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This short section establishes the consonances between the representation of London’s nineteenth-century housing crisis, and its modern-day housing crisis. It emphasises the shared use of language in journalistic representations of urban poverty, but also attends to key differences: while the modern-day housing crisis is preoccupied with the number of homes available and their value as a market commodity, the nineteenth-century housing crisis focused on what new forms of housing could address urgent social need.

The next two chapters (Ch. 4 and 5) examine black Chicagoans’ struggles to win access to the unevenly distributed benefits of the postwar economic boom. This chapter shifts attention from the battles along the color line to efforts to secure housing behind the walls of segregation. The crisis of housing demanded a radical response, yet because the immediate needs for housing were so severe, radicals faced repression, and the opportunities for improved prospects were real at least for some black Chicagoans, many people continued to pursue individualistic efforts to win housing and to work with liberal institutions like the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago Urban League. Such efforts achieved important pragmatic improvements in housing, against all odds, while also creating shared experiences of disappointment with liberal housing reform that would set the stage for more radical movements for community control in succeeding decades.

According to the traditional point of view, demand for residential flats outstrips land supply because of high housing prices. Another viewpoint claims that housing prices soar because of an array of government regulations on zoning, planning, as well as other restrictions on buildings. Professor Edward Glaeser of Harvard University discovered that the housing crisis in the States was chiefly triggered by the high cost imposed by zoning and other land use controls. This chapter glances at two factors that modify the housing supply environment and the consequences posed to society by high property prices.

This chapter discusses both the national and local housing situation in Glasgow at the end of the First World War. It argues that it was so bad that the state had to take the initiative in the provision of working-class housing “fit for heroes” as an insurance policy against revolution. But the consequent legislation – the 1919 Housing & Town Planning Act – was ill-designed, with over-generous subsidies. Nevertheless, within Glasgow, these schemes built under this Act were and are regarded as élite.

This Chapter details how the Irish housing systems, and housing systems across the world, are experiencing a structural ‘shock’. We are in the midst of an unprecedented housing and homelessness crisis. This details the dramatic increase in housing inequalities and exclusion, from the rise in homelessness, mortgage arrears and foreclosures, to the collapse in home-ownership rates and, in particular, the emergence of ‘Generation Rent’ and ‘Generation Stuck at Home’. This new Generation Rent is being locked out of traditional routes to affordable secure housing such as home ownership, social housing and secure low-rent housing. They are being pushed into private rental markets with unaffordable high rents and insecurity of tenure, or forced into hidden homelessness, couchsurfing, sleeping in cars, or pushed back to live with their parents. Ireland has had the largest fall in home ownership rates among European Union (EU) countries in the past three decades. This chapter shows that the current housing situation and crisis is not a temporary blip, but a deep and profound structural crisis that is in danger of becoming a permanent crisis. Our national and global housing systems are in crisis and this is a key juncture.

This chapter sets out why the connection between housing and the environment urgently needs to be moved centre stage in both the housing and climate debates. It links climate change and housing together conceptually through the centrality of home to the human existence. It sets out a new housing plan: a Green New Deal for Housing in Ireland which details the key solutions for transforming our housing systems to provide affordable, sustainable homes for all. This includes a new housing plan, A Green New Deal for Housing in Ireland: Affordable Sustainable Homes and Communities for All, including mixed income public housing for all, a dedicated Affordable Sustainable Homes Building Agency, reimagining public housing, transforming social housing from being treated as a stigmatized form of accommodation restricted to very low-income households to becoming a model of desirable housing available and attractive to a much broader range of low- and middle-income households, using public land for public and not-for-profit affordable sustainable homes, how the new housing model can be financed, and why a new housing model should be underpinned by the right to housing as foundation of housing policy and law. It develops indicators for assessing housing models: and compares the market (dualist) model and public, affordable, sustainable, human rights (unitary) model.

The opening chapter provides an overview of the topics covered in the book, set in the context of the key policy debates that have taken place in recent years, not just in the UK but across countries facing similar issues. The chapter introduces the analytical approaches to be used. The methods are primarily those of economists – including modern as well as traditional techniques - but recognise the insights of other disciplines and the political constraints under which housing operates. The chapter stresses that housing cannot be divorced from the macroeconomy and monetary and fiscal policies are often more important to housing outcomes than policies directly aimed at housing. But housing also influences the economy which, particularly since the Global Financial Crisis, has added further constraints on housing policy.

