The Gated Public Sphere: Property Ownership and the Limits of Democratic Participation In Residential Governance

Background and Purpose:Community ownership the collective claim of residents to shape the decisions, resources, and future of the places they inhabit—is a foundational concept in community development and social work practice. Yet community ownership and property ownership are not the same thing. This study interrogates what happens when the two are conflated: when the right to participate in community governance is conditioned on owning real estate. Drawing on deliberative democracy and housing justice frameworks, this study examines how members of a resident association in an affluent high-rise apartment complex in Seoul, South Korea construct the boundaries of community membership and collective decision-making. We ask: when property ownership becomes the de facto condition of community ownership, whose voices count—and whose are excluded?

Methods:This study employs a longitudinal qualitative design combining participant observation and in-depth interviewing. The author has conducted sustained participant observation in the resident association's Naver Café—a members-only online forum functioning as the primary deliberative space for collective governance—over an extended period. Complementing this, the author has conducted in-depth interviews with one highly engaged resident association member across three consecutive years, tracing how participation norms and governance values have evolved over time. Data include online deliberation records, meeting documentation, and interview transcripts, analyzed thematically with attention to how participants construct the relationship between property ownership, community membership, and civic responsibility.

Results:Findings reveal a systematic conflation of property ownership with community ownership in residents' deliberative practices. Collective decision-making centers on infrastructure maintenance, vendor management, and building operations—all consistently framed as matters of protecting and enhancing property value rather than serving the broader residential community. Most strikingly, explicit proposals to restrict forum membership to property owners and exclude renters surfaced in online deliberations, revealing how community ownership is actively redefined as an extension of real estate ownership. Renters—who share the same physical community—are positioned as outside the boundaries of legitimate participation. The digital forum, rather than functioning as an inclusive public sphere, operates as a gated deliberative space in which civic voice is distributed according to asset holdings.

Conclusions and Implications:This study argues that the conflation of property ownership and community ownership represents a fundamental challenge to democratic self-governance in residential settings. When community is defined by what you own rather than where you live, the promise of participatory governance becomes a mechanism of exclusion. For social work researchers and practitioners, these findings call for a reexamination of community ownership as a concept and practice—one that actively decouples civic participation from property tenure and centers the voices of renters, low-income residents, and others who are too often governed without being heard.