While homeownership has clear benefits among the poor, The Homeowner Ideology shows that the utility of real property rights as an economic resource are severely limited in Sub-Saharan African cities. While global poverty has declined since 1990, it remains widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest proportion of the global population living in slums. In the field of development studies, mainstream thinking is dominated by market fundamentalist neoclassical economics and the premise that ownership reduces poverty. Singumbe Muyeba contends that, in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, this neoliberal premise is flawed and unsupported by the evidence. Rather, such a premise obscures social reality and complex social production processes driving the pervasiveness of the homeowner ideology. Muyeba argues that property rights function as structured idle capital on the formal market in African cities and the persistence of homeownership as the intervention of choice is explained by the influence of neoliberal ideology, intergenerational transfer of homeownership culture within the family, and the state's deliberate and active support for homeownership tenure. 

By examining case studies and delving into the lived experiences of Africans across multiple urban areas, The Homeowner Ideology illustrates the personal stakes of individuals within the mass of statistical data that often dominates discussions about African homeownership. The author’s unique approach to looking at the data interrogates long-held assumptions about property rights in a new way using analytical methods that have not been utilized within an African context.

Singumbe Muyeba is Assistant Professor of African Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver.

“This book provides a thorough, well-researched, clear, and compelling argument. This particular approach is novel both in its intentional mobilization of quantitative evidence and in its focus on the ‘homeowner ideology.’ In contrast to much of the current popular development scholarship that aims to imagine how we ‘formalize the informal,’ Muyeba speaks from the data and embraces alternative perspectives that highlight the importance of usufruct rights and point to an alternative framework for thinking about the persistent challenges of urban poverty and housing. The scholarship reflects the best sort of combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.”— Jennifer Hart, Virginia Tech University