The global urban housing affordability crisis

Abstract

This critical commentary confronts and explores the – so far under-recognised and under-researched – emergent global crisis of urban housing affordability and affordable housing provision. This crisis results from the fact that housing-related household expenses are rising faster than salary and wage increases in many urban centres around the world; a situation triggered by at least three global post-Global Financial Crisis megatrends of accelerated (re)urbanisation of capital and people, the provision of cheap credit and the rise of intra-society inequality. Reflecting on the recent findings of extensive comparative ethnographic research across Western countries, and analytically approaching housing affordability and affordable housing issues from a broadly understood intersection of political and economic spheres (e.g. issues of state and market, governance and regulation, policy and investment), the paper pursues four key objectives: raising awareness of the crisis, showing its extent and context-specificity but also the severe social as well as problematic spatial implications, linking current developments to key academic debates in housing studies and urban studies, and importantly, developing a research agenda that can help to redress the currently detectable ‘policy–outcome’ gap in policy making by asking fresh and urgent questions from empirical, theoretical and political viewpoints. This intervention ultimately calls for more dedicated and politicised knowledge production towards achieving affordable urban futures for all.

Housing Policy in Crisis: An International Perspective

“…Overall, this special issue suggests that since 2008 the policy-outcome gap between state ambitions and results for the public has significantly widened, with policymakers largely relying on market-friendly solutions that only entrench housing inequalities (Wetzstein, 2017). Indeed, rather than representing a turning point against neoliberalism, the post-2008 world has witnessed an intensification of the neoliberal project.…”

Campgrounds as service hubs for the marginally housed

“…Moreover, the fundamental needs that gave rise to service hubs and have helped to sustain them stretch well beyond the North American context in which the concept was first developed. Shortages of low‐cost and low‐barrier housing are particularly widespread, with Wetzstein (, p.3159) identifying an ‘emergent global crisis of urban housing affordability and affordable housing provision’. Driven by broad structural trends, particularly the financialisation of housing, this crisis is evident in both developed and developing countries and is particularly acute in many high‐amenity Asia‐Pacific Rim cities, of which Auckland is an exemplar.…”

Housing today

“…Take affordability, for instance. Although long an issue for many, particularly more vulnerable populations, it was in the past decades that concerns about the affordability of housing reached a crescendo (Gurran, 2008;Wetzstein, 2017;Fields & Hodkinson, 2018). Perhaps for the first time since the 1950s when Keynesianinspired welfare policies still contributed to the affordability of housing in many parts of the world, the inability to afford housing now has also become more of a middle-and even upper-class concern.…”

“…Globalization has created specialized centers of commerce, finance and increasingly tech and science, which channel growth into several competing global cities. It is especially in these cities where housing has become a major concern for a broader segment of the population, leading some to speak of a global affordability crisis (Ley, 2017;Wetzstein, 2017).…”