The really big contradiction: homeownership discourses in times of financialization

Abstract

Belgium is a typical homeowner society where homeownership is not only the largest but also the ‘normalized’ form of tenure. The origins of the Belgian homeownership ideology go back to the early days of industrialization but the discourses surrounding the ideology are reproduced in the 21^st century. Our investigation of the largest region of Belgium, Flanders, reveals four main homeownership discourses: affordable homeownership, conservative housing finance, asset-based welfare and tenure neutrality. With a nod to Kemeny’s ‘The Really Big Trade-Off Between Homeownership and Welfare’, we demonstrate that there is also a ‘Really Big Contradiction’ between the discourses that support homeownership as the ‘normalized’ form of tenure in Belgium and the reality of declining affordability, progressively less conservative housing finance, the fractions and inequalities of housing-based wealth, and the lack of tenure neutrality. In short, we argue that the financialized homeownership model is undermining the stability of homeowner realities and practices, but not so much the discourses and ideologies that support and reinforce the homeowner society.

Keywords:

• Flanders
• Belgium
• homeownership
• ideology
• discourse
• asset-based welfare
• housing affordability
• financialisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Erlend Fikse finished his Master in Geography at KU Leuven in 2019 and is currently working as spatial planning advisor in Norway.

Manuel B. Aalbers is Professor of Geography at KU Leuven. Previously he was at the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University. He is the author of "The Financialization of Housing" (2016) and "Place, Exclusion and Mortgage Markets" (2011).