Fernández, A. (2022, September). A queer reading of housing policy: the case of homeownership subsidisation. In UBH 2022, Upsetting Binaries & Hierarchies, Leiden, the Netherlands.

This talk examines how heteronormativity is embedded in housing taxation regimes producing a link between asset accumulation and normative formulations of familial structures. House prices have risen widely across Europe in the last decades. However, the rise in the appreciation of residential properties is unequally distributed. While older households have largely benefitted from a buoyant housing market as they downsize; younger households and private tenants, hindered by unaffordable rents and prices, struggle to access homeownership. These life-cycle patterns are accentuated in many countries by taxation regimes that lack tenure neutrality, that is, which favour mortgagors and homeowners over renters.

This presentation argues that housing policy has implicit biases towards particular forms of household composition readable in asset formation strategies. What does queer theory have to say about housing tenure and taxation? How does the lack of tenure neutrality affect queer populations? This presentation develops a reading of housing policy from a queer lens to unpack the assumptions about asset and family formation embedded in housing taxation. First, the focus will be on the theoretical possibilities of inserting queer theory in the housing taxation literature drawing from queer approaches to analyse housing policies with a focus on homeownership subsidies. Secondly, the presentation will interrogate the opportunities and barriers present in the main micro household-level datasets in the UK and the Netherlands to prospect the possibilities of quantitative empirical analyses. The ultimate goal of this presentation is to problematise the links between housing policy and household formation from a queer perspectives.