From Housing as Asset to Housing as Patrimony: Policy Ideas and the Re-emergence of the Housing Question

The global financial crisis has ushered in a major housing crisis in many European countries: severe shortage of affordable housing, high rates of housing deprivation, over-indebted homeowners, massive evictions and increase in homelessness are the symptoms of the re- emergence of the “housing question” (Engels 1872). To a large extent, the current housing crisis reveals the failure of past policies, which saw the solution to affordable housing in privatization of housing, securitization of mortgages and “financial inclusion” of poorer people via the relaxation of borrowing standards, and subsidization of “subprime” lending. Despite a major failure of past housing policies, policy makers however have rarely radically questioned these policies and have not come up with sustainable alternatives. Even in cases where governments do experiment with new policies, these experiments typically do not address the disturbing phenomena of the housing question. This paper seeks to shed light on why it is that despite a massive housing crisis we do not see more sustained efforts at tackling it. To this aim, the paper probes into the ideas that have informed housing policies over the last decades.