Human quantitative easing

The far right and housing Part II

This is Part II of a series on housing politics and the radical/far right. I was on the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast on Wednesday talking about my new book, the rent reforms, and the politics of housing. On another note, I’d like to invite submissions for guest posts from people working in the area of housing (or related areas). The newsletter now has over 1,700 subscribers and is a useful way to reach people in the sector. More information for anyone interested can be found here.

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“Affordable housing is perhaps the single most important economic issue for nationalists.” Keith Woods

Today we’re looking a little further to the right of the political spectrum. While Eoin Lenihan (discussed last week) can be described as a national conservative, Keith Woods can fairly easily be described as a fascist. I haven’t spent too much time going through his non-housing stuff (though I did read his book on nationalism), but he is explicit about his advocacy for racial loyalty and is a supporter of the National Party. His claim to fame is an interview he did with Nick Fuentes, who is openly anti-semetic. Woods nods along agreeably throughout the interview as Fuentes prattles on about the ‘problem of organised Jewry’ and the like (Fuentes is influential on the US far right). He’s also a frequent guest on Eddie Hobbs’ podcast.

Despite his fringe ideas, Woods’ writing on housing shows he has a sharp mind. His analysis, discussed below, is much better developed than Lenihan’s and displays much greater understanding of contemporary housing issues. What is most striking about Woods’ analysis is how much it resembles a lot of contemporary political economy of housing, and much of the left/progressive analysis too. I’ll start with these aspects and then discuss how this analysis is woven into a right wing extremist perspective.

From affordability to rentierism

Woods’ point of departure is the affordability crisis, which he describes as the ‘central issue in Irish politics’. He focuses particularly on young people, noting the proportion of young adults living with their parents, something frequently highlighted by many on the left (what Rory Hearne calls ‘generation stuck at home’). He claims this makes us an anomaly in the European context (in fact we are around mid-table). One of the causes of unaffordability he highlights is restricted access to mortgage credit after 2008, an issue I discuss here and which features prominently in the political economy and housing policy literature.

Most people can agree with the above points, but Woods is aligned very closely with the left perspective specifically in that he sees the current housing system as predicated on the reduction of housing to an asset and vehicle for wealth accumulation, and on how this reproduces inequality, especially of the generational variety:

“If this [housing] system looks like it’s designed to transfer wealth to homeowners at the expense of non-homeowners, that’s because it is. Housing policy in most Western countries is not really about housing at all, but about inflating real-estate prices indefinitely”.

This political economic reality, he argues, gives the lie to claims by Government that it seeks to make housing affordable, because we ‘can’t make housing affordable for everyone while also treating it like a vehicle for building wealth for existing homeowners’.

He goes on to point out that the accumulation of wealth in housing assets is a form of rentierism, ‘simply a wealth transfer from the rest of society’ (echoing the historical fascist obsession with ‘parasitic’ (translation: Jewish) financial/rentier economic power). This ‘wealth transfer’ primarily benefits older generations, and thus our housing system is part of a ‘gerentocracy’.

I agree with much of the analysis, with the caveat that I would emphasise class more than generation. But woods then develops these points by relating them to two of the most important themes in extreme right politics: immigration and pro-natalism.

Immigration and prices

Like Lenihan, Woods views immigration as the cause of high house prices (providing some limited evidence of this). But he goes further by arguing that immigration is politically orchestrated to have precisely that effect. The best way to inflate asset prices, he argues, is to constantly pump prime demand, and the easiest way to do this (given the low fertility levels of the native Irish) is to ‘import’ households:

“Since property values are a reflection of scarcity, a surefire way to keep the ponzi scheme of perpetual price increases going is to increase the population.”

He describes this as a form of ‘human quantitative easing’, a term originally coined in the context of labour markets, and argues that this ‘importation of housing demand is at the behest of property developers and other real estate interests’. He argues that ‘[i]mmigration is very big business for property owners. Its effect is far greater even than on wages’.

Here the arguments reflect the typical far right view that everything is being orchestrated by an omnipotent global elite.

