‘The long view’: Introduction for Special Edition of Housing Studies

Back in the late 1980s, Norbert Elias (1987, p. 224) expressed concern that the ‘retreat’ of sociologists into the present moment was leading to the ‘impoverishment’ of the discipline. He argued that ‘[t]he immediate present … constitutes just one small momentary phase within the vast stream of humanity’s development, which, coming from the past, debouches into the present and thrusts ahead toward possible futures’. We do not need to agree with Elias’s aspiration to ‘a universal theory of society’ or consider that such a theory is either possible or desirable to acknowledge his underlying point—that ‘[p]resent conditions may be seen more clearly by comparison with conditions of the past’.

Similar warnings about the ‘permanent present’ have been put forward by housing scholars. Ian Cole has suggested that as a discipline, housing studies has ‘tended to over-actualize present policy agendas and neglect longer run trajectories of social, economic and cultural change’ (2005, p. 284). Attention to contemporary issues in policy and administration, demography and developments in the economy is of course completely understandable: many of these issues are immediate, pressing and relevant and implicated in considerable inequality and injustice. And, as Cole (2005, p. 293) acknowledges, the practice of contemporary academic research, increasingly carried out by researchers on fixed-term contracts and driven by external funding and the need to demonstrate ‘impact’ on the present in response to agendas set by policy professionals seeking generalizable ‘evidence’ about ‘what works’, is inhospitable to more critical reflection informed by hindsight or holistic political and normative concerns. But the lack of space within the contemporary academy does not negate the value of taking a ‘long view’. Hence this edition of Housing Studies brings together papers that explicitly adopt such a ‘long view’ on housing policy and related issues.

According to Cole (2005, p. 286), taking the long view involves developing ‘a historical sensibility’, which is something quite different from providing ‘a description of a sequence of events’. It does not necessarily require historical research, although it can. Making the decision to look back can draw our attention to ‘lessons that should have been learned’ (Yates, 2013, p. 111) but were not, and show us with nuance and context the reasons why particular outcomes have not yet been achieved, despite long and concerted efforts to do so (Bierre et al., 2007). It can reveal to us that policy ideas that look innovative and exciting in fact have long histories, problematic histories in which they may be entangled with other, more sinister discourses, agendas and ideologies (Arthurson, 2008; Flanagan, 2018), or that other ideas that are so long-established they are now ‘orthodoxy’ – accepted as self-evident truths – were once invented, and that this process of invention was determined not by objective truth but by historical contingency (Batten, 1999). It can demonstrate empirically the shortcomings of easy assumptions about cause and effect by tracing the complex of processes, actors, structures and influences that lead to particular configurations of outcomes (Berry, 1999; Rogers, 2016; Di Feliciantonio & Aalbers, 2017).

But more than this, taking a long view can also be about recognizing that like past events, current policies and theories do not occur outside time – they are as temporally situated, contingent and contextual as things that happened years ago. We accept that if we are to properly understand the origins of the public housing system we must locate it in agendas of post-war reconstruction, faith in science, modernism and progress, and the development of the Keynesian welfare state. But we do not always apply the same appreciation of context, contingency and circumstance to current developments, meaning we do not recognize that the same coming together of historical interdependencies, discourses and accidents is what creates current policies.

When the long view is taken, its value is clear. We have both advocated for and used historical methods in our own research to illuminate aspects of the present – using historical research to point to the artificiality of perceived constraints on governmental action in the present (Jacobs, 2001; Jacobs & Manzi, 2017), to challenge the received wisdom of public housing estate decline (Flanagan, 2015) and to problematize the social policy construct of the ‘problem family’ (Flanagan, 2018). Such research is not necessarily straightforward, and archival research in particular can be onerous (see Flanagan & Jacobs, 2018). And we are not the only proponents – as the citations in this short introduction indicate, there are many examples of housing scholarship that has used ‘a historical sensibility’ to make explicit the connections between the past and the present, to overcome policy amnesia, to demonstrate the interdependence between institutions, events and policies and wider currents of social and economic change, to illuminate the contingency of current truisms and to develop, in Foucault’s phrase, ‘histories of the present’. The papers in this special issue build on this research, providing interpretations of housing policy that are insightful, critical and interesting, while showcasing the diversity of ways in which scholars can take ‘the long view’.

