This paper examines how housing figured in the development of classical liberal governmentality over the nineteenth century. Liberal reformers in Britain and the Australian colonies formulated ‘the housing question’ in terms of the physical and moral improvement of urban workers and the poor. This was a problem beyond the powers of the traditional landlord-tenant legal relationship and disciplinary houses of the poor; instead, reformers proposed to remake housing – and thereby the conduct of poor and working subjects – through sanitary dwellings that preserved the integrity of the household, and through close supervision and moral instruction for the poor, including through the tenancy relationship. It would take a different, ‘social liberal’ conceptualisation of government and housing to produce the first social housing systems that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, but the problems and imperfect solutions of the earlier reforms helped to shape them.