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Housing Policy in Crisis: An International Perspective

The 2008 financial crisis and its subsequent economic and political shockwaves are widely linked to housing policy failures in North America and Europe. Encouraging home ownership and asset-based welfare while failing to regulate high-risk lending fueled both an unsustainable housing boom and a toxic asset bubble in housing-backed financial instruments (Aalbers, 2016). The resulting housing crisis has been international in scope, headlined by housing market crashes across wealthy countries and the loss of millions of homes to foreclosure, with the United States and Spain hit the hardest (Beswick et al., 2016). What is striking, however, is that the geography of this global housing crisis extends far beyond the core capitalist countries affected by the 2008 financial crash: housing systems everywhere increasingly are prone to volatility, placing the sustained reproduction of economic and social life under threat. The scale of the international housing crisis has been brought to light in recent years by the work of successive United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Adequate Housing (Farha, 2017; Rolnik, 2014). Their detailed reports, drawing on evidence from the global north and global south in equal measure, reveal a depressing range of lived experiences. Indeed, as Wetzstein (2017) shows, the rapid increase of housing expenses relative to wages and income in cities across the developed and developing world has made urban housing unaffordable at a global scale, leading to rising levels of homelessness and residential instability for low-income owners and renters. Housing markets are working in dysfunctional and geographically imbalanced ways, causing the displacement of lowand middle-income households from higher value areas, and blockages in housing production that are keeping supply low and markets tight (Bardhan, Edelstein, & Kroll, 2012). Although the language of crisis evokes the sudden suspension of the normal functioning of a system (Roitman, 2014), over the past decade the housing crisis has become a motif for a seemingly enduring state of affairs in which rising evictions, overcrowding, unaffordability, substandard conditions, homelessness, and displacement have become the norm. The international housing crisis is thus a feature, not a bug, less an emergency than a consistent aspect of a capitalist political economy predicated on private property, market exchange, and the capital accumulation imperative (Aalbers & Christophers, 2014; Marcuse & Madden, 2016). The state, with its central role in safeguarding and reproducing capitalist relations, is inevitably at the heart of the crisis of housing insecurity. Declining political commitments and, in some cases, fiscal strain, are producing policies that make housing less affordable and less secure for many segments of the population. And, as moments of spectacular suffering such as the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London attest, these policies are also making housing less safe for its inhabitants (Madden, 2017).