Housing

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for the foreign invaders.” “They can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry.” “Millions of ordinary people up and down Britain are utterly fed-up with how immigration is driving up house prices, rents and flooding social housing.”

Three quotes spanning 120 years, the first from the Tory MP for Stepney, William Evans-Gordon, speaking in a parliamentary debate in 1902; the second from a newspaper interview in 2006 by New Labour minister and Barking MP Margaret Hodge; and the third from a Spectator article last month by the academic Matthew Goodwin. A century across which the language has changed but the sentiment has remained the same.

And now we hear that the Tories are preparing to launch a scheme to provide “British homes for British workers”, promising to make it more difficult for migrants to access social housing, which most cannot access anyway. 

[…] 

“British homes for British workers” may be an empty slogan but it is one that Evans-Gordon would have understood. Implicit is a sentiment that echoes across the century, at the heart of which is a concern less for working-class wellbeing than for pinning on immigrants the blame for the failures of social policy to improve working-class lives.

Because in the ’80s and ’90s office buildings were designed to accommodate large swaths of cubicles, the distance between a building’s envelope and its core — usually occupied by elevators and washrooms — tends to be larger than in a typical residential building.

To make the financials work for a project, a certain number of units is required per floor, which results in a layout of long and skinny apartments. As a result, providing access to daylight and natural ventilation to all living spaces at a reasonable cost is a challenging, if not impossible, endeavour.

[…]

“This is not the kind of housing that any of us, if we can afford it, would live in,” Grittner says, pointing at evidence of detrimental effects of insufficient exposure to daylight on people’s health, which includes eye conditions and mood disorders.

Moreover, researchers have found that the presence of windows with an outdoor view creates a sense of safety and control over one’s environment, an important aspect to consider when designing affordable housing.

“When you look at vulnerable populations, who would most likely be living in this type of housing, it’s incredibly important that they have a restorative and nature-connected space,” Grittner says, emphasizing the significance having a connection to the outdoors represents for people living in affordable and supportive housing.

“One of the cornerstones of trauma-informed design is enabling a connection to the outdoors, and understanding the impact of the quality of housing, as well as the surrounding environment.”

Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers said the rental affordability crisis prompted the organisation to look at the experience of those in employment.

“Essential workers are the backbone of our communities, yet they cannot afford to rent. Our snapshot shows that more and more essential workers are being pushed into serious rental stress,” she said.

The snapshot used the internationally accepted measure of rent exceeding 30 per cent of a household budget to be considered as causing financial stress.

“Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses, and many other essential workers we rely on. They cannot afford to live in their own communities,” Chambers said.

Today I’m launching CityDensity.com to compare the world’s big cities.

The website works by breaking the world up into tiny squares, with each square having 1km sides. Because the squares are essentially random they’re also fair - no political borders can make a city seem bigger or smaller than it is. 

Khan launched Right to Buy-back in July last year to boost London’s supply of council homes. It gives boroughs the funds to purchase former council homes that have been sold into the private market through the government’s Right to Buy programme.

Since then 14 London boroughs have been given £152 million to purchase 1,577 market homes that have been or will be converted to social rent or to house homeless families. A total of 1,756 council homes in London were sold through Right to Buy in 2021.

According to the New Economics Foundation, the scheme has led to an average net loss of 24,000 social homes a year since 1991.

The mayor’s office says it has already exceeded his previous target of starting 10,000 new council homes this year. Khan now aims to start a further 10,000 homes in a significantly shorter time – a total of 20,000 new council homes by 2024.

Welcome to Vienna, the city that may have cracked the code of how to keep inner-city housing affordable. As other cities battle spiralling rental prices, partly fuelled by inner-city apartments being used as short-term holiday rentals or being kept strategically vacant by property speculators, the Austrian capital bucks the trend. In the place that last year retained its crown as the world’s most livable city in the Economist’s annual index, Vienna’s renters on average pay roughly a third of their counterparts in London, Paris or Dublin, according to a recent study by the accounting firm Deloitte.

Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population.

In a recent report, only 30 to 40 percent of those polled in a national survey of urban and suburban residents believed a 10 percent increase in housing production would result in lower home prices and rents. Against that backdrop, however, a research team at New York University issued a report last month arguing that there is clear evidence that boosting supply is the key to lowering or moderating housing costs.

“All the evidence shows that it does reduce housing costs,” said Vicki Been, director of the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. The report by Been and two NYU colleagues attempts to look at all the evidence available from studies of the question.

“In sum,” they write, “significant new evidence shows that new construction in a variety of settings decreases, or slows increases in, rents, not only for the city as a whole, but generally also for apartments located close to the new construction.”

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One thing the report authors, state housing officials, and supply skeptics agree on is that building more housing alone will not solve the housing crisis facing people at low incomes.  

Increasing the supply of housing is necessary, said Been, but “it’s not sufficient because there will always be people who do not make enough money or can’t work for whatever reason and don’t have enough income to pay for housing.” She and her co-authors said robust housing subsidy programs are crucial for those households.

Calgary's downtown development incentive program, which offers $75 per square foot to building owners willing to convert underused office space to residential apartments, is unique to North America.

It was launched in 2021, at a time when the city — home to more corporate head offices per capita than anywhere else in Canada — was reeling in the wake of an extended downturn in oil prices and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Commercial property values in the city's core had collapsed due to a wave of energy sector layoffs and consolidation that had left close to a third of Calgary's downtown office space empty.

Desperate to fill nearly 13.5 million square feet of unoccupied space and boost its dwindling tax base, Calgary launched the incentive program with the goal of removing six million square feet of empty offices from the city's downtown by 2031.

Sheryl McMullen, who manages the program for the City of Calgary, said it was unclear at the time what the reception would be.

But the program turned out to be so popular that in October 2023, the city was forced to press pause after reaching its $253-million funding threshold.

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head.  At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs.  From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage. Artificial scarcity also creates growth dependencies: because survival is mediated by prices and wages, when productivity improvements and recessions lead to unemployment people suffer loss of access to essential goods — even when the output of those goods is not affected — and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis.

There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.