Introduction
Leasehold provides the legal framework for most multi-owned housing developments in England and Wales.1 Some of these leasehold sites are self-governed by a company formed of the leaseholders which owns the freehold title, sharing some features with condominium and strata title. However, in the majority of leasehold developments the power to manage rests with a separate freeholder. Recent revelations about exploitative practices by developers, freeholders and their lawyers have added to the existing, decades-old pressure for reform of the leasehold sector. The UK government now favours a move from leasehold to commonhold, the English equivalent of strata or condominium title in which each unit is owned on freehold, and the unit owner automatically becomes a member of the Commonhold Association which owns and manages the whole site. This new form of tenure was introduced by the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 but was not made mandatory. The key reforms put forward in the Law Commissionâs consultation paper, Reinvigorating Commonhold (2018), include simplifying the process for converting from leasehold to commonhold and the compulsory use of standardised documents.2 Launching Reinvigorating Commonhold on December 10, 2018, Law Commissioner Nick Hopkins declared that â[t]he time is right for commonhold⌠It involves a culture change, moving away from an âus and themâ mindset, towards âus and ourselvesâ.â âUs and themâ refers to the traditional freeholder/leaseholder structure, whereas âus and ourselvesâ is intended to convey a new narrative for self-governed multi-owned housing in the form of commonhold.
The theoretical framework adopted in this chapter is based on the concept of narrative, by which I mean a story or explanation, following Carol Roseâs influential work on property as persuasion (1990, 1994). The proposed reforms to leasehold and commonhold are not discussed in detail here; the chapter focuses on what an analysis of property narratives may offer for understanding problematic issues associated with self-managed housing. In my previous empirical socio-legal projects researching English self-governed leasehold sites and commonhold sites, I found some deep-seated difficulties which mirror those revealed by international research: owner apathy, lack of community, and low levels of participation in governance (see overview in Easthope 2019, chapter 6). The strikingly similar findings from jurisdictions where legal frameworks have been supposedly tailored to the needs of self-governed residential developments challenge the confidence that legal reform alone can resolve these issues. In using the lens of narrative to explore the underlying reasons for these problems found in multi-owned housing sites across the world, this chapterâs innovative approach makes a significant contribution to the international research literature.
Two types or levels of narrative are considered here: the abstract or the âmeta-narrative,â and the everyday or âontologicalâ narratives which concern how people experience reality (Somers and Gibson 1994). Narratives have a powerful influence on our experiences, our understanding of how the world works and therefore how to live in it. Rose (1994, 5â6) argues that property narrative and âcommunity normsâ combine to maintain âthe common beliefs, understandings and culture that hold property regimes together.â Both types of narrative are constantly evolving, and so is the relationship between them. As Macpherson (1978, 1) explains, the concept of property âis both cause and effect of what it is at any time⌠changes in what is there are due partly to changes in the ideas people have of it.â A major change since the mid-20th century has been the growing acceptance in the developed world of a narrative of property as exclusionary dominion (derived from Blackstone 1978 [1768], 2). It is rarely pointed out that Blackstoneâs 18th-century exposition of property law and relationships also acknowledged âthat common ownership⌠and communal rights were commonplace, so to speakâ (Schorr 2009, 112). The powerful meta-narrative of property as individual, exclusive, sovereign control over territorial space has taken hold across both civil and common law jurisdictions. As Rose (1990, 54) points out, âthe dominant story-teller can make his position seem to be the natural one,â and so the narrative of property as cooperation has been displaced by that of exclusionary, individual dominion.
A number of factors, including legal discourse, have combined to create this successful meta-narrative of property which provides an unquestioned, universal explanation of how things are in the world. Although âownershipâ is not a legal concept in the common law world, it carries a powerful charge. Research has found that owning property, particularly oneâs own home, is associated with security, privacy, control, and financial value (see Saunders 1990), and that the home is a particular type of property, in which residents invest time, effort and emotions (Mallett 2004). Government encouragement of homeownership over the past decades has added political force to the idea of property as individual possession, which is powerfully associated with raw feelings, existing interests and familiar values.
Over the same time period when a narrative of property as individual dominion became established, multi-owned housing has emerged as a major form of residential accommodation. But the individualistic meta-narrative is clearly inadequate to explain property relations at multi-owned housing sites where there are no physical or legal boundaries to separate one share in the common property from another, and which are managed collectively. These sites combine individual with collective property, and that property is bound up with governance and community.3 Owners must cooperate to make multi-owned housing work successfully, but as Perin (1988, 77) pointed out in her anthropological study of relations between suburban neighbours in the US, âCommon ownership, predicated on Cooperation and Sharing is incongruent with American ideals of Individuality and Independence.â
At the everyday level of narrative, individuals and groups of owners therefore struggle to make sense of their experiences in self-governed housing. In this chapter, the interactions between the abstract and ontological narratives of property are illustrated by examples drawn from qualitative interviews I carried out with owners at a range of English self-governed multi-owned sites. These show that the currently dominant individualistic, exclusionary narrative of property fails to take account of the new ways of living, managing and sharing space in self-governed residential developments. Owners articulated a range of everyday property narratives, from insisting that their home is their castle and therefore resisting the need to participate in collective governance, to embracing a counter-narrative of property that is based on intentional sharing.
Urbanisation and multi-owned housing
The term âmulti-owned housingâ encompasses master-planned housing estates, gated communities, apartment blocks and large houses converted into apartments â or flats as they are known in England. This kind of residential accommodation has become increasingly commonplace across the world as a response to increased pressure on urban space (OECD 2012). Simultaneously, homeownership rates have grown, while renting has declined in many (although not all) developed countries. Over the past half century or so, state policies have emphasised individual choice and personal responsibility, while levels of trust in community and neigh-bourhood have declined (Atkinson and Blandy 2016). The idea that owning your home is natural and normal (see Gurney 1999, in relation to the UK) has been fostered over time by a range of Western states described by Ronald (2008, 162) as âideologically convergent.â These concurrent adjustments in both the provision and ideology of housing have led to tensions in property narratives. As explored further in subsequent sections of the chapter, the individually owned âhome as my castleâ metaphor does not sit easily with the reality of homeowners sharing space, responsibilities and governance arrangements with their neighbours.
In multi-owned housing, the owners hold rights in common over the shared spaces. A fur...