By Jeremy Gilbert and Anna Minton
If the price of food had increased at the same rate as house prices over the past 50 years, then today a chicken would cost £140 in London and $320 in New York. Soaring house price inflation, for owners and renters, is a global problem, with cities around the world from Auckland to Vancouver and Berlin to Stockholm facing huge price rises.
In the UK, a mix of recent disastrous economic decisions are interacting with the consequences of 40 years of neoliberal policy, to create an acute crisis where millions are on the precipice of housing disaster. This is the context for The Politics of Housing, a conference on the housing crisis at the University of East London on July 6th and 7th.
Very low interest rates since the 2008 financial crash, a flood of foreign investment, often from dubious sources, the creation of trillions of pounds of new money through Quantitative Easing and a generation of neoliberal housing policies which decimated social housing, have combined to create one of the most inflationary housing markets in the world.
Now the sharp rises in interest rates since Liz Truss’s catastrophic ‘mini-budget’ are threatening to push millions over the edge as homeowners struggle to pay mortgages, rents soar as landlords leave the rental market and the capping of housing benefit leads to a stream of constant evictions and choices between heating and eating.
At the same time, global developers continue to carve up cities like London, building tens of thousands luxury apartments few people can afford to buy and reconfiguring entire parts of the city. Gentrification and dispossession and counter-strategies will be debated by Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University and UCL’s Mike Edwards, who works with community group Just Space. A policy-making workshop will see Tom Copley, Deputy Mayor of Housing for London, Assembly members and Council Leaders and Cabinet members from across London put forward alternative strategies.
Housing is now arguably the defining political issue of our time. In England and Wales, nothing predicts the political alignment of a voter more accurately than their status as tenant, mortgagee or owner-occupier. Renters in particular have suffered appalling increases in costs relative to wages in recent years: the culmination of half a century of policy oriented towards the interests of asset-holders, developers and landlords at the expense of everybody else. Given the incredible disparity in access to property that now exists between older and younger generations, it is little wonder that political perspectives are today so seemingly polarised along generational lines.
If any single group can be said to have benefitted most from the political regimes that have governed Britain since 1979, then it is landlords and property developers. To the extent that their interests are partially aligned, the benefits that have accrued to social groups such as retired homeowners have led them towards a conservative and defensive politics, hostile to the threatening aspirations of younger voters.
At the same time, tenants are becoming politically organised as such in the UK for the first time in many years. Mara Ferrari, David Madden and Keir Milburn will discuss these issues on a panel on the politics of tenancy, while the broad complex of issues involved with access to housing, democratic input to planning, and the general decline of public space will be interrogated by Owen Hatherley and Eoin O’Broin; Hatherley is one of our best knows writers on architecture and urban space, while O’Broin is a member of the Irish Parliament, in which capacity he has written and campaigned extensively on issues of housing and urban development.
Overall we hope that these discussions will both contribute to a comprehensive understanding of this crucial contemporary issue, and lay the ground for future interventions at the level of policy, analysis and political strategy.
The Politics of Housing is at the University of East London on July 6th & 7th: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-politics-of-housing-6-7th-july-tickets-638780799567
Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London. Dr Anna Minton is Reader in Architecture at the University of East London.
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