stability in employment relations and the casualisation of work contracts, which has undermined the stability of incomes and thereby pensions contributions and the use of household economic resources.
global developments. They identify a shift in the state’s approach to relationships between individuals, housing property and welfare provision in which policy measures increasingly seek to encourage people to fend for themselves in older age through acquiring property and especially through buying and selling houses (2007:190). Housing policy, which was historically an irregular feature in welfare systems, has thus become central, and property ownership has been progressively seen as a mechanism, not just for meeting shelter needs, but for protecting households from other contingencies, especially those associated with old age. In Britain in the 1980s, shifts in housing policy sought to push the majority of households into owner-occupation, with the remaining public and non-profit housing sector increasingly associated with lower income households. Housing markets also fundamentally elevated the significance of housing properties as assets and investment goods, with growing numbers of households no longer just trading up in order to get better housing, but also in order to increase the store of wealth afforded by owner-occupation (2007:189). This was also accompanied by a growth in the amount of families who owned more than one property and the growth of the buy-to-let sector. These developments emerged concomitantly with the emergence of problems in both public and private pension schemes leading to realignment in the welfare state towards housing and assets.
Changing attitudes concerning older people in relation to long term care and pensions are significant, especially in context of the expected explosion of the so called pension’s time bomb and numbers of elderly. The functions of the welfare state are increasingly expected, by both states, who recognize the significance of property wealth held by older generations, and individuals, who have decreasing expectations of state welfare services, to be met by the market. Governments well appreciate that a likely response by many homeowners to the care and pension situation is to look to equity release from their properties. In liberal homeowner societies the nature of equity release products has become highly sophisticated along with deregulation and heightened competition among lenders and the financial sector (see Smith, 2006), which has made the wealth tied up in property appear more tangible. Home owners moving into long term care are increasingly expected to fund their care from equity held in their home. This marks a substantial shift in the overall logic of welfare regimes and the relative influence of citizenship rights.
The citizen, rather than being guaranteed a range of social benefits as a right of citizenship, is being reminded that they could afford to purchase these services through the market by drawing upon the wealth that they have accumulated through home ownership (Groves et al., 2007:193).
Child Trust Fund, introduced in the early 2000s, where the very youngest are encouraged to develop a reservoir of assets. In the longer term patterns of building up of assets to support higher education, followed by the building up of assets through home ownership and pension schemes to provide for retirement are likely to become more central to lifecycles and the distribution of life chances.
The British Labour government has been very explicit about its intentions to expand home ownership and the new approach to housing in welfare. A series of reports has presented a new more comprehensive approach to housing centered on home ownership and improving access to and efficiency of markets rather than enhanced state provision (see for example, ODPM, 2005). Some have argued more cynically that the growth of equity held in the form of home ownership has attracted different parts of the government who are looking ways to exploit the wealth individuals hold (Somerville, 2005). Critically for Groves et al, the property based approach of the state does not negate responsibilities for welfare, but signifies that the way such responsibilities should be discharged should be market based. Housing in future will essentially be more multifaceted and entrenched in the way welfare is facilitated. It will constitute a means of shelter, be important to intergenerational transfers, and underpin the provision of other services where wealth is released from property to cover needs. Essentially, in arguing for the centrality of home ownership in the overall structure of welfare services, Groves et al imply that housing is going from being the wobbly pillar to being the ‘cornerstone’ of the welfare state.
Evidence for the embedding and growing orientation around asset-based welfare has been largely drawn from the British context and the idea of a workfare welfare system in Australia, described earlier (Castles 1998), is also strongly aligned with this model. Furthermore, links have been made between asset-based welfare in the west and the structure of housing and family based welfare systems in industrially developed East Asia, where housing assets are fundamental to household security in a context of underdevelopment of de-commodified public services and goods. Groves et al thus suggest a growing convergence around the asset-based model, with even European societies that have had large not-for-profit housing sectors, moving towards a greater residualisation of social housing sectors and the expansion of owner-occupation.
For Kemeny (2005), in collectivist or social democratic regimes, services for the elderly have been cut-back substantially and needs testing has become more stringent (enough to effectively exclude large groups of applicants and deter even more from even bothering to apply), which may influence the choices of younger, more affluent households who may increasingly see owner-occupation as a means of self-protection for old age.
For Groves et al, this is already apparent in countries like the Netherlands and Sweden where municipal housing providers are being replaced, and movement of middle class households out of renting and into owning is also evident.
What we are seeing is the reconstruction of the welfare state in the context of changes in the global economy: the newly emerging welfare state is more stratified and the associations between residence and income or social class are more clear-cut… The pattern identified in Britain is being reproduced elsewhere in Europe and the new model of welfare states in these countries put individual property-ownership in a more central position, much more comparable with that of East Asia (Groves et al., 2007:198-199)
Inequality and Asset-Based Welfare
Our critique of what we might call an asset-based welfare system convergence thesis, which identifies a coherent and expanding pattern of welfare obligations and provision networks based around the model we have just described, begins by emphasizing the inequitable nature of such a regime. Although they have no illusions that reliance on the market enhances inequalities, Groves et al seem reluctant to deal with the contradictory relationship between asset-based welfare and the ideal of universal rights. In principle, they see the development of an asset-based welfare state in Britain as a continuation of a commitment to public welfare and state responsibility for well being and the equitable distribution of life chances. They also neglect a fundamental ideological dimension as the shift towards asset-based welfare follows precisely along the lines of neo-liberal logic. States face a number of choices in terms of how to deal with ageing populations and pension pressures. Reliance on property ownership and the housing wealth of older generations is more opportunistic than ideal. Asset or property-based welfare essentially constitutes a means by which the reactionary or ideological responses of governments to global markets are translated into the structuring and orientation of welfare systems. It provides a means to re-commodify a whole set of established and de-commodified welfare services under the discursive umbrella of providing the most effective means for serving social needs and public well-being.
The main problem for Malpass (2006) is the focus on the market for the equitable satisfaction of security and welfare needs in asset-type welfare systems. Quintessentially, market mechanisms promote inequality and have little to do with ameliorating it. Markets give most choice to those with greatest purchasing power, and least to poorest, and, moreover, not everybody has the freedom to choose from the full range of what is on offer.
Indeed, markets tend to sort consumers and patterns of consumption so that the richest people not only have the most choice but also the best of what is available. The converse is also true of course, and the poor get the least choice and the worst of whatever is available (2006:112).
repayments or to have their property repossessed. Secondly, choices in markets themselves are agued to constitute a ‘tyranny of choice’, as it has been argued that it is possible to have an excess of choice to the point where it becomes oppressive (Schwartz, 2004).
For Clapham (2006) the move towards neo-liberal welfare and housing policies are argued to reflect government responses to discourses of globalization which have necessitated new approaches to social policies in the postmodern era. There are, however, many other ways societies can respond to intensified global competition and the changing context of welfare systems other than rely on greater marketisation of housing policy and deregulation of housing markets. Such shifts in housing policy are argued to enhance problems of poverty, specifically in terms of patterns of ‘social exclusion’ and ‘new poverty’. The concept of social exclusion stresses the enduring nature of poverty and its transmition from one generation to another. It also emphases the negative consequences of being outside mainstream society which has been exacerbated by greater orientation of social security and social opportunity around property markets and access to owner-occupied housing assets. The nature of poverty as an experience that touches a wide range of individuals, but is often passed through, is referred to as ‘new poverty’ (Leisering and Walker, 1998:13). Poverty, it is claimed, is no longer confined to members of the lower classes but reaches well into the middle classes if only as a temporary experience. Data from the British Household panel survey between 1991 and 2000 shows that although only 2% of households were below the threshold of 60% of median income over this period, 49% were below for at least one year (Department of Work and Pensions 2003). Increased reliance on housing markets for welfare and economic security inevitably makes a great number of households vulnerable to poverty over considerable periods of their housing career.