This chapter describes the foreclosure crisis of the 1930s. Borrower defaults were rooted in the double trigger of reduced incomes and lower house prices, as well as the fragile structure of contracts discussed in the previous chapter. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of foreclosures and weaker house prices. As lenders’ financial positions weakened, the flow of new credit fell to historic lows. By March 1933, the housing and mortgage markets in the U.S. were in a downward spiral with no end in sight.

This chapter is the conclusion of the book. It sets out a vision of immediate and gradual reforms needed for ending the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision in the outsourced state. A first section sets out the scale of the housing safety and insecurity crisis that confronts us. A second section then sets out three policy lessons raised by Grenfell and my own research on outsourced regeneration under PFI still being ignored by government to ensure that all homes are secure and safe to live in and that residents’ voices are democratically enshrined in housing governance: the need to restore accountability and power to residents; the need to re-regulate construction and housing provision in the interests of safety; and the need to end the privatisation disaster through a programme of gradual reforms that will gradually phase out PFI and outsourcing, push back the financialisation of housing and land, and restore a reinvented public housing model based on the Bevanite principle of treating housing as ‘a social service’ and not a commodity that is democratically accountable to its residents.

A fallacy of our building culture is that there is a shortage of housing which is the root cause of a crisis that includes unaffordability and homelessness. A proffered solution is to build more housing, a supply side argument that, as Pettifor (2018: 1) notes, is a conventional wisdom ‘bought into’ by everyone, ‘from the government, to housing charities, to housebuilders’. This ‘wisdom’ goes more or less unchallenged, and propagates swathes of volume house building that do little to tackle the problems of housing shortfalls. Chapter 7 challenges the ‘building as solution’ argument, and argues for a ‘less is more’ approach that tackles the complexities relating to people’s inability to get access to good quality housing. Part of an approach ought to be to build less and to work better with what exists, including bringing back into use the 210,000 long term empty homes in England (Westwater, 2019). It also means changing how people get access to housing, including reforming housing finance, rent controls, and a paraphernalia of other systems that, if left untouched, will mean that building more housing is ineffective.

The Introduction outlines the book’s rationale, research questions, methodology and theoretical frameworks within the context of London’s housing crisis and growing inequality. This context is encapsulated by the street homeless bedding down near citadels of private wealth in the form of luxury apartment blocks – many of which are half-empty – which cater for the global super-rich and are central to London’s property development. It is this juxtaposition – zero domestic space for those who desperately need it, but an overabundance of such space for those who don’t need or even want it – which lies at the cruel heart of London’s housing crisis. Other dimensions of this crisis include housing deprivation (e.g. overcrowding) and dispossession (e.g. evictions), both of which negatively impact upon London’s multi-ethnic working-class population. The chapter examines the highly controversial role played by estate demolition in relation to the housing crisis. The Introduction discusses critical urbanism, Bourdieusian sociology, verstehen sociology, and the sociology and geography of place. Place is examined in terms of attachment, images and myths, and also elective belonging (Savage) and selective belonging (Watt). Other central concepts include home and un-homing, neighbourhood and community, working class (Allen), values (Skeggs), marginalisation (Wacquant), gentrification, expulsions (Sassen) and displacement.

This chapter introduces the HOLC by exploring how it provided relief to one borrower, Joshua C. from Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, who faced foreclosure in 1934 due to a lower market value for his house, less income, and medical debts. The chapter also provides an overview of the book and a summary of its principal findings.

This chapter focuses on a parade that through its name and practice presents an inversion of traditional Mardi Gras’s emphasis on excess. The ’tit Rəx parade offers an ironic twist on the gigantic, expensive, and traditional krewe and parade, Rex, whose king is THE King of Carnival, and whose parade runs the traditional Uptown route. Using interviews and images, this chapter analyzes ’tit Rəx through representative participants and floats. ’tit Rəx provides an example of how parades can be read as resisting and revising traditional Carnival. Like the other new parades, ’tit Rəx raises issues of gender and class. ’tit Rəx also accords with Errol Laborde’s observation that “downtowns are inherently adult” (55), as this Downtown parade is salacious in aspect. While ’tit Rəx floats are tiny, evoking schoolchildren’s Mardi Gras floats made from shoeboxes, they are political and often sexually explicit.