What we don't talk about when we talk about housing crisis

The Week in Housing 05/05/23

This week I am sharing the text of my talk as part of a recent event organised by the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life - 'Thinking about Home: Alternative Perspectives on the Housing Crisis in Ireland’. Thanks to Danielle Petherbridge and Jonathan Wren for organising this thought-provoking event and for the invitation to take part. Also, here at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, UCD, we are hiring a Teaching Fellow in Social Justice. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

The term ‘housing crisis’ is the main way in which the politics of housing is framed in Ireland. But framing our discussion of housing through the lens of crisis risks distracting from what is most important and most urgent in our housing woes. We need to consider what we are not talking about, when we talk about housing crisis.

Before I go any further, let me clarify that there are good reasons why the ‘crisis’ framing has become so dominant:

·         Our housing system is inadequate structurally

·         The human impacts are terrible

·         The term crisis captures readers attention, so it makes sense for the media

·         Opposition politicians can use the term to criticize the Government

·         Housing organisations can use it to call for more funding from Government

·         The private sector can use it to demand reduced taxation and regulation

Nevertheless, I think there are real problems associated with the crisis framing. But my real issue is not so much with the term crisis, but more specifically how it’s deployed in Irish public debate.

The housing crisis frame is typically deployed in the form of what I call the ‘broken machine metaphor’. What I mean by this is that there is a tendency to imagine that the housing system functions like a machine, and that in our case some aspect of this machine is broken. According to this (usually implicit) view, what we need to do is get under the bonnet, identify the broken part, fix it, and at that point the crisis will be over - the machine will be fixed and our housing system will be ‘working’.

In my view, a lot of public discussion about how we can ‘fix’ or ‘solve’ the housing crisis is underpinned by this implicit ‘broken machine’ framing.

There are a number of things that are problematic about this framing:

1. First, the implication is that the problems we are witnessing are “bugs rather than features”, i.e. it distracts our attention from the way in which housing markets persistently and, I would argue, necessarily, generate problems of supply shortage, unaffordability, and inequality. This is not to say that housing markets can never work well or that there is no such thing as a functioning housing system. It is to say that the issues we are experiencing are not necessarily best understood as an ‘anomaly’ or deviation from the norm – the reverse is more likely to be true. This becomes obvious when you look historically or cross-nationally – everything we are facing today is familiar in many capital cities and has been for much of the last 150 years.

2. Second, and relatedly, the ‘broken machine’ framing implies that when we ‘fix’ what is broken in our housing system the system will ‘start working again’. It is almost as if we need to reset or reboot the system. There are two main problems with this. On the one hand, it’s not clear that we had a housing system that worked before this crisis. Even being optimistic, you would need to go back half a century to find a housing system that could be described as ‘working’. On the other hand, even if we could reset the system, it would be pointless as we have to deal with the problems of today and tomorrow, not those of yesterday. While it is true that in past decades Ireland enjoyed lower house prices and widespread access to homeownership, it is also true that we had stagnant population, low levels of urbanisation, persistent emigration, high unemployment, low-income growth etc. We are now a high-income country with high income jobs heavily concentrated in urban areas, and with net immigration. And we are in a climate emergency.

3. Third, the ‘broken machine’ metaphor centres technical expertise – most of the focus is on the technicalities of housing supply, such as the current debate on development levies. A lot of the discussion is essentially wonkish. The key problem here is that it depoliticizes what’s happening in Irish housing by treating it as a technical problem, and gives policy and especially market experts an (in my view) overly dominant role in the debate. At the risk of being overly simplistic, technical expertise can’t really help us to figure out what kind of housing system we want, or the kinds of values that should underpin it, or indeed what we are willing to sacrifice to create such a system. These are ultimately political questions.

4. Fourth, the broken machine metaphor depoliticizes housing more generally by systematically ignoring that the housing crisis impacts some cohorts more than others. In short, the housing crisis is largely a class issue. Indeed, poor housing supply, it can be argued, is of direct economic benefit to the majority of Irish households who are homeowners, as well as to the large cohort who own more than one property.

The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as a housing system that “works”. The question always must be, works at doing what, for who? In other words, works in relation to what criteria.

Some people like to reduce everything to supply – but we produced housing at 4 times the European average in the run up to the crisis of 2008 – was that a housing system that worked? It worked according to some criteria (high levels of output, viability, profitability), but not for others like affordability, equality and sustainability. So we need to think about and create a shared vision of tomorrow’s housing system, and we need to do this in a way which is concrete and detailed.

One of the problems with the the tendency to reduce everything to the issue of supply, for example, is that it can lead to a very crude discussion, as if all we need to is produce 60,000 housing units per annum and all will be well. Imagine discussing our food system simply in terms of the producing X Billion calories per annum, with no regard to the quality or variety of the food, or how it is produced.

You can only think about how to ‘fix the housing system’ when you have a vision of what you think a housing system should do. In other words, we need to move beyond a debate focused on ‘fixing a machine’, to one focused on figuring out what kind of housing system we want, and one which recognizes that the process of figuring out what kind of housing system we want is political – it involves values, it involves conflict, it involves winners and losers, it involves competing economic and political interests.

Events & News

A reminder that the Peter McVerry Trust are recruiting, and the Housing Agency’s will host an information session on their latest Research Support round - details here. ON May 11th Threshold and Alone will launch new research on older households in the PRS.

What I’m Reading

The 2022 Housing Association Activity Report has just been published. Really interesting new article by Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn on digital housing activism. A recent useful review of the impact of housing on health/wellbeing. This article takes a more critical perspective on tenancy law.