ABSTRACT
Housing wealth has been a peculiarly anglo-saxon preoccupation in the last few years, stimulated by the rising cost of housing in many countries and the rapid expansion of owner-occupation in England during the 1980s. The knee-jerk response to this has been to study the extent to which one particular tenure-owneroccupation-generates wealth without explicit analyses of wealth accumulation in other forms of housing, such as public renting, or asking questions about the wider relationship between housing and wealth. Indeed, the whole approach of such research, by focusing exclusively on wealth in owner-occupation, implicitly treats owneroccupation as if it were the only form of tenure in which housing wealth existed. The result of this has been that housing wealth is equated with owner-occupation and the wealth generated in socialrental housing is ignored. For the fact of the matter is that housing wealth is not tenure-specific. There is nothing unique to owneroccupation in this respect. In all housing, housing wealth is generated by the process of house-price inflation which increases the gap between outstanding loan and current market value. In both social renting and owner-occupation the wealth is made use of through the lower housing costs associated with the growing imputed rental value of the dwelling. In both owner-occupation and social renting the owner may realise the capital value tied up in the housing through remortgaging or through sale with vacant possession. The main
difference between these two forms of tenure lies in the fact that capital realisation in owner-occupation is exclusively made for private-consumption purposes, whereas the wealth accumulated in social-rental housing is more flexible because while it, too, can be accessed privately by various measures, it can also be easily accessed for satisfying collective-consumption needs. Given the ideologicallycharged nature of the policy debates in Britain and other anglosaxon societies over tenure, the preoccupation in English-language research with housing wealth and owner-occupation plays directly into the hands of political ideologues who wish to foster and spread the belief that owner-occupation generates wealth while social renting does not.
