A half way house? An exploration of the impact of shared ownership’s dual status as a form of social rented and private ownership on households and front line staff in Cumbria and London.

Abstract

Despite making up less than one per cent of total housing stock in England, since its introduction at the national level in 1980, shared ownership has played an important material and ideological role as part of wider neoliberal reforms to replace publicly-owned rented stock with privately-owned housing. The scheme has been used as part of a bundle of mechanisms to reduce spending on public housing, to enable access to appreciating housing wealth as part of asset-based welfare policies, and to spread a set of personal, social and community benefits which have come to be associated with ‘home’ ownership. In the first two decades of the twenty first century shared ownership has taken on new prominence as a solution to the “housing crisis”, characterised by declining owner occupation rates and a chronic shortage of affordable and secure housing particularly for younger low to middle income households. Although launched with significant amounts of hyperbole and taking up an increasing proportion of government subsidy for affordable provision, the evidence suggests that schemes like shared ownership have a limited impact upon these underlying problems in the housing market. Indeed, shared ownership can be seen to embody some of the contradictions at the heart of neoliberal policies that seek to find market solutions to market-based problems.

This thesis explores these contradictions by examining the extent to which shared ownership can be used to meet the housing needs of particular regional populations as well as individual households. Drawing on empirical material gathered through in-depth interviews and participant observation with households and front-line housing staff in Cumbria and London, the thesis illuminates a set of tensions that run through the veins of shared ownership as a form of social and market-based housing. The thesis reveals the challenges housing associations experience in meeting housing needs whilst also driving sales; the divergent ways in which public and private discourses deal with ambiguities in relation to established tenure norms; and finally the difficulties both households and housing associations face in attempting to manage the risks associated with marginal home ownership.