Convergence and Asset-based Welfare
While these criticisms of inequalities created by asset-based welfare states are important, the main thrust of our critique concerns the validity of claims that there is convergence, firstly, among western homeowner societies around where discourses about property based welfare have been most prominent. Secondly, in industrialized East Asian societies where the use of housing as a welfare asset is assumed to be well established, and thirdly, in social democratic West European societies where there has been marginal evidence of greater privatization in the housing system and some reduction in state commitment to universal welfare provision. Dealing with the first issue is most problematic, due to the lack of clear evidence. Essentially, a transparently asset-based welfare system has not fully crystallized in any western society and discourses on asset-based welfare has strongly drawn on inferences from shifts towards market orientated and deregulated policy, as well as policy discourse in government documents. The categories used by Kemeny (1992) and Esping Andersen to describe home owning and economically liberal welfare regimes are still more than adequate to account for the structuring of housing policy around housing markets and the residualisation of welfare. Recent changes, may suggest that the neo-liberal aspect of such welfare regimes may have entered a new period of intensity.
Tiger Contexts
structure of welfare services across this region where providing access to private housing, support of the construction sector and economic growth are more embedded with the legitimacy of governments and hegemonic power bases (Ronald, 2006). East Asian home ownership has not followed a simple neo-liberal logic based upon property based citizenship, and mass home ownership has been forged out of necessity rather than a principle of public welfare. A key feature of an East Asian housing model is state intervention, although housing is always delivered on market terms which belie the role and accountability of the state in welfare provision (see Ronald, 2006; Doling, 1999).
Singapore provides a particularly strong example of an East Asian asset-based welfare system. Essentially, although social security welfare is minimal in Singapore, the government has gone to great lengths to support a Central Providence Fund (CPF), (paid into by employer and employee) to provide for the retirement of workers. Equity built up in the CPF can be used to pay for a deposit on a publicly provided, owner-occupied (99 year lease) home, as well as for monthly mortgage repayments. Although housing is consumed at a market rate and development is carried out by private developers, the foundation of housing provision is essentially public in that the government directly controls the supply of land and influences development along central 5 year plans. While retiring Singaporeans can draw upon the CPF to a level based on their overall contributions, many people prefer to transfer the equity early-on to a housing property and participate in a process of asset building through movements up a home ownership housing ladder. Home ownership has now extended to around 90% of households in Singapore who largely rely on their housing assets to support their retirement.
However, there is a substantial contrast in the operation of this system to a western model of asset-based welfare as East Asian housing and welfare systems were established in post-war contexts where there was limited or no public provision at all. Neither was there political pressure, as in Europe, to establish collective provision mechanisms and universal citizenship rights. The purpose of the expansion of the owner-occupier section was to stimulate economic growth, and it has been rapid and sustained economic growth which has allowed home ownership to function as a family asset-base for welfare provision. East Asian regimes have been developed under soft authoritarian and often undemocratic principles and there has been little effective mobilization of the left or labour movements (Holliday, 2000, Jones 1993). The legitimacy of the state has been made possible by economic growth, and home ownership has been a critical means by which wealth has been transferred to individual households in cases where the increase in overall GDP is translated into housing market increases. Owner-occupation has been central to the formation of East Asian urban middle-classes who have primarily demanded the state provision of services and goods which enhance the ability of households and families to improve their own economic condition (such as education and publicly facilitated housing investment properties) rather than social wages (Ronald, 2006; Clammer, 2001).
large owner-occupied housing assets were excluded from such welfare services through means-testing, and were responsible for their own care needs. Commitment to owner-occupation has also waned. In Hong Kong, state support of home ownership has declined (since 2004 home ownership targets have been abandoned) in part due to the experienced vulnerability to the vicissitudes of the market (see Chiu, 2006), and in Singapore problems in sustainability of market values has proved a challenge to the whole framework of property asset-based retirement strategies (see Chua, 2003).
East Asian examples demonstrate a key fragility in asset-based systems which rely on sustained and continued property value increases. Governments become perpetually bound up to the support of housing markets. Freedom to take economic measures which may impact housing values, such as interest rate adjustments, is critically impaired. At around 90% home ownership, the Singapore government is finding it increasingly difficult to sustain demand for owner-occupied housing units. Maintaining demand is necessary for increases in values of owner-occupied housing (expected to increase much faster than inflation), which provide essential household security and facilitate a whole network of household based retirement and welfare subsidy. The 1997 Asian currency crisis threw markets and property values into turmoil, threatening the basis of welfare and security across the region and illustrating the vulnerability of asset-based systems. Readjustment in housing policy in the region demonstrates a new awareness of governments to the balance between national and individual economic security and housing market volatility.
