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The Crisis of Asset Homeownership: Remaking Landed Economic Security in Neoliberal America
Luis Flores, Stone Program Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
Abstract: It has become common to interpret the transformation of household life in contemporary America through the lens of “financialization.” However, in important ways, the postwar home had long been “financialized”—reduced to exchange value rather than the sites of productive or commercial life that anchored older notions of landed independence. Drawing on two historical case studies, I propose a fuller theory of what changed since the 1980s, involving the shifting foundations of homes as sources of economic security. I trace divergent and conflicting efforts to turn homes into liquid and short-term resources by supporting the deregulation of second mortgages (for home equity loans) and for the relaxation of zoning restrictions on accessory units in single-family homes (enabling rental incomes) in the 1980s. Advocates for an emerging “liquid homeownership” envisioned a shift away from a regime I term “asset homeownership.” Between the 1930s and 1980s, mortgage regulations and zoning rules built a dam around the single-family home, protecting it from devaluation but “locking in” home equity, while restricting home-based commerce. Asset homeownership promised postwar owners access to a long-term, stable, but ultimately illiquid asset, that instead offered old-age security and access to place-based privileges, from tax benefits to quality school. In the late 1970s, intersecting crises of inflation, old age housing, and the rise of immigrant populations, propelled divergent strategies to transform homes into short-term and liquid assets through mortgage and zoning deregulation. In both cases, homeowners and regulators clashed over the desirability of protections that previously were the foundations of asset homeownership. Meanwhile for policymakers, “liquid homeownership” offered a third way between public policy and incentives for private initiative to address the multiple crises of the 1970s.
Luis Flores is a recent doctoral graduate in sociology from the University of Michigan, and incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley (Fall 2025). Drawing on historical methods, his research examines the regulatory politics at the boundary of home and market, shaping the extent to which homes can serve as sites of production, exchange, and speculation. His previous work examined how early American zoning laws shaped wealth and labor dynamics through the separation of home and market. His current research turns to the contentious blurring of home and market in the post-industrial present. As a Stone Postdoctoral Fellow, Luis is expanding his dissertation, The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking After the American Family Wage, into a book manuscript. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association (ASA), and received awards from four ASA sections.
