The Housing Crisis

First published between 2015 and 2019 on the website of the London-based architectural practice, Architects for Social Housing, the articles collected in this book analyse the financing, legislation and policy behind the UK housing crisis, as well as the resistance to it. Their focus is the housing crisis in London, where wealth and poverty meet as nowhere else in the UK, and where the housing crisis is most acute; but beyond that they look at the whole of the UK, to which housing poverty, precarity and homelessness is being exported on the London model. This makes these articles relevant beyond the London context, and of use to those trying to understand the causes of the housing crisis in their own countries. The basic premise of this book is that the housing crisis is not a product of the failure of housing legislation and policy to house its citizens in safe, secure and affordable housing but, to the contrary, of the success of that legislation and policy in creating the conditions that produce the vast profits extracted from this crisis at every level of its production. The housing crisis, in other words, has been deliberately and carefully created. This book is about how and why.