Transformations in housing and housing policy research: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Abstract

In the years since the Global Financial Crisis, the function of housing markets and role of housing sectors have shifted enormously. Consequently, research on, and understandings of, the integration of housing in the economy, polity and society – especially as a vehicle of enhanced neo-liberalisation and intensified socioeconomic division – have in many ways advanced. This editorial reflects on these transformations in relation to the latest editorial epoch in the International Journal of Housing Policy. In marking the hand over to the new editorial team, it considers how both the journal and housing policy research have changed and are changing.

Keywords:

• Housing policy
• financialization
• affordability crisis

Plus ça change…

Six years doesn’t seem long in the life of a journal, but it certainly is in the life of an editor. Giving up the role of Editor in Chief at the International Journal of Housing Policy (IJHP) has been hard to do after putting so much into it for so long. What has made it easier is the knowledge that the baton is being passed into excellent hands. Indeed, Emma Power and Dallas Rogers have already begun to put their own mark on the journal. I look forward to seeing the longer term impact of the new, two-headed editorial structure as well as the realisation of the high ambitions of the new management.

When I took over the editorship from Suzanne Fitzpatrick at the end of 2013, the journal had already gone through a number of significant transformations, not least the title change in 2010 (from European Journal), which helped significantly advance the profile and impact of the journal. In the half decade or so that I have been at the wheel, the journal has undergone some even more radical internal and external shifts. Many of these reflect trends and new technologies in the scientific publications sector. For example, online-first pre-publication of articles, altmetric scores (and the practice of Tweeting) and digital submissions and downloads have all become much more important to the production and impact of IJHP. Others reflect changes I have sought to introduce to the editorial structure. Specifically, when I took over, the journal functioned with a core staff of just three: Policy Editor (Peter Mackie), Secretary (Jane Allen) and myself as Editor in Chief. In the last few years a number of outstanding younger scholars have come aboard, helping to both bear the increasing workload, but also bring energy and innovative ideas into the production of the journal. As it stands at the end of 2019, we have three Editors, three Associate Editors, a Book Review Editor, a Digital Editor and, soon, a new Policy Review editor, with Jennifer Hoolachan taking over from Peter. The journal now sits firmly in the top 20 percent of SCOPUS publications in its field (citation score of 2.42 in 2018) and has recently entered the Web of Science.

Housing policy research has also changed notably over the last six years as has been reflected in the content and focus of the Journal. It is perhaps worth considering some particular themes. The first is the ongoing financialization of housing. The reorientation of national and global economies around new structures of housing finance was, of course, the headline story of the late-2000s. Since then housing financialization has taken on new forms. Of these, the entrance of new actors and increasing cross-national flows of wealth into housing have been particularly prominent. The subsequent price boom derived from intense activity among international property buyers has dominated discussions of housing market restructuring and regulation in many contexts, especially global cities.

The revival of rent seeking and the growth of private rental markets have also become central to the housing financialization narrative and, increasingly, housing policy agendas. While the turning point in the decline in private rental housing certainly preceded the crisis, the sector has advanced spectacularly since. The UK is an illustrative case with the sector almost doubling in size since 2003. The primary actors in this case, as in most societies, have been small scale landlords buying up extra property in the face of low interest rates and poor investment opportunities, and a swell of demand for renting, especially among younger households who have struggled to buy, or even find a home in context diminished credit access, stagnant wage increases and resurgent house prices (Kemp, 2015; Ronald & Kadi, 2018; Soaita, Searle, McKee, & Moore, 2017). The housing literature has arguably cast most light on international buyers (especially Chinese and Russian ones) and the big actors – private equity firms, hedge funds, Real Estate Investment Trusts etc., – entering more vulnerable market sectors and taking advantage of post-crisis market conditions. On the one hand, wealthy international buyers and large investment companies have benefitted from new technologies, both digital and financial, facilitating new ways of managing property remotely and advancing new kinds of investment products that financialise incomes derived from rents (Beswick et al., 2016; Fields, 2019; Fields & Rogers, 2019; Fields & Uffer, 2016; Waldron, 2018). On the other, they have driven conspicuous increases in rents, evictions and gentrification processes (see Byrne, 2019; García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016).

