Holiday reading list for a post-COVID-19 housing system

As the year 2020 tracks its way towards a close the journal is only beginning to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on housing systems around the world. Throughout 2020 we have dedicated most of the journal editors’ editorial space to discussing some of the emerging issues at the intersection of COVID-19 and housing (Rogers & Power, 2020; Power, Rogers, & Kadi 2020). In this editorial we try to round out this discussion, as much as that is possible at a time when a second wave of COVID-19 infections is hitting Europe, China and other parts of the world, nearly one year after the virus emerged. Developing a clearer view of the impacts of the pandemic on housing markets and systems will be a long-term project for housing scholars. In this last editorial of 2020, we reflect on trends emerging in housing studies and recommend a few relevant books, among those we reviewed this year that might help conceptualise the changes in housing systems and potential directions for the future.

The effects of the pandemic on housing markets have been slow. The first months of 2020 showed considerable buoyancy in mortgage lending in Europe, while house prices continued to rise in many contexts. In the Netherlands, for example, despite worries that the lockdown and subsequent economic stagnation were going to affect the housing market (Groot & Spiegelaar, 2020), optimism ensued as the predictions were slow to manifest (Graaf, 2020). As this editorial goes to press, housing market analyses suggest that many housing markets will take longer to be affected by the crisis due to various support or stimulus packages from some governments (Spiegelaar, 2020). However, housing prices and transactions are expected to decline over the coming year as the government support is withdrawn. The first signs of a drop in credit demand are starting to appear in some countries, as the impacts of economic stagnation hit household earnings and employment prospects. And while government measures offering relief on mortgage payments were successful so far, their long term ability to shore up housing markets is doubtful.

Already visible, however, are the ways in which COVID-19 exacerbates existing housing inequalities and the many different locally instantiated manifestations of COVID-19 induced housing change. Working-from-home (WFH) is being positioned as the new normal, and it is shifting demand for owner occupied housing from central cities to suburban locations in many cities. But not everyone can work from home, and WFH holds the potential to exacerbate spatial polarisation and inequality. Middle and higher-income households employed in service jobs where WFH can be sustained more easily over the long term have greater opportunities to move out of congested global cities such as Paris, New York, or London (Haag, 2020). In the private rental market, cities and countries were quick to impose eviction moratoria and rent relief in the first months of the pandemic, but, as the COVID-19 crisis continues, it is becoming clearer that additional or different measures will be necessary to prevent rent debt burdens and evictions. Furthermore, the pandemic has brought into sharper relief the affordability and precariousness problems that private rental tenants have long experienced (Simcock, 2020). In the upcoming months, the effects of the pandemic will likely be felt in housing production as well, as developers reel from lockdowns and accompanying disruptions in planning processes, labour markets and supply chains. In countries like the Netherlands, and many others, the slowdown in housing production will likely exacerbate already significant housing shortages, therein threatening the sustainability of the housing system and possibly pushing an increasing number of households into homelessness (Hochstenbach, 2020).

Apart from these larger systemic housing challenges, the COVID-19 crisis has been shown to exacerbate social inequalities at an individual level, especially those that are shaped by our housing circumstances. The pandemic has had a great impact on minority and Indigenous populations in countries like the US, Canada, Australia, with overcrowding, and poor access to health services in underserviced urban neighbourhoods being key challenges to be tackled through housing policy. People experiencing homelessness, living in temporary shelters or camps are yet another group of people that have borne the brunt of the epidemic. Efforts to relieve dire situations have typically been short-term and fallen short of resolving these longstanding issues. Furthermore, COVID-19 contributes to global housing inequalities; there are growing problems in accessing sanitation and clean water through the provision of adequate housing coming to the fore particularly in the Global South as countries fight to contain the virus (Sharif & Farha, 2020).

As we try to make sense of the new housing realities during and beyond COVID-19, and we grapple with its long term effects on housing markets and systems across different contexts around the world, as community of housing scholars we have a solid body of housing theories and debate to assist in this challenge. With this in mind, we have trawled the International Journal of Housing Policy book review archive over the last year to offer three book suggestions to take into the holiday period.

Book 1: Remaking housing policy: an international study

The first book suggestion is David Clapham’s Remaking Housing Policy: An International Study, which Mark Stephens reviewed in Issue 2, 2020 (Stephens, 2020). It shows how the ideology, discourse, political-economic regime of neoliberalism has shaped housing policy, and how we might change this. Clapham’s Remaking Housing Policy approaches the topic by focusing on 5 key concepts that frame neoliberal discourse: privatisation, marketisation, commodification, financialisation, and individualisation. Written as a textbook, the volume nonetheless makes an important contribution to comparative housing research by positioning neoliberalism as a key force of convergence, responsible for unequal distribution and access to housing, a decline in public housing provision, and a housing policy response that is geared toward marketisation. Yet, argues Clapham, it is a force that can be countered through national housing policies. For Clapham the path toward a new housing regime rests on a revival of state housing provision to rectify housing market failures, and therein driving down rental prices. The favourable treatment of homeowners should be curtailed, he argues, and he proposes a capital gains tax to incentivise older homeowners to ‘trade down’ to free up property and drive down house prices. To encourage governments to turn away from neoliberal policies, Clapham pins his hopes on an unlikely coalition of disenfranchised groups, from squatters to the children of baby boomers shut out of the dream of homeownership, that can push for reforms.

