‘Buy Your Home and Feel in Control’ Does Home Ownership Achieve the Empowerment of Former Tenants of Social Housing?

Abstract

Encouraging home ownership is an important aim of housing policy in many countries. It is supposed to have positive effects on individual households and on society as a whole. This article focuses on the effect of home ownership on former tenants of social rented housing in the Netherlands. The central issue is whether becoming a home owner increases one 's sense of freedom and security in the home, one 's sense of control over one 's life, and one 's self-esteem. In other words, to what extent is buying a house a way of empowering individuals and households? Many Dutch housing associations are currently devising sale policies with the aim of empowering their tenants and providing more freedom of choice.

We present the results of telephone surveys of 535 Dutch former tenants who bought their social rented dwelling and 602 others who decided not to buy their dwelling. The main question is: to what extent do these two groups differ in their scores on empowerment scales based on earlier research. Scales of ‘perceived control over life’, 'self-esteem' and 'housing-related empowerment' were adapted and measured among respondents of both groups. The results show that tenants who became home owners score higher on the control scale than tenants, but this difference can be explained by other background variables. Moreover, home owners score higher on the scale of housing-related empowerment, but lower on the scale of self-esteem, net of other factors.

Key Words:

• Home ownership
• empowerment
• control
• self-esteem
• social housing
• housing associations
• the Netherlands

Notes

*Due to incorrect phone numbers, other administrative errors, residents not answering the phone even after three calls, or residents who indicated beforehand that they did not wish to be called.

^ALow education: no education, only primary education, lower secondary or lower professional education.

^BMedium education: intermediate vocational, general secondary, pre-university education.

^CHigh education: higher professional education or university.

*Items 8 to 13, 15, 17 and 19 have reversed meanings and were recoded accordingly in the scale construction.

***, buyers and tenants differ significantly (p < 0.05); results based on Chi-square tests.

*p < 0.05;

**p < 0.01;

***p < 0.001.

^AMedium education = intermediate vocational, general secondary, pre-university education.

^BHigh education = higher professional education or university.

1. See http://www.tewoon.nl

2. We asked the participating housing associations to deliver data of all sale offers and actual purchases since 1 January 2005. However, some of them appeared to have delivered also cases from before this reference date, as a small proportion of the respondents indicate that the sale offer or actual purchase was made before 1 January 2005.

3. The deleted item is ‘People like myself have very little chance of protecting our personal interests when they conflict with those of strong pressure groups’.

4. The deleted item is ‘At times I think I am no good at all’.

5. For all four-digit post code areas in which our respondents live, we calculated the median of the share of owner-occupied housing. The median lies at 54 per cent.

6. For example working more hours or changing to a better-paid job.