Writing in The Spectator in 1923, the Scottish Conservative MP Noel Skelton coined the phrase a property-owning democracy: mass suffrage would only be stable, he argued, if wage-earners also owned property - above all their own homes - because ownership makes citizens prudent, rooted and invested in the existing order. The argument crossed the Atlantic into Hoover's President's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership in 1931 and the Own Your Own Home campaigns, then into the mortgage machinery of the FHA and the postwar American suburb. Thatcher's Right to Buy from 1980 turned it into the sale of some two million council dwellings. Throughout, the tenant is cast as provisional and the owner as the full citizen.
Homeownership ideology explains why so much twentieth-century urban form is a single owner-occupied house on its own plot, and why Anglophone housing policy subsidises purchase rather than supply. It is also the mechanism by which the dwelling became a leveraged financial asset, which is why house prices now discipline national politics.
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