The housing crisis and London

Abstract

City has, from its inception, paid close attention to London, to the ‘World City’ or ‘Global City’ ideologies underwriting its concentration of wealth and of poverty and to challenges from among its citizens to the prevailing orthodoxy. This paper focuses on London's extreme experience of the housing crisis gripping the UK—itself the European nation with the fastest long-term growth of average house prices and widest regional disparities, both driven by overblown financialisation and the privileging of rent as a means of wealth accumulation, often by dispossession. Londoners’ experiences stem partly from four decades of neo-liberal transformation and partly from accelerated financialisation in the last two decades and are now being accelerated by the imposition of ‘austerity’ on low- and middle-income people. The social relationships of tenancy in social housing, private tenancy and mortgage-financed owner-occupation are, however, divisive and the paper ends by identifying what may be the beginning of a unified social movement, or at least a coalition, for change.

Key words:

• London
• rent
• financialisation
• dispossession
• gentrification
• displacement
• wealth
• income

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 When asked to write a report to government on housing prospects for UK cities I was initially reluctant. I'm not a ‘housing expert’ and doubted whether I should do work which could be construed as complicit with the neo-liberal trajectory of the Coalition Government of the day. In the end I agreed because for so long critical social scientists have belaboured governments for taking advice only from academics sympathetic to the neo-liberal project.

2 Mark Weedon at IPD—the independent Investment Property Databank—estimates that the institutionally owned rental housing stock is only about 30,000–50,000 dwellings in 2013, compared with the total of about 5 million privately rented units (pers. comm.).

3 The role of think tanks in elaborating this discourse is brilliantly analysed by Tom Slater (2016).

4 Similar concerns have been expressed by organisations as diverse as the TCPA and the Home Builders Federation (HBF) in evidence to the London Plan Examination in Public (EiP) 2014.

5 I am referring here to the rather triumphalist view of ‘cities' and their agglomeration economies as the engines of competitive economic and cultural life, best exemplified in the London context by the work of the LSE's Urban Age programme and the think tank Centre for Cities.

6 There is a fundamental debate in CITY about the future of urbanisation between a mainstream approach (for example Brenner and Schmid 2015) and a developing critique of urbanisation (for example Catterall and Wilson 2014, and their reference to the extensive work of Adrian Atkinson; and Shaw 2015) and of the assumed inevitability of its total penetration of the planet.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Edwards

Michael Edwards is a Planning Professor at University College London. Email: [email protected]