One of the points made by Elias (1987, p. 225) is that social theories, even the grandest and most well-known, are products of place, time, context and politics. Two of the papers in this special issue, Timothy and Sebastian’s ‘Historicizing housing typologies: beyond welfare state regimes and varieties of residential capitalism’ (2018) and Megan’s ‘Kemeny revisited: the new homeownership-welfare dynamics’, (2018), demonstrate, in very different ways, how seminal and influential theories need to be understood as temporally situated rather than as universally and perpetually valid.

Jim Kemeny has made a significant theoretical contribution to housing studies, particularly with regard to the relationship between home ownership and welfare policy; he has argued that high levels of home ownership function as compensation for low levels of welfare provision, especially in old age, and that the ideological consequences of this would be declining support for publicly funded welfare services over time (Kemeny, 1980, 1981). Empirically, Blackwell and Kohl use quantitative analysis of longitudinal data and a path dependency framework to both call into question claims of a straightforward connection between housing policy and welfare regimes, and to demonstrate the part played by other factors, such as housing finance. But their most relevant contribution, for the purposes of this special issue at least, is to demonstrate the value of a long view in casting long-accepted theories in new light, as well as presenting alternative, historically-sensitive responses to old problems.

Nethercote revisits Kemeny’s thesis using a different set of analytical tools. She argues that state-sponsored financialization and its biopolitics, especially within the specific context of the Australian case, have produced a set of conditions in which housing assets have not just become liquefied but have been co-opted to manage risk not just in old age but throughout the life course. In doing this, Nethercote opens up space in which we can consider how this fragile, fragmented form of social protection might inform a new generation’s attitude towards welfare provision in ways contrary to those anticipated by Kemeny. Her analysis demonstrates the importance of historically contextualizing not just data, but accompanying interpretative theories – it is only by taking the long view that we can appreciate their limits.

Ade Kearns, Valerie Wright, Lynn Abrams and Barry Hazley use a long view to subject a different kind of long-standing ‘truth’ to scrutiny. In this case, it is the enduring narrative that post-war slum clearance was universally destructive and destabilizing for displaced communities, a narrative that continues to be marshalled today. Kearns and his colleagues’ analysis problematizes such mobilization of black and white accounts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ policy by demonstrating the situated, contingent and political context of the original research which ‘proved’ the damage wrought by slum clearance. Whether in the past or the present, all knowledge generation is informed by the ways of seeing and knowing that are available to the researchers. By re-analysing 1960s-era survey data and supplementing this with oral life histories, Kearns and his colleagues produce an account which is ‘not formulaic, but, rather, nuanced, varied and subjective’. According to such an account, ‘relocation’ does not function as a stand-alone explanatory category, but is an event transformed into an experience through the accumulation of time and interdependent relational dynamics, an experience that must be understood within the context of an entire life lived. This finding, only obtainable by taking the long view, has implications for present day research examining the consequences of relocation over relatively short timeframes.

A different kind of slum clearance is the empirical focus of Hector Becerril Miranda’s ‘Long-term effects of housing policy instruments: Rio de Janerio’s case through an actor network perspective’. Becerril examines and theorizes the different approaches taken to slum ‘upgrading’ in Rio over time. By taking the long view, and tracing the ebbs and flows of housing policy in general, and slum upgrading as a policy instrument in particular, Becceril is able to demonstrate the importance of time and the weight of accumulated process, interaction and reflexivity in shaping the way in which actors in the policy process, human and non-human, come together to produce outcomes.

