The great British housing crisis

Abstract

Noting the recent resurgence of housing as a political issue, this article takes a historic view of the origins of the current housing crisis. While the foundations of the contemporary housing system were laid in the period following the First World War, the roots of the crisis lie in two developments in the 1980s: the privatisation of the social housing stock through the Right to Buy and the growth of mortgage lending in response to financial liberalisation. These two changes combined to produce an upsurge in ground rent on residential land and a restructuring of housing consumption and production around the pursuit of this ground rent. This article ends by outlining a range of policy measures and considering the prospects for their implementation.

Reflecting on neoliberal natures: An exchange

“…A simmering crisis of housing availability and affordability prompted less enthusiasm for any form of landscape conservation if it entailed imposing even nominal costs on developers. The narrative that a lack of affordable housing in the UK is driven by excessive, expensive environmental regulation typically refuses to acknowledge how the neoliberalization of housing and the liberalization of consumer finance, two of Thatcher’s signature policy initiatives, is the catalyst of the housing crisis (Robertson, 2017). Instead of advocating for increased investment of social housing, this genre of explanation embraces neoliberalism’s stock response to crises of its own making: solving market failures with ‘freer’ markets, and blaming ‘restrictive policy’, rather than austerity or liberalization, for social and economic problems.…”

“…Surely new phenomena require new strategies of opposition, yet old strategies clearly remain useful. For example, the rollout of biodiversity offsetting policy at the European Union (EU) level was halted by some very old school organizing: from counter-demonstrations to coalition building to pamphlets (Lave and Robertson, 2017). 2 Taking the political implications of our work a bit further, I have to come think that those of us who study the rare aspects of ‘neoliberal natures’ that may actually have a claim to novelty (the shiny labels on the old bottles) may be complicit in their reproduction.…”

The financialisation of housing land supply in England

“…A housing land supply that is increasingly organised around the appropriation and maximisation of ground rents is likely to impact on the supply of housing, influencing not only where houses are built and at what price they are sold, but whether homes are built at all (Robertson, 2017).…”

Fortifying futures: how older boomerangers in English multigenerational households boost resilience through social capital accumulation and distribution

“…Across all tenure types and for all age groups, housing has become increasingly unaffordable (Meen et al, 2016). The continued welfarisation of social housing has resulted in further residualisation of the sector to the extent that only those considered in acute housing need are allocated public housing (Fitzpatrick and Watts, 2017;Robertson, 2017).…”