Anna Lindley writes:
In large cities all over the world, people talk about ‘the housing problem’ or the ‘housing crisis’ – but what exactly do they mean? And to what extent is it a global problem, or many different problems? Are we on the edge of a very different kind of urban future? These are the questions that Deborah Potts tackles in her tour-de-force book Broken Cities, published by Zed earlier this year. The neoliberal approach tends to frame the problem as one of market supply – that there is a shortage of housing or land to build on. If enough houses are built, the market logic goes, prices will fall and become affordable. But research suggests that while house-building may help those on the edges of the affordability line, they tend to have limited impact on the majority of those on low incomes, who fall well below. Drawing on decades of research and teaching focusing on urban centres in Southern Africa, the UK and elsewhere, Deborah Potts emphasizes the role of demand-side problems driving the affordability conundrum. While poorer people in these cities undoubtedly need housing, they do not have near enough income to secure what is understood as a ‘decent’, ‘legal’ home. While unemployment can make this worse, most people thus affected are in fact in work – the stark reality is that their employers just do not pay truly liveable wages. In many cities, incomes at the bottom end of the spectrum have long fallen short of the cost of social reproduction (particularly the rising cost of housing) and the minimum pay and pensions increases that would be required to rectify this are so big as to be unlikely without major political transformation.
Broken Cities illuminates common responses of low-income city-dwellers to the affordability challenge. People may squeeze on space (e.g. crowding families or co-workers into one room, co-ordinating bed use around shift patterns); they may resort to more basic or improvised structures (e.g. trailers, subdivided housing units, office conversions, backyard shacks, squats); they may live in informal settlements on city peripheries (in cheap housing close enough to employment opportunities but with insecure tenure and poor conditions); they may fall into an itinerant, ‘hidden homeless’ existence (sofa-surfing or spending prolonged periods in ‘temporary’ accommodation). These are pragmatic, bottom-up, informal ‘solutions’ that avoid street homelessness but are a very long way from what most people think of as an appropriate home – and indeed may be endangering to health and contravene local housing standards. A particular strength of the book is its global and historical reach, connecting urban housing problems across the world, probing contextual detail, differences and distinctiveness, but always with a close eye on common features and the core conundrum of affordability of decent housing for the poorest in society.
