of entire urban neighbourhoods and exclusion from social and economic networks.
Inequality is rising dramatically – while in the OECD countries the bottom 40% hold only about 3% of the total wealth, the top 10% account for 40% (OECD 2019a). The costs for essential commodities like health, education, and also housing have risen well beyond inflation and income increases. Since the 1990s, austerity‐driven policies in countries like Great Britain or the Netherlands – historically nations with strong welfare systems – drastically privatized and reduced investments in public housing, limited rental subsidies, and thus dismantled rights and access to affordable housing (Rolnik 2019). Looking at the European Union, many countries have seen a shift from capital to revenue funding, from investing into building homes to housing allowances. Housing allowances are increasingly used to subsidize tenants in the expensive private rental market (Pittini 2019).
With the impact of deregulation in Germany and the sale of social housing stocks to the free market (to also ease budget strains), places like Berlin, once a paragon of social housing, have almost entirely lost their institutional capacity to actively pursue housing policy (Marquardt and Glaser 2020).
Due to such developments, on average one third of the disposable incomes of middle‐income households has to be spent on housing, with low‐income tenant households ‘facing even higher relative housing cost burdens in the majority of countries’ (OECD 2019b). In the USA, there is no state where a full‐time minimum wage suffices to rent or own even one‐bedroom dwellings, and almost half of all renting households spend an unsustainable part of their income on rent (Madden and Marcuse 2016).
Rolnik (2019) argues that these dynamics go way beyond just rising prices. She argues that with neoliberalism as a dominant political force since the 1990s and the simultaneous expansion of asset markets the provision of housing has essentially been taken over by the finance sector, leading to its commodification even though being a fundamental need of subsistence. While the world's total GDP has only increased five times between 1980 and 2010 financial assets have risen by a factor of 16 – a ‘wall of money’ (Rolnik 2019) seeking new opportunities for profitable investment. A ‘peculiar form of value storage (has thus emerged), as it directly related macroeconomics to the homes of individuals and families.’
These developments led to the situation that in places lacking affordable housing options even for middle‐class families many units lie empty most of the same time: like about 69,000 in Melbourne (Prosper Australia 2020) and 125,000 without permanent residents in London (Trust for London 2020) in 2019, or an estimated 99,000 condo units and homes in Toronto in 2016 (Better Dwelling 2017). Here, ‘these (factors) drive up housing prices and fundamentally alter the character of neighbourhoods’ (Leung and Williams 2017), pointing at displacement and dissolution of existing networks as a consequence. Also, neighbourhoods attractive to tourists are increasingly threatened by gentrification induced by short‐term rental platforms such as Airbnb (Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018), which tend to take affordable apartments off the market, flout existing housing regulations, and undermine policies protecting affordable housing supply. In Dublin, Airbnb became a dominant rental property market platform even for permanent residents, where at times more than twice as many apartments were offered on Airbnb as on the normal rental market with its regulations (Harris 2018).
The controversial statement made by the architect Patrik Schumacher at the World Architecture Festival 2016 (Frearson 2016) might unintentionally help to uncover some of the rationale behind such market‐driven mechanisms of exclusion and how they can directly affect individual housing biographies. Frearson (2016) summarizes Schumacher's argument that in order to ‘make the city's housing provision more efficient’ and to address its ‘affordability crisis’, proposes to abolish any land use prescriptions, milieu protection, housing standards, and all forms of social housing or rent control. He criticizes it as a ‘tragedy’ that social‐housing tenants have rights to ‘precious’ city‐centre properties while those working here are the ones that would ‘really need (options to live in the centre), to be productive and to produce the support required for those that have been subsidised’. The arguments are interesting in so far as needs for affordable housing are not denied here but would leave its supply entirely to the free‐market mechanism, in the end accepting that these would privilege the ‘productive parts’ of the population with suitable housing options in central locations, while those depending on affordable housing would have to relocate and consequently be excluded from the social and economic networks and opportunities they are part of. Such displacements from central neighbourhoods to the peripheries would also increase need for transportation, indicating that exclusion also has an ecological dimension.
It is important to anticipate that issues of affordability go way beyond just economic aspects. In particular, because the notion of ‘making and having a home’ is considered to be an essential and ‘universal activity and (…) an extension and expression of our capacity to create’ (Madden and Marcuse 2016), the experience of displacement – either ‘direct’ by means of evictions, e.g. in order to raise rents or redevelop habitats, or ‘exclusionary’ by market mechanisms that render unobtainable what might have otherwise been a viable housing option – have fundamental social and psychological effects (Madden and Marcuse 2016). Dwellers forced to relocate are exposed to precarity, disempowerment, and insecurity; destructive for both individuals and communities. Affected citizens must reconstitute their social and professional networks ‘in circumstances that almost by definition are strained’ (Madden and Marcuse 2016).
These developments cast a more complex light on who is affected by exclusion – from opportunities to experience the benefits of ‘otherness’ and participate in and contribute to the social and economic potentials the urban realm could offer. Armborst et al. note that in general ‘cities (in general) bring people together, but they're pretty good at keeping people apart too’ and argue that most Americans still live in communities that ‘are racially, economically, (and) generationally … segregated’ (Armborst et al. 2017). Aiming to understand the specific reasons, the authors compile an entire ‘Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion’, inventorying physical artefacts, policies, and practices used by multiple actors – designers, policymakers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, or others – to deliberately either restrict or enable inclusive access to housing, urban spaces, facilities, and service – as instruments of either integration or segregation, inclusion or exclusion.
Agencies of exclusion identified in their studies are – among others – exclusive access to public spaces, racist housing policies and racially‐homogeneous communities, gated communities, masterplans leading to exclusion of affordable housing projects, physical infrastructure solidifying socio‐spatial segregation, loopholes to relocate affordable housing options to other areas, segregating school district policies, or lack of choice regarding apartment types. Also, architecture itself as a creative domain ‘which makes real estate real’ contributes to the socio‐economic disparities at play, both reflecting and producing the prevailing social and economic order (Martin et al. 2015). These exclusionary practices continue to apply – and have a systemic capability to apply highly sophisticated financial instruments and legal expertise (Sassen 2014), undermining the capacities of the affected to defend their rights.
Examples fostering inclusion are policies against discrimination of people with disabilities, affordable housing subsidies also giving access to jobs, education, and health, housing options for immigrants, inclusionary housing policies setting quotas for low‐ and moderate‐income household in new developments, public support for ‘Naturally Occurring Retirement Community’ (see also below), or senior housing options for LGBT communities. The authors note that this arsenal reads in general almost like a historical account of the making of the modern American city as such, arguing how instrumental these ‘weapons’ are for the level of inclusivity of urban societies.
Agencies of Inclusion
Instruments
