ABSTRACT
The growing salience of housing as an exchangeable asset in a market has led to increasing economic associations and motivations with regard to private housing procurement. Furthermore, it has been proposed that the meaningful construction of housing as property has significant and wide ranging implications in the restructuring of citizenship rights, welfare relationships, political and socio-economic relations (Kemeny, 1992). There is some consensus that in societies where homeownership dominates policy and has been normalised as ‘natural’, tenure status is strongly differentiated and has substantial impact on the meaning, perceived stability and quality of a home and its occupants (Forrest et al., 1990; Gurney, 1999a, b; Kemeny, 1981, 1992; King, 1996; Murie, 1998; Richards, 1990). A critical aspect of the growth of homeownership in modern industrialised societies has thus been the transformation of dwellings into housing ‘properties’, through the marketisation and monetisation of housing and the promotion of housing policies. Essentially, the natural process of living or dwelling in a home has been transformed for the majority in homeownership orientated societies into a process of housing ‘consumption’, and, increasingly, ‘investment’.
