Property and Democratic Citizenship: The Impact of Moral Assumptions, Policy Regulations, and Market Mechanisms on Experiences of Eviction

Project Information

PaDC

Grant agreement ID: 771795

DOI

10.3030/771795

Project closed

EC signature date 5 June 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 970 687,50

EU contribution

€ 1 970 687,50

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 5 - PaDC (Property and Democratic Citizenship: The Impact of Moral Assumptions, Policy Regulations, and Market Mechanisms on Experiences of Eviction)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2024-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This research explores the impact of property regimes on experiences of citizenship across five democratic countries: Greece, The Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Property rights are a foundational element of democracy, but the right to private property exists in tension with values of equality and a right to shelter. An investigation of property is urgent given the recent normalisation of economic models that have resulted in millions of evictions every year. Through an ethnographic study of conflicts over property this research provides a comparative analysis of the benefits and limitations of contemporary property regimes for democratic citizenship. A property regime is defined as the combination of moral discourses about real landed property with the regulatory policies and market mechanisms that shape the use, sale and purchase of property. The selected countries represent a diverse set of property regimes, but all five are experiencing a housing and eviction crisis that has created new forms of disadvantage, exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, age and income, and led to social unrest. This research critically examines the concept of property through a qualitative approach centred on moments of conflict resulting from the use, sale or purchase of specific properties to answer: how do property regimes shape people's experience of citizenship and what can this tell us about the role of property in contemporary models of democratic governance?

This research provides the opportunity to rethink the role of property within democracy based on extensive empirical data about how moral assumptions combine with particular ways of regulating and marketing property to exacerbate, alleviate or create inequalities within contemporary experiences of democratic citizenship.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

This research theorizes the impact of property regimes on people’s experiences of citizenship in 5 countries: Greece, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom and United States. The project has now completed all 5 research phases and accomplished beyond its research aims. By placing conflicts over housing within the larger framework of “property regimes” the project expanded the analytical frame to examine how property’s market mechanisms, policy regulations, and moral discourses impact people’s lived experiences of citizenship and democracy.

Specifically, six core themes emerged from the qualitative research as salient across all five country cases: 1. the project showed the need to treat “rent” not as an amount of money people pay to live somewhere, but rather as a social relations that requires human circulation in order to produce value (Ill-Raga, 2024a & 2024b); 2. the project analyzed the way that specific property regimes require corresponding citizen “subjectivities” that transform over time (Karyotis and Sakali, 2024); 3. it demonstrated that housing precarity should be understood as a form of (racialized)”slow violence”; 4. it confirmed the need to view housing not as an individual matter that merely requires the aligning of individuals with housing units, but rather as places where individuals become integrated into specific “communities”, establish support networks, and access essential services such as healthcare, food, and education; 5. it further investigated the role of “financialization” and debt in shaping the social relations of housing; and finally, 6. it also touched on the larger philosophical and practical questions of how to develop “alternative housing” models that challenge the dominant neoliberal paradigm which prioritizes growth and profit. See https://www.propertyanddemocracy.org/themes/.

The findings from the quantitative analyses can be grouped into three main areas: (1) the relationship between property relations and income inequality in the aftermath of the global financial crisis; (2) the impact of technological changes on housing markets, local policies and citizenship experiences; and (3) the relationship between residential displacement, housing precariousness and citizenship status. The research identified the following important and unexpected trends: 1. an examination of three categories of housing property relationship (landlords, tenants and homeowners) reveals that the share of homeowners has declined substantially across countries, with the sole exception of Greece, 2. several countries in our sample exhibit a substantial rise in the share of landlord households, and where this has occurred, the decompositions reveal a striking rise in both overall and between-group inequality, independent of country-level variation in terms of housing policy regimes. Further analyses revealed that automation, digitalisation and platformisation are giving way to new housing practices, most notably in urban contexts.

The dissemination includes: 1 successfully defended PhD (with no corrections) and 2 more near completion, 1 co-authored book (3 more forthcoming), 7 journal articles, 7 book chapters, 32 public outreach publications, 43 presentations, 2 keynote lectures, 32 conference presentations, 4 short films, and the production of a TV-news segment. Additionally the project organized a large international inter-sectoral conference that resulted in immediate social impact through the creation of international networks and knowledge transfer to civil society organizations and the general public. For a full list of results see: https://www.propertyanddemocracy.org/results/

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The PaDC project has reframed the issue of housing insecurity and eviction through the concept of “property” which has allowed us to make two shifts in the analysis: first, it expands the temporal frame to include an exploration of the entire history of property relations from colonial roots to contemporary inequalities; and second, it expands the spatial and analytical frame so that the analysis is no longer about trends in a specific sector (housing), or about urban transformation in terms of “gentrification” – but can be understood instead as a lens into the dynamics of democracy itself. In this way we explore the impact of housing insecurity not only on individual people, or a specific neighborhood, but on our very way of thinking about what constitutes the “good society”. This shift in focus has created new avenues of analysis by linking the concept and practice of housing with theories of value, rent, debt, colonialism, race, slow violence, subjectivisation, and social reproduction among others.

Our quantitative analyses have identified major shifts in the structure of housing property regimes in Europe and the United States, including the expansion of private landlording in specific country contexts and emerging inequalities between property classes. Moreover, our analyses of housing precariousness and residential displacement move beyond the largely descriptive findings of previous approaches to their study in Europe, refining existing indicators and identifying their determinants through multivariate analysis. By linking citizenship with housing precariousness and displacement, we also bridge housing research and social stratification with the emerging literature on internal bordering.

Copyright illustrator: Lucas Braak https://lucasbraak.nl/