In this Journal, a number of special issues and individual papers have contributed to this wider debate on housing financialization and its geographic impacts. For example, a number of articles stand out from Forrest’s special issue on the Ongoing Financialization of Home Ownership (2015), as well as Rogers and Koh’s special on The Politics and Practice of Foreign Real Estate Investment (2017). The more recent paper by Jacobs and Manzi (2019) on Conceptualising ‘Financialisation’, also addresses this key issue, reflecting both on what we understand housing financialization to be as well as how it impacts governance and organizational behaviour. In the latest special issue, Kadi, Hochstenbach, and Lennartz (2020), further explore the changing nature of housing financialization through a focus on Multiple Property Ownership in different contexts.

…plus c’est la même chose

Another theme that stands out in the time I have been running the journal has been the assertion of, and discussion surrounding, the ‘housing affordability crisis’. Policy debates in most countries now allude to such a crisis, although I would argue that the conflicts and inequalities resulting from how housing is organised have been relatively consistent over the last decades. What has perhaps changed then is how ‘crisis’ is understood. Indeed, what has happened more recently is that dis-functioning housing markets have had a growing impact on more middle-income people – and not just on the poor and marginalised – who are finding it increasingly difficult not only to meet market prices and rents, but also find an appropriate home. Post-crisis housing market conditions have brought into question the fundamental premise of housing systems under late capitalism: that the solution to poor housing conditions and housing sector failure lies in expanding the home ownership market and reducing social housing. It seems the crisis then lies in the realisation that these two strategies no longer seem to work.

In the introduction to her special issue, Anacker (2019) draws attention to an important distinction between housing affordability and affordable housing. Both of these have diminished, although a widespread decline in the former has made rethinking the latter much more exigent. For me, this turns the issue into a more specific question: if the answer to the housing affordability crisis isn’t, or can’t be, building more social housing, then what is it? At the moment, a significant proportion of the housing literature thus seems to either dwell on the failure of housing policies to subjugate wealth accumulation practices to the interests of housing people, or focuses on new affordable housing solutions (typically small scale and temporary ones).

This brings me to a final and related theme: rethinking what housing is. Of course housing is about people and homes, but it is also a set of complex practices and relationships that shape and are shaped by institutions, politics and the economy. One opportunity the Global Financial Crisis of the late-2000s created was the chance, in context of the ostensible failure of the existing system, to explore other ways of ‘doing’ housing outside established provision practices and troika of tenure categories (i.e., social renting, private renting and home ownership). In our Journal, Mullins and Moore special issue on Self Organised Housing (2018), is particularly illustrative of new (and some not so new) initiatives in housing that seem to have found more room to expand in the post-crisis milieu. Collaborative Housing, for example, is a common term used to describe approaches to the provision, construction and allocation of housing reflecting greater levels of collective participation in the housing process (see Czischke, 2018). At one end of the scale, this can include co-housing projects that embody shared values and a commitment to creating a housing community or residential commons. At the other, it can also include group-coordinated, self-provision housing (or group self-build) that results in the production of housing commodities that can be easily rendered back to the market.

A bientôt

Many people think of housing policy as a rather dry topic concerned with regulations and practices that influence quality, shape and volume in the provision of housing units. Reflecting on the themes I have set out above will hopefully demonstrate there is much more to it. These are certainly interesting times in housing policy research and many housing, but also non-housing researchers are beginning to look at housing processes in very different ways. It has recently been suggested that we reconsider conventional housing tenure categories and reflect again on how helpful they are in identifying ‘key fault lines in housing and society’ (see Murie, 2019). Such a suggestion underlies the relevance of this journal as a medium of academic engagement in housing issues. This subject, as has become increasingly apparent, lies at the heart of contemporary social, economic and political transformations.

I am enormously proud of my work on the journal and consider it an absolute privilege to have been given this precious responsibility for so long. I am also very excited for Emma and Dallas as they take over. I have been particularly impressed by their vision for the journal and the way they have begun to reshape operations. While I will not miss all the laborious language checking, late night email exchanges or dealing with grumpy reviewers (it’s always reviewer number three), I will certainly miss the engagement with state of the art research in housing as well as working with my colleagues at the journal. Many thanks to Justin Kadi, Tom Moore, Peter MacKie, Gerard van Bortel and Oana Druta for their patience with me on the editorial board. I would like to give Jane Allen a special acknowledgment, not only for making my job as editor manageable but for also being the glue holding the journal together for more than a decade. I would finally like to thank the members of the Management board for their support, and especially Keith Kintrea who keeps trying to retire as Chair of the journal, but never quite manages it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.