The bordering of British homeownership - race and property in the nation of homeowners

It has become somewhat of a truism that Britain is in the grips of a housing crisis, affecting the homeownership prospects of younger cohorts ('Generation Rent') in particular. But if we look at trends in tenure by ethnicity, it is apparent that homeownership decline has not been race neutral.

My own comparison of the 1991 Census and the 2017-19 Annual Population Survey reveals that white homeownership has remained relatively stable in recent decades, while rates of Indian and Pakistani homeownership have fallen by around 15 percentage points. All rates of minority homeownership are now lower than the white rate, a significant shift from the position in the early 1990s when homeownership levels within the Indian, Pakistani and African Asian communities exceeded those of white households.

Critically, this shift has occurred in the wake of the reorientation of British identity around the figure of the homeowner. Britain, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, tends to understand itself and be understood as a quintessential 'homeowner society' or 'nation of homeowners' (Arundel and Ronald, 2021). These concepts have their roots in the interwar period (Francis, 2012), but assumed a more influential or mainstream position within British political culture and self-identity in the latter half of the twentieth century, buttressed by rising rates of homeownership and the advent of neo-liberalism (Arundel and Ronald, 2021).

There is a sense in which the concept of a homeowner society merely describes, or purports to describe, the British tenure distribution. However, on a more fundamental level, it represents or effects the possessive coding of British identity, the foregrounding of a possessive ethos in the construction of Britishness. What are the racial dynamics of British homeownership decline? And how does this relate to the possessive coding of British identity in the latter half of the twentieth century?