David Cowan and Alex Marsh’s ‘A perennial problem? On under-occupation in English council housing’ similarly examines a policy-setting over time. They take the controversial ‘bedroom tax’, an initiative of the UK’s Conservative government, and argue that rather than this initiative being ‘a novelty’, anxiety over under-occupation of council housing has had a long, though not necessarily consistent or unwavering, history. Their close examination of this history shows that the concern is less for what size of household lives in what size of property, and more for the government of council housing – what is means to ‘manage’ council housing, who is being governed, to what purpose and up to what limit, and how this activity of ‘managing’ or ‘governing’ is to be carried out ‘properly’. In doing say, they show how ‘[t]he history of this backwater of housing policy demonstrates how class, income and tenure played such a significant role in the shaping of housing policy’. Their use of the long view also allows them to delineate the space for a more nuanced assessment of the bedroom tax. Cognisant of its history, they can identify which of its aspects are genuinely new and significant – its break with past efforts to develop nuanced knowledge of over/under occupancy, its mobilization of a new conceptualization of the tenant as deviant, dependent, self-interested subject, and the shift in its rationale, from the wellbeing of tenants to the wellbeing of the taxpayer.

For Ken Gibb, Geoffrey Meen and Christian Nygaard, the long view is of inherent empirical value. In their paper, ‘Long-run dynamics: understanding local housing market change in London’, they use long-run data analysis to examine neighbourhood change in London. Their results indicate that at the local level change is less persistent than is normally assumed and that the key factors in that change would be neither easily discernible nor often captured in short-run datasets. Given the considerable inbuilt path dependency created by the existing built environment, not every event, policy or intervention has lasting consequences for the urban form, and the dramatic or structural changes that do are rare and infrequent. Gibb, Meen and Nygaard demonstrate the benefit of a long view for capturing a broader range of the factors in a story, not just a few, and for providing a fuller explanation of how changes happen or do not happen that can be of considerable value to policy-makers today.

Steffen Wetzstein’s ‘Comparative housing, urban crisis and political economy: an ethnographically based “long view” from Auckland, Singapore and Berlin’ takes a view that is not just long, but broad. Wetzstein takes a large contemporary problem – that in many countries, house prices are growing rapidly and outstripping growth in incomes – and argues that the current political economy of this crisis emerges from past decisions, contexts and trajectories. He suggests that taking a long view of these will provide ‘more effective theoretical and methodological guidance in relation to unpacking the present’. Drawing on a comparative study of disparate but oddly comparable cities, he suggests that if policy-makers are to intervene effectively then they need to start mobilizing policy across space and time, taking a long-term focus that understands geographical and historical developments as cumulative, contingent and pertinent.

Daphne Habibis, Rhonda Phillips and Peter Phibbs’ ‘Housing policy in remote Indigenous communities from 1967 to the present: how politics obstructs good policy’ takes on the ‘wicked’ problem of remote Australian Indigenous housing. This is a vexed, politicized, racialized policy issue, exacerbated by significant practical and structural problems. Looking at it over the long view draws two things into view: that colonization is an ongoing project rather than a set of events long confined to the past, and that this area of policy has been fatally affected by politicization to the detriment of outcomes. The context is marked by the churn of institutions, policies and people, with resulting loss of institutional memory and knowledge, breached trust and uncertainty. Their analysis points to dramatically shifting ideologies, contamination by other agendas, moral panics and scant regard for evidence – and the persistent failure to recognize what does appear as a constant: the determination of many Indigenous people to remain on country. The value of the long view in this case is that it draws attention to what we actually already know, but have chosen to forget, and why this is so.

A cumulative reading of the papers in this special issue leads us to conclude that a long view is essential for policymakers if they are to better understand the reasons why so much housing policy implementation falls short or has consequences that are unintended. A long view can reveal the common challenges that arise across time and space, such as the need for adequate resources and commitment to seeing the tasks completed. The study of the past is an excellent starting point for serious investigations of the challenges of the contemporary period and the issues that are likely to confront us in the future. But more than this, the long view is essential for good research. Rather than respond simply to demands that scholars engage and deliver ‘impact’, we should expend more time pursuing scholarship that is reflective, critical and of value on its own terms. There are risks of course – we need to be careful that we are not seeking to bend history to suit our own ends, to see what we want to see or to find only what we are looking for. But regardless of the point in time upon which our empirical gaze is directed, having ‘a historical sensibility’ as we go about our task is an excellent basis to start from.