cannot meet any unmet demand for cheap housing for those in the bottom bands.
4. ‘Decent’, ‘legal’ housing
Having argued that profit-oriented private suppliers cannot meet the demand for urban low-income affordable housing, it is now time to point out that, in fact, this is easily disproved! In most cities and towns across the world, informal markets provide millions upon millions of housing units, both for owners and renters. The market does work. But this is precisely the sort of housing that is so frequently labelled ‘a problem’. Often the argument outlined and criticised above – that the answer is to increase the formal supply of legal zoned land and thereby housing – is trotted out as the solution to this problem.
The mistake is to cordon off this ‘housing type’ analytically as something peculiar to, or inherent in, societies of the Global South and of no significance for urban housing studies in the Global North. For it is neither peculiar nor irrelevant. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European and North American societies had plenty of exceedingly poor-quality urban housing, usually in the rental sector. It certainly rivalled, and often exceeded, the worst housing conditions experienced in urban slums across Asia, Africa and Latin America today. But at the time the concepts of ‘informality’ and ‘legal standards’ in relation to housing (and indeed labour) were not current or were in the process of being formulated. This is why the premises outlined so far are scattered with these terms (‘informal’, ‘formal’, ‘legal’, ‘zoned’, ‘planned’), because these are key to understanding not only the differences between affordable housing issues in the Global North and the Global South, but also the similarities.
For very good reasons, as they grew wealthier and more democratic, Global North societies gradually imposed regulations and standards on housing quality and invested in major urban water and sanitation infrastructure. Their urban housing sectors were transformed, low-income people’s welfare as measured by health outcomes soared, and these ‘standards’ have become embedded as norms that are often underpinned by judicial obligation. Meeting these standards costs money. In the capitalist societies of the Global North, the norms of private property rights are also embedded, and this adds value to housing and therefore also increases its cost. These conditions are taken as read in most housing studies in the contemporary Global North. The question of what might occur if these conditions were not, or could not, be maintained is rarely factored in. The answer to that question would be that an informal housing sector would emerge which would provide affordable housing for low-income groups, just as in the cities of the Global South and just as in the cities of nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Such housing would replicate the ‘problems’ that the formal-sector norms were designed to address. In other words, the basic premise is that the market cannot deliver affordable housing for the poor if – and the following two points are the big ‘ifs’ – even very basic standards of space, privacy, services and health commensurate with local laws are met and housing delivery is presumed to be done by a regulated, legal, taxable building sector.
5. Social housing
The final premise is simple: if the conditions above are met, then ‘formal’ social housing (priced below the levels set by the market) has to meet the demand for affordable housing from low-income urban groups. This housing sector is the central ameliorating factor that addresses the mismatch between incomes and ‘decent’ housing in urban societies across the world, in the cities of both the Global North and the Global South. The type of provision (from built rental units to subsidised, legal, planned but empty plots for ‘self-building’) varies across time and space. But much of this has been squeezed in the neoliberal phase since the 1980s and with the global shift away from public-sector provision and subsidies and towards full cost recovery.
The terms ‘housing affordability’ and ‘affordable housing’ are used above and throughout this book because they are commonly understood to refer to the situation in which households are struggling or unable to pay for fairly basic housing. Nonetheless, they are not really straightforward and it helps to consider this issue before proceeding. Before the 1980s, for example, policy discussions might focus more explicitly on ‘low-income housing’, making clear the crucial link between housing problems and incomes. According to the late Michael Stone, Professor of Community Planning, Public Policy and Social Justice at the University of Massachusetts Boston, it was only in the 1980s that ‘the term “affordable housing” came into vogue as affordability challenges moved up the income distribution and as public responsibility for the plight of the poor was in retreat’3 – in other words, it can and has been used to obscure the issue. Nonetheless, as long as it is recognised that affordability is about a relationship between people and whatever they need to buy, rather than the ‘thing’ itself, the terms are useful, and they are very widely used by the public, academics, the media and advocacy groups in this sense.
Housing processes across time and space: recognising the links
These five premises about housing provision and outcomes relate to the sharp end of housing crises. There are sections of society that are wealthy, or have well- or reasonably remunerated stable employment, for whom private-sector, capitalist housing markets may work well enough. But there are scores of different societies across the world, and the proportion of housing demand that can reasonably be served in this way is highly variable between them. For those outside this segment of housing demand, relying on the market can lead to very negative outcomes or no housing at all (i.e. homelessness). And within each society, or country, there are many urban centres with highly variable patterns of income. The geographical expression of demand-side housing problems is therefore very varied, both between and within countries. There are also temporal variations. The situation can worsen or improve – there is no steady direction of change. Over time, there can be huge changes in the type of housing ‘allowed’ by governments and falls or rises in disposable incomes before housing costs are factored in. Such changes can significantly shift the proportion of urban households whose incomes are too low for them to meet their basic housing needs in the housing markets they face. A current example in England is the sudden steep rise in the numbers of adults living with their parents in the south-east, and particularly in London, as rents or mortgages have become increasingly unaffordable for people in income bands who, before the global financial crisis, were reasonably served by what the market provided.
The geographical variability of the scale of really chronic housing issues across the world and the obvious differences in the outcomes, particularly in terms of highly visible, large expanses of what are often labelled ‘slums’ in many cities of the so-called Global South, can easily divert attention away from the underlying processes at work. The influences on the nature of the supply of housing are indeed so variable that it sometimes seems impossible to make meaningful comparisons between regions. Modal (rather than average) income levels, the specific requirements of local financial institutions, land laws, car ownership, public transport, land values that encourage particular types of building (e.g. high-rise versus low-rise), culture, technologies, materials, the weather – these and many other factors all play a part. A further and crucial factor is the history of state interventions in housing markets. Yet a focus on the nature of housing itself – what is ‘supplied’ and its tangible qualities – often leads to an almost binary approach to the study of urban housing in the Global South versus the Global North. In the former, the focus is on so-called slums – although, in reality, this is better understood as the outcome of informality in housing provision of various types4 – and the problems tend to be cast in terms of ‘development’.5 Since these types of housing outcomes are far rarer in the Global North – at least in modern times – the focus in housing studies there is on the workings of formal, large-scale private-sector housing markets (e.g. new private housing provision or gentrification) and the