Social Democratic Contexts
The claim that Western European socio-democratic or corporatist welfare regimes are moving in line with a British asset-based model is also questionable. Boelhouwer and van der Heijden argue that while the philosophy of the ‘enabling state’ was developed, whereby people were expected to take action based on empowerment and political rights, which had subsequent effects on housing policies, they are not convinced that the Netherlands, among others, will follow a route into dependency on household property assets.
In our opinion, there is no direct causal relationship whereby the reduction in (public, government administered) pensions will necessarily lead to an increase in home ownership as an ‘alternative’ form of retirement saving. After all, there are also countless insurance-based investment products, which can serve to ‘top-up’ the state pension provided by the government. Moreover it must be asked whether homeownership provides a good alternative to such insurance based products (Boelhouwer and van der Heijden, 2005:78)
need. This has become difficult in circumstances where the primacy of professional or political definitions of need is under threat and fit poorly with the current emphasis on individual, consumer and lifestyle choice (2006:67). The Second challenge is to maintain objectives of equality and social solidarity in housing and social policy. Clapham asserts that a non neo-liberal agenda could be pursued if the current ideology of social democracy is adapted to the changing context. This involves offsetting risk, reinforcing social solidarity and enhancing individual control. The point is that there is potential for individual societies to be reflexive, and that convergence around neo-liberal policy objectives is not as likely as asset-based welfare convergence thinkers make out.
Nevertheless, the assertion that asset-based, home ownership orientated approaches have expanded in influence is evident in liberal welfare regimes, and more universal increases in owner-occupation rates and house prices do suggest that home ownership may be becoming more salient to household welfare strategies outside of this regime type. Moreover, the capacity for housing tenure differences to widen inequalities in wealth and thus access to market based services has also been expanded. What is more important for our consideration of ideology and home ownership is that neo-liberal ideologies of market relations are expanding along with the privatization and commodification of housing, which has been influenced by global economic changes (and government responses to them), the contraction of welfare provision, and the growing context of ageing societies and pension crises. Furthermore, growing levels of home ownership and the apparent gains made by homeowners, who are seen as better able to provide for their own retirement and welfare needs through their property assets, undermine collectivist hegemonies and promote commodified and privatistic perceptions of welfare services and how they are most effectively structured. Our argument is that it is not necessarily asset-based welfare systems that are the point of convergence, but that home ownership in neo-liberalized global context has ideological outcomes that are having an accelerated and widened effect across a greater number of societies.
From Risk to the Ideology of Markets and Choice
While convergence around a property or asset-based welfare model is difficult to demonstrate, home ownership has become more central to both welfare systems and individual strategies for providing welfare. This restructuring is critical. We argue that the impact of tenure relations in homeowner societies is thus much more profound than previous conceptualizations of the ideology of home ownership, focused on conservatism and political attitudes, have accounted for. Kemeny (1981, 1992) identified the significance of the expansion of home ownership in the promotion of privatism. Our assertion is that the greater emphasis on home ownership forms part of a pattern of restructuring of both ideological relationships between the state and individual welfare responsibilities and, at a much deeper level, symbolic relationships between individuals, welfare goods and markets. Consequently, the phenomenal growth of home ownership is tied up with changing relationships between states and individuals in some societies, which are linked to more universal (but differentially effective) socio-economic transformations in the latest period of modernity.
ideological basis of this approach to welfare, which claims that, due to growing affluence and technological change in large scale industrialized societies, that welfare needs can be met in the private market, goes back to earlier neo-liberal debates in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. Freidman, 1962). However, it is arguably recent changes in housing policy leading to the expansion of home ownership and the growth of housing assets, that have allowed the logic of ‘opportunity’ and ‘choice’ to take hold, which has shifted the onus from direct state provision of welfare to the indirect facilitation of access to welfare goods and services within a market where welfare ‘consumers’ have ‘freedom’ to exercise ‘choice’.
