Contents
| 1. Prized or Priced |
| 2. Priceless Housing |
| 3. Price is the Problem |
| 4. Value With No Values |
| 5. Value and Viability |
| 6. The De-Valuation of Need |
| 7. Abolish Price |
Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 1: Prized or Priced
The aim of this book is to evaluate the effectiveness of the commodity known as affordable housing. The starting point for this evaluation is a switch in policy goals from the priorities of need to concern about the price of housing. Needs-based housing policies addressed themselves primarily to use values and the provision of decent homes regardless of cost. Affordability referred explicitly to exchange values. It transformed the concept of need into an exchangeable commodity. This introductory chapter characterises affordability as an economic valuation of need, or the pricing of a prized goal. Price is made the standard against which housing priorities are measured. It is this act of valuation that guides the book’s critique of affordability, and it is the value form of affordable housing – its production, circulation, and exchange – that provides its trajectory.
Chapter 2: Priceless Housing
This chapter appraises the practical delivery of housing for need through its removal from the circuits of commodity exchange. It explores the direct social provision of forms of cost-rental, municipal housing and socialised homeownership around the world. Charting the shift from need to affordability in the decimation of decommodified housing, it investigates the subsequent escalation of housing costs and resulting crisis of inequality, not affordability. The chapter critically examines the strategies of affordable housing provision that maintain demand without reducing prices. Just like any other commodity, so-called affordable housing creates value and surplus value in production to realise value as money in exchange. It is a regressive strategy, benefiting first those with ability to pay, and channelling subsidies to profit landlords, landowners, developers, and real estate commercial interests.
Chapter 3: Price is the Problem
Affordability puts an economic value on housing need. It implies that the unequal distribution of decent housing can be remedied by the operation of supply and demand in the housing market. This chapter critiques the economics of supply and demand and explores the contingencies of these categories in the differing use values of housing. Its aim is to situate the dynamics of price and value within the circulation of capital. Affordable housing is a commodity that produces value, realises value, and enables the extraction of value, but at the same time – in its relation to need – changes the idea of value entirely. If demand is social need with ‘money to back it up,’ as Marx said, what is need without money? The chapter asks what it means to make affordability the goal of housing policy in a system where value is determined by price.
Chapter 4: Value With No Values
Affordable housing transforms the social task of producing housing for need into the supply of a commodity exchanged at price. Affordable housing can only assuage need if it is acquired as a commodity. The value we place on housing is realised only in the act of exchange. The affordable housing sector has become one small niche of the real estate development industry, and affordability serves as a distorted brand name for a package of real estate practices rather than any reflection of costs. This chapter explores the construction of affordable housing in its various commodity forms. It identifies the sources of capital and revenue funding, the financing of the development process, the grants, loans, and tax credits that underwrite construction costs. It follows the flow of value in the form of interest-bearing capital as it discounts the price of affordable housing before returning to investors as interest. I ask, what happens to the goal of decent housing for all when price becomes the decisive criteria.
Chapter 5: Value and Viability
Affordable housing is value in motion; money making money as interest-bearing capital or as surplus value extracted from land rent. This chapter follows the flow of value from that monopolised asset of scarcity, the earth itself. Land values are propelling housing costs, and that same surge in value goes to subsidise the price of affordability. The allocation of land as a use value is the necessary means to decommodify housing, but the provision of affordable homes depends on the treatment of land as fictitious capital. Land values must be forced upwards to subsidise a supply of affordable homes, and affordability worsens as land prices rise. Affordable housing is marooned in the centre of circulating flows of value, appearing alternately as the remedy of land speculation, and as its beneficiary. In this chapter, I review the effectiveness of inclusive zoning policies and planning obligations that divert value from the profits of real estate development to subsidise the exchange price of housing. Valuation and viability stake out the decisive battlefield on which rival claims to value are fought, but affordability is an illusory goal in a housing market dependent on continuously soaring land rents.
Chapter 6: The Devaluation of Need
Affordability has put a price on housing need and the needs assessments of residual welfare systems are mediated by ability to pay. This chapter explores the way affordable housing need is calculated, and the targets for supply or lack of them, and evidences the unequivocal refusal to identify the resources required, and the deliberate and systemic undercounting that is done to maintain the illusion that the market can deliver for housing need. Affordable housing is rendered affordable by the addition of value to discount the price of exchange. This value comes from three sources: profit on production, interest on credit and uplift on land rent. This price subsidy is not a gift. Surplus value must be paid back in rents, fees, or labour. In this chapter I expose the unaffordable prices extracted by the myth of affordability illustrated in the intermediate housing market where the so-called affordable price exceeds market costs. This chapter exposes the part played by affordable housing in the conviction politics of social mixing and the landscape of segregation, exclusion and banishment that has followed. Affordable housing provides a stigmatised safety net that prices out those most in need.
Chapter 7: Abolish Price
This chapter comes back to the question of ends, and to the goal of providing decent housing for all. That goal is not achieved through the commodification of need. The value form of affordable housing only feeds price inflation in the circuit of capital. The popular response to global housing unaffordability has been to demand a return to social housing, but that path may simply expand a residual and stigmatised service. In this chapter I aim to identify the distinctive characteristics of a socialised housing system and to map out means to these ends. How can social housing effectively disrupt the stratification of capitalist society and reduce dependence on the commodity market? How can its egalitarian effects be magnified and its co-operative and democratic achievements be advanced? Through this analysis, this concluding chapter seeks to turn attention to what is valued, and valuable, in the direct provision of socialised homes for all.