Anxious to pay: hidden costs of subsidized housing and the gendered burden of homeowner-citizenship in Brazil

Using gender-targeted housing subsidies, Brazil’s Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program has significantly expanded homeownership among low-income women. However, the latter often face unexpectedly high costs upon becoming homeowners. While existing research shows that burdensome housing costs have adverse socio-economic impacts on beneficiaries of MCMV and similar subsidy programs, this article looks ethnographically at their gendered and disciplinary effects. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in an MCMV-subsidized housing estate in São Paulo, it reveals three effects of cost-burdened homeownership. First, high costs produced deep anxieties and necessitated new budgeting and income-generating practices, augmenting homeowners’ existing burdens of paid and unpaid labor. Second, management of housing costs was experienced as a specifically gendered burden, conferred on women by an avowedly ‘pro-female’ state policy. Third, rather than critique MCMV for imposing high costs, women invoked maternalist state discourses to frame payment as a legitimate obligation that made them respectable citizens and responsible mothers. Bridging the feminist sociology of welfare states with recent work on the disciplinary role of housing policy, this study reveals how programs promoting women’s homeownership can both expand and legitimize unequal gendered burdens.