Housing and pro-natalism

All of this is of course catastrophic for ultra-nationalists because they think about politics in terms of the biological reproduction of the racial/ethnic group. Immigration not only dilutes the imaginary purity of the nation, but also, by driving up house prices, undermines the ability of native Irish to form households and have children. Housing, Woods argues:

“[H]as had a major impact on Ireland’s fertility rate: as recently as 2010, Ireland still had an above-replacement fertility rate of 2.05. Now, it stands at about 1.7, but for native Irish people it is likely lower, as new immigrants tend to have more children.”

The centrality of affordable housing to nationalist politics, then, is precisely because ‘it is one of the most straightforward ways to increase declining birthrates and encourage family formation, the lifeblood of any nation’. In other words, this a housing politics which frames housing in terms of the biological reproduction of the race.

The following passage gives a sense of how Woods weaves together the critique of rentier political economy with pro-natalism:

“Fixing affordable housing is a necessary step in fixing the birthrate crisis and restoring an economy that serves the mass of working natives rather than endlessly channeling resources to unproductive rentiers. Politicians and policy planners will carry on claiming they want affordable housing while boasting about property-value increases, but until we recognise those are mutually incompatible, we’ll continue to watch the housing market fail spectacularly at what it’s supposed to do — provide houses.”

Many right wing commentators critique contemporary liberal/left politics as a kind of ‘cultural Marxism’, in which class is replaced with identity (e.g. gender/race). But you can see from the above quote that Woods’ perspective is also a kind of cultural Marxism). If you replace replace ‘birthrate crisis’ with ‘housing crisis’ and replace the word ‘native’ with ‘class’, it would be perfectly consistent with a Marxist analysis.

Conclusion

Readers can probably imagine some of the criticisms I would make of the arguments described above so I won’t spell it out (it probably suffices to say that I don’t particularly relish the prospect of perpetual race war). But this series of posts isn’t really about critiquing these ideas but more about exploring how the hard right understand and articulate the politics of housing, and also reflecting on which aspects of these analyses have the potential to influence politics or appeal more widely.

For both Lenihan and Woods the main focus is to place housing at the service of the nation, as opposed to at the service of international capital. Their analysis differs, but it is this way of framing housing politics that unites them. While Lenihan sees nations as primarily cultural entities, for Woods they are biological realities. Thus for Lenihan it’s all about aligning housing with cultural reproduction, whereas for Woods its all about aligning housing with biological reproduction. In both cases, the enemy is constructed as an unholy alliance between economic elites and immigrants.

In the case of Woods’ piece, the explicit racialism of his analysis means it is unlikely to have much impact beyond those of an extremely ideological bent. But some of the underlying themes are likely to resonate more widely. The impact of housing on family formation and the ability to have children is indeed of enormous importance and likely connects with the frustrations experienced by many. I suspect that increasing affordability would not reverse declining fertility, but it would potentially allow people to form families earlier, or at least to feel they had more agency around the choice of when to have children, and how many. A lot of how people think about housing, and therefore the politics of housing, relates to the family. And of course the family is incredibly normative and carries enormous moral weight in our society.

Moreover, although the idea that immigration is being orchestrated to inflate property prices is ludicrous (there is zero empirical evidence for this), it is true that institutional landlords explicitly see inward migration as a crucial part of their business model, and target this cohort in particular. Indeed, I have heard senior figures say this explicitly at property industry events. One can easily see how a populist right movement could form an effective critique around this.

Next week we’ll look at far/radical right housing politics internationally.

Events & news

Legislation on the new PRS rules has been published. The opposition have been very vocal in attacking the partial deregulation of rents. Seemingly the opposition also refused to sign off on the Housing Committee’s pre-legislative scrutiny report, although I’m not sure what the significance of that is. Meanwhile CBRE’s latest report suggests institutional investment looks likely to revive following the new rules, as well as the VAT and building standards changes.

What I’m reading

Did I mention my book has been published? Threshold and Housing Rights NI have just published the first all Ireland renters survey (see this write up in the Journal.ie). Logan Sirr has a new paper looking at the potential application of the Austrian cooperative housing model to Ireland. Just Housing have published a new piece looking at IRES REIT, financialisation and energy issues. Relatedly, Richard Waldron has a new paper on energy conditions and housing precarity in Ireland. Some interesting new research on social housing, racialisation and muslims in Ireland.