Meanings of Homeownership: Exploring the Nexus of Culture, Finance, and Policy


Kathleen Piovesan, Employment and Social Development Canada; Ivana Previsic, Employment and Social Development Canada

Two recent large-scale qualitative research projects on the relationships between homeownership, housing debt, and retirement have demonstrated that housing, in the form of homeownership, is a key cultural structure and individual experience that both embeds meaning from and produces meaning in policy and finance. Using a life history approach alongside in-depth qualitative interviewing, this project draws on literature in the areas of neoliberalization, housing policy, and financialization to examine how a diminished social safety net has invested homeownership with intense emotional, cultural, and financial meanings. These meanings, as argued by Smith (2008) are producing new subject positions vis-a-vis the home, which are increasingly enmeshed with financialized versions of owned housing as a vehicle not only for shelter and the emotional-cultural attachments associated with this use, but with credit, debt, and wealth accumulation and the emotional-cultural attachments associated with these uses. For unattached women homeowners, in particular, greater difficulty achieving other forms of financial security (e.g. savings and pensions through waged work) combined with a more limited safety net and extant inequalities (gender wage gap, care gap, and pension gap) led them to rely on their homes, and particularly the prices that can be “fixed” through mortgaged housing purchase, “added” through additional housing debt, “earned” through housing price increase, and “saved” through debt repayment. Housing policy in Canada combined with financial markets, especially in a low interest rate environment, have directly contributed to this contradictory yet deep meaning making. By withdrawing from housing production to satisfy neoliberal policy mandates, governments pushed lower income households into the market for housing, both rented and owned, contributing to a rise in pressure in both markets. Combining this pressure with existing cultural norms valorizing homeownership, many women acted to lock in a fixed housing price or sought to retain their owned homes post-divorce or at the point of widowhood to retain a sense of control and financial possibility. Surprisingly, debt did not much challenge this perception of homeownership as security, even when debt grew eating into equity or when debt repayment ate into income preventing financial savings and even leading to a struggle to afford daily living. Implicit is a comparison to other forms of housing tenure, especially market rental. Through their lens, and often with direct experience of the rental market, including eviction, home owning is the only means through which to achieve secure housing, in the sense of housing they have, are likely to keep long term, and through which they experience the emotional wellbeing of physical comfort and safety, relative autonomy in housing decisions, and sustained connection to valued objects, memories, relationships, and lifeways. These ties and the perceived threats of not owning a home combined to make any risks in homeownership, particularly with housing debt, seem small. The dream of homeownership, including its many contradictions and risks, permeates our housing policy. From the period of neoliberal withdrawal to the current promises made in new government programs and pronouncements, homeownership, despite its extremely high costs, including the costs of purchase and of interest payments, remains a major emotional-cultural-financial goal among households and policy makers. And, the more its goal is embedded in policy, the more it is embedded in individual dreams and vice versa. However, could there be another way? The experiences of the unattached women in this study indicate yes. Homeownership takes on a foundational set of emotional-financial meanings in two conditions: no other source of financial security and no other source of housing stability. Yet, homeownership is not the only way to provide these things. This paper will conclude with alternative policies that may expand the possibility of security to a broader range of people.

This paper will be presented at the following session: