The University of Bristol has been awarded a grant by the Leverhulme Trust to conduct a research project entitled “Shared Ownership: Crisis Moments”. The project is led by Professor Dave Cowan, who will be working with Helen Carr (Kent) and Alison Wallace (York).
Shared ownership is an important and enthusiastically promoted vehicle for extending the benefits of home ownership to those who would not otherwise be able to afford it. However, it contains economic, social and legal problems, which can become crisis moments for the occupier. These crisis moments will tell us much about the social construction of ownership. Using qualitative research methods and innovative methodological insights, the project seeks to uncover a legal consciousness about marginal homeownership amongst policymakers, providers, lenders and consumers, as well as how crisis itself is perceived, and dealt with, by these actors.
Shared ownership is most commonly an arrangement where a buyer purchases a share in a property (often starting at 25%), against which commonly a mortgage is taken out, and they are granted a lease which represents the value of that share. There are at least 124,000 shared ownership properties in England and Wales. A considerable proportion of the public money available to social housing has been used to build new shared ownership properties. Despite this, there are many potential problems with this product: there are restrictions on the buyer’s ability to sell the property; the buyer is responsible for 100% of the management and maintenance costs (even if they have a smaller stake); if they fall behind with their mortgage payments, the lender can either seek possession or, more commonly, buy the rest of the property; and the buyer can lose not just the property, but also their capital stake (and any increase in value), if they fall behind with their rent.
Although there have been other studies of shared ownership, there has been limited exploration of its consumers’ understandings of this product. For example, we do not know if buyers think of themselves as “owners” or “renters”, or what action they take when things go wrong. We believe that these two are related – ie buyers will think of themselves differently when things go wrong. We refer to things going wrong as “crisis moments”. We think that these moments will usually, but not necessarily, be infused with legal consequences; where they are not, there may well be subsequent legal consequences. Relationship breakdown may, for example, subsequently give rise to rent and/or mortgage arrears and/or financial worries.
The project seeks to blend legal consciousness studies with actor-network theory. The former concerns the experiences of legality in everyday life. The latter is an approach which does not give primacy to human actors, is not concerned with the relationship between size and power, and is concerned with the translations which move the product on. The desire with actor-network theory is to “follow the actors” as they produce their own “social”.