of New York City why they devote years to ejecting tenants with capped rents: it works.
You can enforce a quota of affordable homes for buying and renting in every new private development. If you study the way developers systematically erode these quotas, once they’ve got planning permission, you can see how effective they might be.
But ultimately, the most important action the State must take is to build homes for social rent. It has to plan them, build them, own them, hold on to them and manage the allocation according to the most pressing need. It needs to build so rapidly that who gets what becomes a non-issue.
Across the western world, after the Second World War, where the private sector could not provide decent homes, the State did. As Ó Broin points out in this book, under Bevan the British Labour Government initiated a housebuilding programme explicitly premised on the idea of housing as a public good, not a commodity.
This time around we face different challenges to those that confronted the post-war generation. People are flocking to big cities – not just the young but the elderly – after a life of farming or small-town manufacturing.
More people want to live singly – or in shared accommodation. The rise of networked lifestyles has socialised many aspects of urban living, from Starbucks to the gym – so that what people want from the space they live in might be changing. There is also the challenge of meeting tough targets on carbon use and circularity (inbuilt recyclability).
The biggest mistake would be to look at the current state of the built environment and see it as the product of randomness plus demographic change. It is the precise outcome of planned action by the rich against the poor.
From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns. The lesson I take from it is: it can all be redrawn again, this time with the people in control.
In this hard-hitting and timely book, Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists, and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live?
Paul Mason is a British journalist and author of
the book Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future
Overture
Inadequate Language
Every day our attention is drawn to housing. Homelessness has reached record highs. Thousands of children are spending years living in unsuitable and overcrowded emergency accommodation. Tens of thousands of people are unable to access appropriate, secure and affordable housing. Rents and house prices continue to rise while an entire generation of young people are locked out of the private market. Social housing delivery is glacial, waiting lists are too long and rent subsidy dependence is growing. The private sector is building too few homes at the wrong price. Accidental landlords are leaving the market and are being replaced by vulture funds.
Increasing numbers of people are affected by and concerned with the failures of our housing system. In newspapers, television shows, casual conversations or arguments in pubs and parliaments, housing is the topic of the moment. But how adequate is the language we are using to describe what is happening around us?
We talk of ‘market failure’ as if the provision of housing operated inside some kind of private sector bubble free from State intervention. The word ‘failure’ suggests either a lack of success or a problem caused by the omission of some required action that never took place.
We use the word ‘broken’ suggesting that our housing system once worked but has at some point in its development fragmented into pieces. The word describes something that was badly designed or poorly implemented. But also something that with the right intervention could be put back together again.
More and more we talk of ‘crisis’ as instability, trauma and hardship increasingly come to describe people’s experiences of trying to access secure and affordable accommodation. For some, ‘crisis’ also speaks of a crucial or decisive turning point, a sudden change of course or, in drama, a high point immediately preceding the resolution of a conflict. For others, ‘crisis’ is the inevitable outworking of the cycles of the market economy as boom turns to bust, only to repeat itself endlessly.
In response, reformers ponder how best to ameliorate, but not eradicate, the worst impacts of this unavoidable sequence of events while revolutionaries agitate for some imagined rupture and new beginning.
Some prefer the word ‘emergency’ both because it speaks to the immediate risks facing so many people while at the same time demanding urgent attention and greater intervention to get the ‘crisis’ under control. But ‘emergency’ also sounds like an accident that requires you to be rushed to your local hospital. These ‘emergency’ departments never go away, they just see different people on different days with different ‘emergencies’ without end.
Others talk of ‘scandal’, ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’. The first suggests something that offends or causes reputational damage, presumably of those responsible. The second and third imply an unforeseen event, something natural possibly, maybe even on a greater scale than originally imagined.
For me none of these words work. They fail to fully grasp what is going on around us. Housing is not a purely ‘market’ activity and the State, past and present, is intimately involved in every aspect of its financing, building, pricing and allocation.
And surely ‘market failure’ is a tautology. Allowing the market too much of a role in the provision of housing is always destined to fail. History, if nothing else, teaches us that.
Indeed, talking about ‘market failure’ suggests that it has an opposite called ‘market success’. Such a thing may exist for the few, but it definitely does not exist for the many.
Housing is a system involving both State and market. There are also non-governmental, academic and media agents whose role is important. And crucially there are real people not just living in, or seeking to live in, but financing, planning, building, pricing, allocating and paying for the places they come to call home.
Our housing system never worked properly. It was never in a fixed or whole state only to be broken and fragmented somewhere along the way.
It certainly is in crisis but whether this is a key moment in the creation of something better is not yet clear. And are we really consigned to the Hobson’s choice of an inadequate amelioration or an impossible revolution?
For tens of thousands of families and individuals the inability to access secure and affordable accommodation certainly is an emergency demanding urgent action but was this really an accident, the result of a bad fall or clumsily decision?
And of course what is going on in housing today is a scandal but I wonder if those responsible are really suffering any repetitional damage. Unfortunately, too many people think of the hardship they see around them as the result of some natural disaster or human catastrophe, a localised problem rather than a system failure.
Each of these words describe a piece of our housing problem but none of them quite get to the root of the meaning of what we are living through. This is not just about semantics. Words matter. How we describe what we see in our society is in effect how we
