Government policies have led to the
egregious destruction of housing access
for the poor, while lining the pockets
of the elite, writes Owen Hatherley
ne of the most breached of rights declared by the UN at its
inception is the right to be decently and securely housed,
as Raquel Rolnik reminds the reader at the start of her book
on the global housing crisis. Her panoramic, newly translated book
from 2015, Urban Warfare, and Samuel Stein's new short polemic,
Capital City, both chart how housing ceased to mean a place in which
to live as of right, and transformed instead into a financial instrument.
Since the mid-1970s, successive governments across the world have
helped along this transformation, regardless of the consequences for
that original 'right'. These changes have become the orthodOAJ' of t he
World Bank - it once lent 90 per cent of its housing budget to public
housing schemes, but this has now shrunk to less than 10 per cent -
and of that alleged champion of social democratic values,
the European Union, which, in 2008, ruled that public housing could
only be provided for those who couldn't afford t he market's product.
Offering decommodification to anyone who isn't desperate
is an impermissible interference with the free market.
The two books are different in focus - Rolnik sweeps across five
continents, while Stein zeroes in on New York City - but t heir analysis
is very similar. Both are professionals in the housing sector, though
of very different seniority. Stein is a qualified planner, whereas Rolnik,
a Brazilian professor of urban planning, spent six years as the UN s'
special rapporteur on housing. In this capacity, she firmly criticised
the housing policies of the UK's Conservative-Liberal Democrat
coalition, particularly its brutal, r egr essive 'bedroom tax', earning her
brief Daily Mail notoriety. The titles of each book embody their object
of criticism as a particular form of state - the 'real-estate state' for
Stein, the 'empire of finance' for Rolnik. Accordingly, both are
strongly corrective against any 'cock-up theory' of how we got to this
point, insisting that the financial bubbles, the shortages of affordable
housing and the empty luArur y towers are all the results of deliberate
decisions that have made a small number of people astonishingly rich.
Usefully, both spend a lot of time explaining how we really got hereLEFT New skyscrapers
loom over Thomas
Heatherwick's Vessel.
Severely criticised in the
press, Hudson Yards is the
largest mixed-use private real
estate venture in US history
in the first place. Rolnik registers the importance first of
the destruction of social housing across much of Europe
and the dismantlem ent of less-radical forms of state
assistance in the US or Greece. This act of destruction is
followed by one of expansion, where finance moved into
the places it hadn't previously gone, linking apparently