Gender and the cultural obsession of home ownership in the US

Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-first-century America 

By Adrienne Roberts

Post-2007/08 crash literature is dominated by a macroeconomic evaluation of the US's subprime mortgage crippling debts which has saturated economic analysis. Adrienne Roberts calls for economists to embrace a wider cultural and political perspective, specifically in the way mortgage lending is not homogeneous across gendered, racial and class lines but exacerbates inequality. IPE scholars also neglect these factors as 'extra-economic' relations rather than challenging these inequalities. She frames her analysis under the umbrella of 'social reproduction' and how this has been privatised by economic policy in the US, through the cultural encouragement of mortgage lending to the working classes to meet their basic needs. This is also echoed by David Harvey who identifies that home ownership in the US is a cultural symptom of a credit based economy and encouraged by policy. As the welfare state diminishes, the most impoverished in society need to rely on credit to meet, for example, rising health care bills and labelled under "medical indebtedness". Home ownership and the accumulation of household equity becomes the most central store of wealth with credit as the means of survival.

Roberts explains that initiatives that promote home ownership such as Thatcher's encouragement of people purchasing their council flats is part of a ideology of "market citizenship" in which gives the impression that inequality between gender, race and class are withering away, when in fact conditions such as the gender pay gap are ignored. Roberts argues this is intricately linked with different labour relations such as the employment of women from the global south in menial jobs with very low wages which further them from the American dream of the ownership of a white picket fence and a Volvo.  Women are also amongst the highest group who have had to re-mortgage their houses or take out further loans due to "medical indebtedness". One of the ways that gender has been ignored is the movement towards a 'dual-ownership' understanding amongst income, instead of a realisation that there is an asymmetric reliance on women for domestic labour, a factor that feminist political economists reaffirm.

The MID (mortgage interest deduction) has also created asymmetric inequalities as mostly subsidising the costs of mortgages for the wealthiest. However, despite questioning its position in fiscal policy after the financial crash, it is still one of the most popular policies amongst US taxpayers, and hence a politically sensitive area. Schwartz identifies that by encouraging home ownership, justifies low interest rates and inflation over government welfare spending. Even though the MID does not directly  discriminate against gender and race, there is a societal hierarchy against those who have the opportunity to own a home in the first place e.g. 57% of white women owned their homes compared to 28% of Hispanic women. There is also a spacial emphasis on how communities with large numbers of foreclosures reduce the value of surrounding properties and disproportionately affects African-American's, perpetuating racial economic inequality. Roberts therefore sees that the financing of social reproduction as inherent to the disparity of wealth amongst social groups which much of macro-economic analysis ignores. Encouraging a feminist analysis of government spending which identifies these different inequalities will help diminish the effects of power in the post-crash reconstruction of the global economy and therefore Roberts is right to call for scholars to acknowledge gendered and racial power relations in mortgage literature.