Shared Ownership and Housing Policy

This chapter presents a study of housing policy from the periphery. As we develop below, it is not its numerical significance as a tenure that makes shared ownership so important; rather, it is its totemic significance in housing policy and its location as a social housing low-cost homeownership “product” which make it an object of study. Our argument is that, in the very way in which it is discussed and represented in policy and by policy-makers, shared ownership appears as a very simple “product”, albeit one which has gone through a series of different iterations. And, most of all, shared ownership is constructed as ownership. That very simple ownership product, at heart, is how shared ownership came to be represented and translated by a range of others, including buyers—to adopt the metaphor widely used in policy documents, enabling people to “get a foot on the ladder” of “homeownership”. And, of course, these are very legal translations