Essentially, the establishment of mass-home-ownership and the augmentation of owner-occupier household asset holdings have enhanced the potential for governments to pursue the aims of welfare residualisation and the more competitive orientation of national economies towards global capitalism. The contraction of welfare safety nets and greater orientation to global markets has proven to intensify risk and individual vulnerability, while access to home ownership and the equity that can be built up within it is considered a hedge against such insecurities. The function of owner-occupied housing is thus transformed where its relative salience as an exchangeable market good becomes increasingly prioritized over use value, especially when housing property also constitutes a substantial, tangible asset from which to draw other goods and services from the market. In this context access to housing and the freedom to choose from the market is considered necessary for the actualization of security. Whether or not owner-occupied homes can effectively provide insurance against the risks of contemporary social conditions is questionable. What is also significant is the restructuring or social re-construction of responsibility and accountability around the individual for the security of their wealth and well-being. What is constructed as security, opportunity and choice, therefore, is essentially risk.
Malpass (2006) points out that discourses of choice have become endemic in British government discourses and rhetoric on social policies, and in particular housing policies. Indeed, housing and home ownership have largely constituted the avant-garde of the choice agenda and forms the logical basis of the ‘opportunity society’ and asset-based welfare approach. The concept of choice was central the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s, and also became pivotal to Labour policy during the Blair administration into the twenty first century. Inevitably, choice, based on market choice, is presented as a superior way to secure housing and generates bias against non-market based tenures and against alternative ways of offering choice (2006:113). Indeed, the concept of choice is biased in housing towards a particular type of choice: to transfer from rental housing to owner-occupied housing. In the case of those who have moved out of social rental housing or have exercised their ‘right-to-buy’ as sitting tenants, there are not the same rights to sell houses back to local authorities or get back into social renting. Malpass suggests therefore, that housing policy in recent decades has really seen the reduction of choice as privatization of public housing constitutes an irreversible reduction of viable possible housing options for most households to market based ones.
Conclusion
aligned to changing patterns in housing tenure and the building of housing property assets. In the context of proliferation of globalization discourses and the intensification of international flows of capital and employment, the argument that there will be growing convergence around an asset-based model of welfare provision has gained some following, especially among writers in the English speaking world. This perspective has been intensified by concerns with the inadequacy of housing and welfare policy systems in relation to apparent social, economic and demographic changes. Giddens (1994) suggest that the patterns of public policy that have functioned under the previous conditions of modernity are inadequate or ill suited to the emerging context. We need, therefore, new models for policy. This has been taken to mean, mistakenly, that a neo-liberal model of marketisation and deregulation is most appropriate in housing and social policy restructuring.
The assertion that there is convergence around an asset-based model of welfare grounded in the expansion of home ownership tenure reflects much of the logic of globalization discourses. However, such a phenomenon is not so clearly evidenced. Certainly, it is apparent that the considerable assets held by many homeowners are being eyed up by government agencies and that, in some countries at least, policy discourses reflect a desire to take advantage of these assets in the deregulation of policy, residualisation of public services and the marketisation of welfare goods. A crystallized approach to property based welfare is not so apparent. Neither are transformations in social democratic country’s policies concerning housing property assets. Although such societies are experiencing growing demand for owner-occupied housing and cutting back welfare costs in the context of an ageing population and slowing down of economic growth, the assumption that this will lead to the adaptation of neo-liberal approaches to housing tenure and welfare provision is suspect. Asset-based welfare systems in East Asia do share many features with western homeowner societies but, at the same time, appear to be developing policy in line with attempts to reduce risk and vulnerability to global markets.
Enhanced risk is a key dimension of the withdrawal of welfare and an augmented reliance on property assets and property markets. However, the logic of global convergence is arguably driving these features. The more consistent aspect of convergence is, therefore, the embedding of neo-liberal ideologies in housing and welfare policy discourses. By heightening the significance of housing as a private good in a progressively asset orientated system, and expanding owner occupation, individuals are increasingly committed to their stake in the market based system. By relating to welfare needs and satisfactions in terms of goods and the market, rather than services and collective provision, the relationships of individuals to the state have been increasingly realigned in terms of the market. Essentially, we are talking about the restructuring of economic subjectivity around markets which has ideological and political salience.
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