The occupation of state housing as a moral obligation? Housing welfare in Gauteng between reciprocity and liberalism

The article analyses how political stakeholders have mobilized a moralizing discourse to blame practices of renting and selling state-subsidized housing by its original recipients. Although departures are mostly legal, owners who do not occupy their units are affected by the state’s moral expectations of reciprocity that extend ambiguous moral claims towards the right use of provided housing far beyond the law. First, we show how the post-apartheid welfare state – similar to conditional cash transfer policies – enhances operational moral logics of obligatory reciprocity to direct people’s behaviour towards favoured forms of market integration. Yet, the moral extension of reciprocal dependency works against the liberal foundations of its own housing policy. Second, we foreground a praxeological perspective towards the operational moral logics structuring how recipients justify their own departure from state housing. Whereas few respondents reject reciprocal obligations, many tend to adopt the state’s moralizing discourse and reproduce reciprocal hierarchies.