- Professor David Harvey on housing Archived Message
Posted by johnhol
on February 25, 2019, 8:07 pm
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Begins: A house is a simple enough thing. But it is also a commodity, which means it abounds ‘in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’, as Marx once put it. I grew up in a house in a safe, secure, and respectable working-class neighbourhood in Britain after 1945. The house was a use value — stolid in its ordinariness. It constituted a secure, albeit rather repressive space in which to eat, sleep, socialise, read stories, do homework, or listen to the radio; a place where family, with all of its inner complexities and tensions, could dwell and relate without too much outside interference. Relations with neighbours were cordial and supportive but not intimate. This was the city of use value. I do remember, however, the day the mortgage was paid off. There was a mild celebration. The house, I then realised, had an exchange value that could be passed on to future generations (like me). But that was never a topic of conversation. Not far away there were estates of social housing. They looked OK to me but when I dated a girl from there my mother strongly disapproved — they were feckless people not to be trusted, she said. But they too seemed to have secure housing in a not too bad — though somewhat bland — living environment. We listened to the same radio shows and the kids played the same games on the street. But at election time they supported Labour. In my neighbourhood there were a few posters, some Labour but also some Tory. Working-class homeownership, promoted from the 1890s onwards in Britain, had always been an instrument of social control and a defence against Bolshevism. In the United States they say: ‘debt encumbered homeowners don’t go on strike.’ In the 1980s the emphasis changed. Margaret Thatcher sold off the social housing and people became more passionately concerned with the exchange value of their homes. The building societies that promoted homeownership stopped being local working-class institutions and became more like banks. In 1981 nearly a third of all houses in Britain were in the public sector, but by 2016 that had fallen to less than 7 per cent. In an ideal neoliberal world there should be no social housing. As Colin Crouch argues, ‘social housing tenants are the unwanted residue of a pre-neoliberal past.’ We were set fair to be a property-owning democracy. Houses were exchanged to rent or fix up. Then maybe people could move up to a higher-status neighbourhood. The emphasis was on improving the house as an exchange value, as a form of saving, and as a locus for augmenting personal wealth. Individual wealth in homeownership was a common topic of conversation. Riff-raff (like people of colour or immigrants) would be kept out to protect neighbourhood property values. Segregation tightened and gated communities flourished. Spaces were enclosed and the urban commons was depleted. By the century’s end the emphasis shifted again. The house was viewed as an instrument of capital accumulation and speculative gain. It became an ATM machine from which people could extract wealth by refinancing their mortgages. Credit and liquidity sloshed through housing markets, driving house prices hither and thither. But behind this shift a far more monstrous power emerged. The focus was not on the house but on the land upon which it stood. The gap between current land value and the value under the highest and best use enticed investors. To realise this speculative gain either the existing uses had to be displaced and present occupants evicted, or current residents had to pay higher land rents for the privilege of staying put. Dramatic examples could be found in all of the world’s large metropolitan regions. Take the case of China. Land prices increased fivefold in China between 2004 and 2015. Before 2008, land values accounted for on average 37 per cent of Beijing housing prices. After 2010 that had risen to 60 per cent. Everywhere, low-income populations were either forced out or burdened with sky-rocketing rents. ‘Millions’, Dinny McMahon wrote in his book China’s Great Wall of Debt, ‘have been priced out of housing markets in the cities in which they live, and the situation is only going to get worse.’ Marx would not have been surprised. ‘Poverty is a more fruitful source for house rent than the mines of Potosi were for their owners’, he said. ‘Tremendous power’ accrues to landed property which enables it to ‘exclude workers engaged in a struggle over wages from the very earth itself as their dwelling place’. It is, he went on to observe, ‘the ground rent and not the house that is the object of speculation’. Continues: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/a-tale-of-three-cities |
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