Book 2: Neoliberal housing policy: an international perspective

Keith Jacobs’ Neoliberal Housing Policy: An International Perspective was reviewed in Issue 4, 2020 by Valesca Lima (Lima, 2020). The book takes a historical approach to the question of housing and is centred on the experience of a number of English-speaking countries, including US, UK and Australia. It provides revealing insights into the effects of housing policies that have crystallised over the last four decades on cities and nations in these countries. Jacobs’ main argument is that the current housing crisis, marked by rising inequality, housing affordability and accessibility issues, is the result of a decline in publicly provided housing and the continued promotion of homeownership; both of which are political choices rather than market forces. In this sense it is not inevitable or impossible to change our housing systems and futures, despite the neoliberal ideology permeating policy making at the present time. While analysing well-known cases for the implementation of neoliberal housing policy, such as the US, UK and Australia, Jacobs also acknowledges that pockets of more social democratic housing policies persist, and it is in these places that hope for housing policy beyond neoliberalism can be found, whether it is in the form innovation in housing construction and new housing typologies, or alternative tenures. Furthermore, several other books, such as Fuller’s The Financialisation of Housing, also reviewed in Issue 1 2020 (Kohl, 2020), or the volume edited by Markus Moos titled A Research Agenda for Housing, reviewed in Issue 2, 2020 (Clapham, 2020) offer additional insights into this prevalent and important debate, and further qualify the relationship between the rise of neoliberalism and its effect on housing policy, markets and systems.

Book 3: Class, ethnicity and the state in the polarised metropolis: putting Wacquant to work

The third book is an edited volume by Flint and Powell, titled Class, Ethnicity and the State in the Polarized Metropolis: putting Wacquant to work. This book was reviewed by Tony Manzi in Issue 3, 2020 (Manzi, 2020). The book provides a fascinating discussion of urban marginality and territorial stigmatisation in the context of the neoliberal state. The collection offers a rich account of the work of Loïc Wacquant, a sociologist, as well as demonstrating how his thought can be applied to different aspects of housing research, from surveillance and governance in public housing projects, to advanced marginality in refugee camps and stigma in social work, to incarceration practices and segregation as mechanisms through which marginality is institutionalised. Through a dialogue between Wacquant and a number of urban researchers who are researching from different country contexts this volume outlines a suite of conceptual tools to make sense of variegated conditions of marginality.

This issue

Looking toward the future, what is clear is that effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will be long lasting and will spread through every aspect of daily lives, markets, political and institutional settings. Build-back-better commitments at local (Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna), national and supranational level (EU – Just Transition Fund, and European Green New Deal) will hopefully challenge the status quo, and institute new practices that effectively tackle the social, economic and environmental crises we are facing. Our challenge as housing researchers will be to contribute to shaping new housing policy instruments in the aftermath of the pandemic, in a world in which alternatives for the current bankrupt system are direly needed. While looking back at the developments of the last few decades can offer useful insights into understanding the present, shaping the future will require an effort of the imagination. New housing typologies, vernacular designs, new forms of provision and management, self-organisation and alternative tenures, (digital) technologies that mediate the provision, consumption and daily practices of housing are all domains that will shape upcoming housing research debates.

Papers in this issue continue that important work, reviewing the state of housing systems, and housing research, internationally. Job Gbadegesin and Lochner Marais evaluate the state of housing policy in Africa in the last two decades. Identifying a shift toward a more applied focus in housing research, they identify the importance of that work to drawing “African governments’ notice to the continent’s severe housing problems and the need to develop implementable African housing policy.” Claudia Murray and David Clapham in “Housing policies in Argentina under President Macri (2015–2019): a divided nation perpetuating path dependency” consider if housing policy changes instituted under Macri’s administration will have enduring consequences or represent only a temporary disruption. Contributing to debates in path dependency studies, it suggests that these short-term changes will have little enduring effect. With the growing polarisation of domestic politics in many countries around the world, these findings have international resonance. Kristof Heylen’s “Targeted affordable housing subsidies in Flanders: evaluating equity using equivalence scales” examines the equity of affordable housing subsidies in Flanders and identifies scales that would “improve some equity aspects of the subsidies.” Francis Bondinuba, Mark Stephens, Colin Jones and Robert Buckley's paper, “The motivations of microfinance institutions to enter the housing market in a developing country”, brings together a number of key issues of emerging importance for housing studies in the global south. These include 1) the role of housing markets as a driver of economic growth in emerging economies, 2) the housing conditions, such as overcrowding and poverty, in countries such as Ghana, and 3) the slipperiness of the formal, semi-formal and informal segments of the housing market in the global south. The final paper, Camillo Boano and Giovanna Astolfo’s “Inhabitation as more-than-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar” is a timely response to Michele Lancione’s (2020) Housing Futures Essay in this journal. The paper builds on Lancione’s call to attend to radical practices of everyday dwelling, making the case for attention to be afforded to “caring, repairing and imagining the future” captured in their concept of ‘inhabiting’.

Rounding out the collection is Izaak Williams’ Policy Review “A reappraisal of contemporary homelessness policy: the new role for transitional housing programmes.” The paper addresses the growing turn to Housing First within the U.S. and internationally. It flags the need for further research and to “reappraise the potential continuing value of [traditional housing programmes] in producing positive outcomes for homeless populations” in this context. The book review section includes two regular reviews. Valesca Lima's (2020) review of Keith Jacobs' Neoliberal Housing Policy: An International Perspective and Daan Bossuyt's (2020) review of Pernilla Hagbert and colleagues' edited volume Contemporary Co-housing in Europe: Toward Sustainable Cities?; as well as a longer essay review by Matthew Thompson (2020) of Brett Christopher's volume The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain.

Oana Druta
Department of the Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4939-2231

Dallas Rogers
School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9359-8958

Emma Power
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5204-322X