Housing in Lao PDR

Or Actually existing leftist mass home ownership

This is the first post in a four part series.

There’s a bit of cliché going around that the current passion for home ownership in Australia, the US and other Western countries can be traced back to anti-communism during the Cold War. This is often summed up in a quote from postwar New York property developer William Levitt “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do” (Lacayo 1998). You might have heard of Levitt: one of his developments on Long Island—“Levittown”—is often cited as an example of the suburban style of living enabled by the automobile.¹

Levitt’s words about housing and communism have appeared on memes and social media, and also in academic works. For some they represent a solid reason to support homeownership (repel communism!). For more urbane writers, Levitt’s words are an ironic indicator of the consumerism and individualism lurking in the familiar dream of owning one’s own home. In this way, otherwise left-leaning academics end up quoting Levitt approvingly.²

However ironic these recent resurrections of the 1940s property magnate are intended, it is important to pause before following Levitt too blindly. Recent trendy deployments of Levitt replay some stale stereotypes about the political insignificance of housework, the irrelevance of carework and the stupidity of labour in general. In addition, William Levitt is also famous for denying housing to people of colour: another Levitt quote is “We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we can't combine the two” (Lacayo 1998). It concerns me how easily otherwise left-leaning housing thinkers uncritically cite a known racist to buoy up their own dismissiveness of the everyday aspiration held by millions of people (most of them people of colour) to own one’s own home.

In this series of posts I argue for a left-leaning endorsement of mass home ownership. I argue that real world examples of widespread home ownership are better traced back to communism than anti-communism. Also, the ideal of homeownership owes more to peasant or smallholder archetypes (something common to much of humanity) than to suburban wage slaves or dual income nuclear families. I argue, furthermore, that the evidence in support of left-leaning mass home ownership is found in nets cast wider than the familiar examples of UK social housing, US suburbia, Nodic style rentals, and the Australian quarter acre block. Understanding of actually existing socialisms, most of them championed by non-white nations and radicals, is sorely lacking in studies of housing.

The communist promise to redistribute land so that those who worked it included a related promise that homes would belong to those who lived in them. The popularity of such promises among largely rural and semi-rural peasant populations was bedrock to virtually all the actually successful revolutions that our world has witnessed. As James C. Scott writes:

It is abundantly clear that the peasantry, not the proletariat, has constituted the decisive social base of most, if not all, successful twentieth-century revolutions. In China, Vietnam, Mexico, and Angola the massive participation of the peasantry so overshadowed the participation of other social elements that it becomes possible to speak of peasant revolutions (1977, 267).

If one social unit that represents the peasant, it is above all the household. Or more precisely, it is houses arranged in villages. Can we think of homes and villages as revolutionary? I think so, but doing so requires understanding of real world examples where this has been the case. In this series, I explain how ideas of household and village have developed under Lao socialism as a means of rethinking the home as a revolutionary base.

Rather than homeownership imagined as some kind of “American dream” of rugged self help and exported ex nihilo (as Kwak, Hester and Srnicek argue), I think it is more likely that anti-communists developed a mass homeownership dream after seeing the popularity of communist redistrubution policies. The American’s effort to provide homes ti create anti-communist sentiment was, of necessity, a rather contradictory initiative. Levitt’s New York development itself was underpinned by significant government investment. Nancy Kwak shows how contradictory it was for US development workers in Taiwan to say they were promoting self-help and free enterprise when they were actually providing government sponsored housing. Still, these gifts of houses were popular and an important plank in creating a non-communist Taiwan (2015).

Contrary to Levitt’s quip, I know lots of homeowners who are communists. I’d even to venture to say that most homeowners I know are communists. I am an anthropologist and since 1999 have specialised in the study of rural Laos, a country that identifies as socialist and is led by a communist party. At 95.9%, Laos currently has the highest rates of homeownership in the world according to some rankings, such as this example from World Population Review. Although this World Population Review provides a commentary on each of the countries in the top ten, curiously it does not note one obvious feature of their own top ten table: all these countries are either socialist or post-socialist. That is, the highest rates of home ownership in our world (the world we actually live in) have not been delivered by the American dream, but by communists, the American nightmare.

Notably, all of these countries could also be described as peasant societies, if not now then very recently. Some housing scholars dismiss the importance of such figures, arguing that poor and peasant societies offer few lessons for urban and industrialised societies. I beg to differ. The 20^th century showed the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. If the first taste of the 21^st century is anything to go by, its lessons seem to come packaged as disasters and teach the fragilities of urban industrialism. What if we suspended our knee jerk reactions for a moment, and thought of the peasantry not as a collective past (and good riddance, too!) but as a collective heritage shared by many cultures around the world, one which informs the present where futures are made?

Usually websites that list Laos as a leading country in home ownership do not cite the source of their figures. My suspicion is that the figure of 95.9% comes from census data. The Lao 2015 Population and Housing Census reports:

“Nearly all (96 percent) of households owned the dwelling unit they occupied. About 2 percent were rented, while another 2 percent occupied their units rent-free or did not report any occupancy status” (2015, page 87).

My reading of this figure is that 96% of houses are owned by their occupants (not that 96% of the population own a house). The report notes that homeownership rates are even higher in rural areas, with renting found almost only in the capital city. This rings true with my day-to-day observations of housing in rural Laos over the last two decades. In the next three posts, I discuss three elements that contribute to remarkably high rates of home ownership in Laos:

• 1) Lao socialism (next week);

• 2) A moral economy that views land as inalienable and housing as a non-negotiable need (the week after…) and;

• 3) Matri-centric homes (final post in this series).

In summary: it is true that much of the “crisis” of home ownership in liberal democracies is best understood as a key touchstone in liberalism’s tussle with communism, but not in the way Levitt or his followers have suggested. Communism has acheived high home ownership rates, while liberal democracies have rendered it merely a “dream” for many. Those seeking to address the overlaying crises of homelessness, domestic violence, high rents and soaring debt burden in liberal democracies need grounded understandings of housing in real world actually existing socialism.

I could think of no worse authority on homeownership and communism than William Levitt. Instead, let’s take a look at an actually existing state—Laos—and examine how homes there operate politically, socially and culturally.

Image: Ott and the boys at home. Photo Credit: Holly High.

Works cited:

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 1941-. “More Work for Mother : The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.,” January 1, 1983.

Hester, Helen, and Nick Srnicek. After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. London: Verso, 2023.

Kwak, Nancy H. A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Lacayo, Richard. 1998. “Suburban Legend: William Levitt,” TIME magazine, July 12, 1998.

Scott, James C. “Hegemony and the Peasantry.” Politics & Society 7, no. 3 (1977e): 267–96.

1. See for instance Ruth Schwatz Cowan’s depiction of Levittown in her 1983 classic More work for mother (1983).

2. Some examples: historian Nancy Kwak cites Levitt uncritically in her 2015 book A World of Homeowners in support of her argument that the rise and spread of homeownership globally was due to a largely American vision of it as the prerequisite for a stable middle class which would in turn underpin capitalism, democracy, and resistance to communism (2015, 51). Scholars Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek use the Levitt quote in the trendy journal EFlux to argue that “American programs were uniquely focused on expanding home ownership” and home ownership was emblematic of US capitalism, individualism, and self-help. Such arguments tend to depict the US (or Australian) dreams of homeownership as somewhat unusual, and contrast these to state planning or state ownership solutions to housing, such as post WWII social housing in the UK. Hester and Srnicek again uncritically cite Levitt in their 2023 book, After Work, to shore up their argument that the passion for owning housing has in practice entailed “a colossal squandering of human time, effort, and labour” (p82).