The contentious politics of housing supply
By Quintin Bradley
My new book Property, Planning & Protest, will be available to order from Routledge from March 2023. This is the first book ever to portray the amenity movement and community planning groups as defenders of a democratic planning system – rather than ‘Nimbys’. It situates community concerns over housebuilding in a political economy of land and housing and the extraction of ground rent by real estate development interests.
What’s it about?
The struggle for the right to housing is a battle over property rights and land use.
For housing to be provided as a human need, land must be recognised as a common right.
Property, Planning, Protest is a compelling new investigation into public opposition to housing and real estate development. Its innovative materialist approach is grounded in the political economy of land value and it recognises conflict between communities and real estate capital as a struggle over land and property rights. Property, Planning, Protest is about a social movement struggling for democratic representation in land use decisions. The amenity groups it describes champion a democratic plan-led system that allocates land for social and environmental goals. Situating this movement in a history of land reform and common rights, Property, Planning, Protest sets out a persuasive new vision of democratic planning and contributes a powerful insight into the global affordability crisis in housing.
Contents: Scroll down to read an abstract of the chapter:
One: The Politics of Housing Supply
Two: Land as a Financial Asset
Three: Housing Need or Greed
Four: The Inclusive Rights of Property
Five: Housing as a Collective Concern
Six: Down to Earth
One: The Politics of Housing Supply
The global crisis of housing affordability has brought about an extraordinary mobilisation of social movements concerned with the politics of home and habitation. The spread of rent strikes, tenants’ unions, and eviction blockades has been accompanied by an upsurge in community land trusts and housing cooperatives pioneering alternative models of housing supply and land use regulation across the urban centres of the Global North and South. The oldest and most internationally significant of housing social movements is also one of the most controversial. It is a movement of amenity associations, community groups and environmentalists campaigning for land use planning and the regulation of property rights. As real estate investors acquire land at an unprecedented scale and financial institutions turn residential development into a new asset class, what has been called the amenity movement, and was once known as the town planning movement, finds itself on the frontline in the contentious politics of housing supply.
Two: Land as a Financial Asset
The ubiquitous narrative that building more homes will bring down the cost of housing serves to justify the deregulation of property rights, the removal of democratic scrutiny and the exclusion of collective publics from land use planning. The fallacy that land is a commodity like any other underpins this supply-side story, but the models of a self-regulating market fail to accurately describe everyday practices in real estate. Many academics have turned to classical rent theory in response, particularly noting its effective application to fathom previous financial bubbles in housing and land markets. In this chapter I investigate the strategies of corporate landowners and housebuilders through Marxian rent theory to focus on the monopoly relations of private property ownership. This inquiry reveals an economy in which land is valued for its financial returns rather than its productive use and is diverted from social need for the benefit of investment markets. Landowners and developers routinely exploit monopolies to withhold land and create artificial scarcity in housing supply. The affordability crisis in housing is a direct result of the exercise of monopoly power in the real estate industry and a financial bubble in land speculation abetted by the deregulation of land use planning.
Three: Housing Need or Greed
The deregulation of property development rights has created a market in which land uses are allocated to achieve the highest rental yield while land itself is increasingly treated as a financial asset rather than a productive resource. In this financialised real estate market, the supply of housing is determined by demand for property investment as well the need for a decent home. The aim of this chapter is to explore the distinction between need and demand in housing supply. The political promotion of homeownership as an asset of exchange value confronts planning with the challenge of allocating land for housing as an object of potentially unlimited demand as well as calculable need. To make housing available on the basis of need, rather than ability to pay, requires a town planning system capable of intervening in land values with the power to allocate privately owned land for public use. Housing need has been addressed effectively in previous decades through the collective provision of public housing, but mass clearances have dispossessed communities from land and returned property rights to the pursuit of value extraction. I begin with an investigation of land market economics in which exchange value determines use and housing is the outcome, and almost a side-effect, of speculation on rental yield.
Four: The Inclusive Rights of Property
In this chapter I investigate the competing claims on property that frame the contentious politics of housing supply. Planning is about property rights. Planning and zoning policies regulate the rights of property owners to do what they want with their land to protect the rights of others with an interest in that land. Planning regimes in Britain, North America and Australia privilege the rights of exclusive property ownership while seeking to uphold a public interest in land use. Individual property rights are legally defined, while public interest claims are contested. Conflict over housebuilding revolves around the tension between the land use development rights of titled property owners and the undocumented rights of others with an interest in that property. This chapter investigates the creation myths of property, setting John Locke’s justification of colonial dispossession against Marx’s account of the usurpation of common property rights. It introduces a definition of property rights as inclusive rather than exclusive, and of property as a social relationship as well as a possession. I argue that contemporary amenity movements assert protectable rights to the use value of land they do not own but in which they hold a material interest.
Five: Housing as a Collective Concern
The supply of housing is dependent on the rental value of land. How can low-cost decent homes be built, how can places have great public services and amenities, when land is privately owned and dedicated to the extraction of value? In this chapter I continue my inquiry into property rights and third-party interests in land to explore the claimants and beneficiaries of land value. I am concerned with the extraction of rent by landowners and the distribution of the rental yield resulting from property improvement. Drawing on classical rent theory, I take a historical perspective on the vexed question of who should pay for social infrastructure and social need. Just as amenity and access can be seen as use rights of property, I argue that rights to land and the benefits of land value are owed to communities. Without effective land value capture, housing – a product of collective labour and collective need – appears to communities as the imposition of a speculative commodity. In case studies of community planning, I demonstrate that housing can be an active agent, the object as co-worker, through which value is returned to communities.
Six: Down to Earth
To provide housing as a universal right and a human need requires an approach to property rights that values the use rather than the exchange value of land. The right to develop and extract value from land can make it impossible for others to exercise their rights of use or meet their basic needs. The obstacle to the provision of housing as a collective concern lies in the monopoly privileges of land ownership which undermine democracy and any opportunities for participation in planning. In this final chapter I return to the idea that land use planning can be understood as the assignment of property rights. I argue for a model of democratic planning that prioritizes the use values of land over exchange value and directs land use to social and environmental goals. I conclude with a blueprint for a planning system that has the tools to intervene in land supply and redistribute land value to supply housing as a universal right for all.