This is The Housing Question, a newsletter about housing, but not just housing… politics, social policy, economics, history and anything else that helps makes sense of how we got here. Why is it called The Housing Question? I’m increasingly resistant to using the term ‘housing crisis’. Ten or 15 years ago it had something to say about the problems in our housing system. Now there are many different crises – and addressing the dominant one (the affordability and accessibility of home ownership) can mean distracting attention from all the others (homelessness, lack of social housing, insecurity etc). In the face of what look more like long-term structural problems, ‘housing crisis’ seems redundant or, worse, counter-productive. As one interviewee put it to me during the research for my thesis, the very fact that we’ve done naff-all about it for years means there isn’t a housing crisis. Of the alternatives, ‘housing emergency’ (as used by Shelter and others) is a step up on crisis and conveys a sense of urgency but it also implies something short term.
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Coming soon
This is The Housing Question, a newsletter about housing, but not just housing… politics, social policy, economics, history and anything else that helps makes sense of how we got here. Why is it called The Housing Question? I’m increasingly resistant to using the term ‘housing crisis’. Ten or 15 years ago it had something to say about the problems in our housing system. Now there are many different crises – and addressing the dominant one (the affordability and accessibility of home ownership) can mean distracting attention from all the others (homelessness, lack of social housing, insecurity etc). In the face of what look more like long-term structural problems, ‘housing crisis’ seems redundant or, worse, counter-productive. As one interviewee put it to me during the research for my thesis, the very fact that we’ve done naff-all about it for years means there isn’t a housing crisis. Of the alternatives, ‘housing emergency’ (as used by Shelter and others) is a step up on crisis and conveys a sense of urgency but it also implies something short term.