The failure of homeownership and the reconfiguration of class identities in Spain

In March 2007, David, a 19 year-old student from El Masnou, questioned the government president José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in the following terms: “When and how the government is going to act so that I can buy a house?”. This took place in the TV program “I have a question for you”, where citizens of different origins, age and social conditions pose questions to politicians. David was part of a set of three youngsters that asked the president about the ‘housing problem’ in Spain. All three complained they could not afford ‘to buy’ a house. This episode shows to what extent at the peak of the Spanish housing bubble ‘access’ to housing meant homeownership, which was thought of almost as a citizen’s right.

What has happened since then is broadly known: huge unemployment and salary cuts, large number of evictions, and debts increasingly difficult to pay. What perhaps is not so well known is how the expectations of those for whom access to homeownership was taken for granted have adjusted to the new situation, and what are the consequences of this shift in expectations for social identities, and for popular economic and political thought. In this paper I want to explore the changing meaning of homeownership and the social propositions that move around it through the comparison of the discourse on homeownership of different class fractions in two different historical moments: at the beginning of 2008, when the housing bubble was at its peak, and at the end of 2010, when the failure of homeownership was blatant.

I posit that the failure of homeownership also implies a change in class identities that acts in contradictory ways, both as a radicalization of neoliberal premises of individuality, and as the emerging demand for an economy towards collective goals.