Scarcely a day passes without the publication of a report or article arguing that countries around the world are in the grip of a housing crisis.
For many commentators and governments, including the UK’s Conservative administration, the nature of the housing crisis, as well as its causes and solutions, are all relatively simple: house prices and rents have rocketed in recent decades as planning constraints have prevented enough homes from being built, and so we need to deregulate planning or zoning systems so that supply can keep pace with rising demand. This approach positions the housing crisis as a technical economic problem with a straightforward solution which market forces are itching to deliver if only government would get out of the way.
While ensuring sufficient homes get built is clearly a very important policy goal, there are real risks and problems associated with the current trend for housing debates and policy programmes to focus so heavily on supply volumes.
On the practical side, one danger is that deregulation combined with numerical output targets to be delivered largely by private housebuilding firms will lead to quantity being prioritised over other socially important but less profitable considerations like dwelling quality, size (both in terms of adequacy and in the mix of sizes being built), ease of adaptation (over the life course and to meet the challenges of climate change), affordability, location and accessibility. This is not a theoretical concern: in 2015, the Chancellor George Osborne – reportedly responding to lobbying by housebuilders – scrapped the longstanding target for all newbuild homes to be carbon-neutral by 2016 on the grounds that this would be so expensive that it would deter new construction. Recent reports have meanwhile identified that many British newbuild estates are car-dependent spaces; this has damaging consequences for carbon emissions, congestion and public health. Clearly policy makers need to work harder to ensure that new housing construction contributes to social objectives.
Perhaps a more significant problem with treating the housing crisis as a technical supply-side problem is that this takes little account of its fundamentally social dimensions. For a start, it is rather misleading to talk about a singular ‘housing crisis’, as this overlooks major variations in the types of housing problems confronting different people. It is not all about high house prices and rents: the exact blend of housing problems varies hugely across social groups – for instance along the intersecting lines of birth cohort, ethnicity, sexuality, health status and/or social class – as well as from place to place. For some, the affordability of rental housing or difficulty fulfilling desires for owner-occupation may indeed be the main concerns, whereas for others it is housing insecurity, fuel poverty, overcrowding and/or poor dwelling quality. There are thus many intertwined and socially selective housing crises, not all of which can be solved (and certainly not in the short term) by simply building more homes. Other policy approaches such as tenancy reforms and financial support for physical upgrades need to at least remain on the table.
Meanwhile, it is critical to remember that housing is clearly not in a state of crisis for everyone. Many people are satisfied with their homes, have enough space, have few problems paying for housing (over a third of English households own their home outright) and are able to move to somewhere they want to live at a time of their choosing. Some have also made a lot of money from the housing market over the years. For example, Office for National Statistics estimates indicate that UK households hold over £5 trillion in property wealth; but while the richest decile of households own an average of £500,000 in property apiece, the poorest 30 per cent have nothing. Housing crises are, therefore, ultimately produced by – and in turn are helping to exacerbate – the broader inequality crisis that today afflicts much of the Global North.
To tackle this situation requires moving away from viewing housing as a discrete, specialised and often technical domain of public policy which prioritises markets and supply volumes over social need. To do this, housing needs to be viewed as just one component of a broader social policy agenda. This approach allows us to consider how policies across different domains of government are fuelling different aspects of contemporary housing crises, while opening up space for thinking about how these could be changed in incremental and/or more radical ways to make housing work better for society.
For example, wage stagnation and job insecurity in Britain’s polarised labour market coupled with cuts to social security entitlements are part of the reason why housing has become unaffordable and insecure for so many. Action to improve incomes and employment security while simultaneously ensuring that secure and low-cost rental housing is available for a broad cross-section of society (as was the case in the post-war council housing sector) would together provide a powerful progressive package of social policy reforms. Meanwhile, stopping housing from exacerbating wealth inequalities will not only require taxation reforms (candidates include removing capital gains tax exemptions on owner-occupied house sales and overhauling the council tax system), but also consideration of the way that meagre public pension provision encourages people to invest in property as a retirement resource.
Overall, we need to rethink not just the content and focus of housing policies, but also the very notion that housing policy is a discrete and highly technical domain of government. Instead, housing needs to be treated as one plank of a much more coordinated social policy agenda dedicated towards fulfilling big politically negotiated objectives (notably reducing inequality but also achieving net zero while adapting to climatic volatility) which can only be achieved through joined-up interventions across government departments. This approach seems unlikely to find favour with the ‘tinkering’ approach of the Sunak government and so it looks up to us, as engaged citizens, to ensure that we push and vote for housing to be part of a much broader, more ambitious and more progressive social policy agenda over the coming years.
Rory Coulter is Associate Professor of Quantitative Human Geography at University College London.
Housing and Life Course Dynamics by Rory Coulter is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £26.99.
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