Trends in global income, urban demography and ideologies: a perfect storm for housing affordability?
Appendix 1: Bloomberg Housing Affordability Index
Appendix 2: Total housing cost overburden rate among low-income households in OECD countries
List of figures, tables and boxes
Figures
2.1 Housing affordability curves for households in a private-sector-financed scheme in Harare
2.2 Typical wages and average rents in England and London in 2016: the housing dilemma illustrated
4.1 UK housing completions per year by tenure, 1949–2015
4.2 Plot layout in an informal housing area in Kisumu, Kenya: landlord and tenant housing and services
8.1 Income distribution by quintile in the UK in 2016
Tables
3.1 England and Wales 2006 Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS): potential influences on ‘The basic physical and mental needs for human life and comfort’
9.1 International long-term and internal migration: London and south-east England, 2014–17
10.1 Real (formal) house price rises in 2017–18 and house price to income ratio for 2010–18 in selected countries
A1 Bloomberg Housing Affordability Index 2018
A2 Share of households in bottom quintile of income distribution paying more than 40% of disposable income on total housing cost, by tenure (where data available), 2010 and 2014 (or latest year available)
Boxes
2.1 The benefits of RDP houses in South Africa
3.2 Desperate slums in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s
5.1 Landlords’ intermediaries: rent collectors and evictions
7.1 Fighting for their rights: the communities of Dharavi
8.1 The conversion of offices to slums in the UK
In 1978, shortly before the era of neoliberal capitalism was imposed on urban societies across much of the world, I began researching urban processes and livelihoods in southern Africa. Over the decades I researched and taught about urban livelihoods, low-income housing, the changing characteristics of migrant households and of migration patterns both to and from cities, and the role and nature of so-called informality in employment and housing. In particular, I spent much time and conducted major surveys in low-income neighbourhoods in Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. Along with the surrounding countries of Malawi, Zambia and South Africa, almost every type of low-income housing policy in fashion for the cities of the Global South from the late 1970s to today were practised with varying results. Most were promoted as ‘affordable’; very few were. Zimbabwe and South Africa were both ruled by white minorities when I began my academic career. This meant that they also had, most unusually for sub-Saharan Africa, significant provision of public rental housing that was affordable in so-called ‘townships’, although its main original purpose was for political control of migration and black African urban residents.
In the UK, I live in the borough of Haringey in north-east London. I moved there in the late 1970s at a time when the issue of housing affordability per se in the UK had largely been solved by the cumulative outcomes of state intervention over many decades, but particularly since the end of the Second World War. The ward in which I live is culturally diverse and constantly changing. Haringey has some very wealthy residential areas, some much poorer areas, and everything in between – a comprehensive range of the various private- and public-sector housing types to be found in London outside the city’s central (and ludicrously expensive) areas. As with many of London’s residential boroughs beyond its historic centre, Haringey’s phases of rapid development in the late nineteenth century, from a peri-urban mix of land uses, including agriculture, to a densely built urban housing environment, followed the geography of the new underground railway lines. I have rented in the private sector in Haringey (and elsewhere in London), experiencing the usual range of eccentric and sometimes venal landlords, dangerous exploding water heaters and bizarre fungi and moulds that renters may encounter in that sector in the UK, albeit at a time when the rents were affordable. In the early 1980s, just as the first round of massive upswings in London house prices began, I bought a dilapidated terraced house. This had been divided into five bedsits by the previous owner and did not comply with most of the statutory housing standards. Today, it is worth a fortune because of subsequent rounds of surges in house prices in the UK’s cities, and particularly in London. It is utterly unaffordable to the sorts of households who were buying in the area in the 1980s. Their typical employment and related income profiles, and reliance entirely on mortgages and 10% cash deposits, would not buy a house in Haringey today.
Over the decades, my lived experience in north London and various cities in southern Africa, alongside my research and teaching on housing, increasingly led me to see the issues underlying housing outcomes and the issue of affordability in these areas, and elsewhere in the urban world, in terms of their structural similarities rather than their differences, albeit always shaped by specific local histories and politics. The crisis of housing affordability across the world’s major cities has also deepened and become more embedded. These are the issues that led to this book. In the following chapters examples are drawn from across the world but particularly from southern Africa and from London. A deliberate effort is made to illustrate problems and policies with reference to cities outside Europe and North America.
The dilemma of affordable housing and big cities
Generation Rent in London and divided families in South Africa; dormitory living in Shenzhen and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; squatters on the edge of Lisbon and cage housing in Hong Kong. What do these situations have in common? The answer is obviously that they are urban housing ‘problems’. But can they be understood as manifestations of the same underlying urban processes?
Much work by scholars and policymakers argues that the common problem is to do with a shortage of housing, sometimes linked to shortages of urban land for residential housing. This conceptualises lack of housing in cities across the world as a supply-side problem – the obstacles to the provision of housing for all are constraints on supply. If enough houses were built, prices would fall into line with demand: the magic of the market, of the invisible hand,