How the housing shortage became a political crisis

Writing about London, Paul Watt and Anna Minton argue that the housing crisis comes in “varying degrees of severity ranging from the mild (over-indebted ‘mortgage slaves’), through the moderate (young professionals and students experiencing multiple private sector rent hikes and evictions), to the severe (those living in damp, overcrowded flats or in temporary accommodation) and ending at life-threatening (the street homeless).” 

In a similar vein, Julia Heslop and Emma Ormerod state that the housing crisis is difficult to define as it “does not only involve those in housing precarity, such as people experiencing homelessness, overcrowding or insecure tenancies, but also middle-class millennials struggling to get on the housing ladder.” 

Various key indicators underscore the variegated character of what may be considered the Dutch housing crisis. While being far from exhaustive, key aspects include the rapid increase in house prices, especially in cities such as Amsterdam as well as some of the lowest rates of new constructions since WWII being recorded since 2010, with especially the construction of affordable social-housing in sharp decline. Overall trends show stagnating homeownership rates and a gradual but continuous decline in affordable social-rental housing.

Among young adults (aged 25-34) tenure shifts are more pronounced with a notable decrease in homeownership as well as social rent, and an increasing dependence on private renting. This latter trend has exposed populations to increasing precarity, as private tenants often depend on short-term leases while also finding themselves increasingly in housing affordability stress. 

The Dutch social-rental sector still shields a sizeable share of the population from these adverse trends, but is subject to ongoing residualisation. This is marked, among other things, by a decreasing size of the tenure following a slump in new constructions along with increasing social-housing sales post financial crisis. 

Furthermore, government policies have increasingly restricted access to the social-rental sector to the lowest-income populations as the tenure is being remade from a broad service to a last resort tenure. 

As in other countries, the lack of affordable housing has contributed to a sharp increase in homelessness. While Statistics Netherlands registered 32,000 homeless working-age people in 2020 (compared to 18,000 in 2009), expert organisations employing a broader definition argue the actual number is much higher. Umbrella organization Valente for example speaks of 54,000 “clients” who experienced some form of homelessness in 2011, with this figure increasing to 100,000 in 2019.

These general trends are not unique to the Netherlands but have similarly been identified in other European countries. Conceptually, they are part of a polarisation of housing marked by a retreat in owner-occupation among some and a re-concentration of property and housing wealth among others. They are part of processes of housing financialisation in which housing as an asset class is integrated in capital flows operating at various spatial scales, further accommodated by political agendas promoting housing liberalisation, private ownership and accumulation as part of asset-based welfare strategies while also systemically eroding tenant protections and the provision of de-commodified housing alternatives more broadly.

A number of patterns and trends can be considered emblematic of an unfolding housing crisis. However, crises are not natural or given phenomena, but are socially constructed. That is, a crisis only becomes a crisis when it is labelled and understood as such. 

A crisis is a perceived threat to core values in society or life-sustaining systems that therefore requires urgent attention. Defining a crisis typically allows for contesting interpretations of underlying causes, who is to blame, likely effects and necessary solutions. Indeed, the very act of diagnosing a (housing) crisis has an agenda-setting purpose, shaping which “remedies” are imaginable.

The labelling of a housing crisis is thus an act of framing. Invoking a crisis triggers a response, as the crisis situation opens a window of opportunity for a change in policies or political constellations. 

Various previous studies have focused on the framing of a housing crisis. Writing about England, Heslop and Ormerod show how government, media and think tanks push a narrative in which the housing crisis is largely reduced to a lack of supply caused by overregulation. Similarly, White and Nandedkar note that political discourse in New Zealand favours a simplistic framing, identifying “poor land supply and an inefficient planning system” as root causes. 

This market-oriented frame may come with a degree of positivity:  while it acknowledges the existence of a housing crisis, it also emphasises solutions already exist. These are typically fixes and tweaks, with developers keen to implement them (if not for an overregulated planning system). These frames have been criticised for forwarding solutions that call for market-friendly deregulation and commodification, foreclosing the scope for more fundamental politicisation or even stigmatising de-commodified alternatives, such as social housing, as part of the problem rather than the solution.

Vested interests do not have a monopoly on interpreting, labelling and mobilising the housing crisis to suit their own agenda:  Actors challenging the status quo may do so as well. Critics exploit the crisis by pointing to the systemic injustices that are considered endogenous to current politics, thus calling for fundamental political-ideological alternatives.

The above helps us understand how frames shape how we conceive of certain problems, their causes and the solutions deemed necessary. What it does not explain, however, is why the housing crisis emerged as a topic in public and political debate in the first place. Some would say the housing crisis is far from a new phenomenon but rather a permanent feature of capitalist society. This begs the question: whose crisis we are talking about here?

In answering this question, it is first important to recognize that housing positions are not only crucially shaped by class position and economic inequalities, but are in turn also key in shaping and reproducing these, and increasingly so. 

Recent studies argue housing is increasingly central in facilitating accumulation and defining class position. While incomes from labour for many stagnated, generating wealth through asset ownership has become increasingly important with – colloquially stated – many homes earning more than jobs. The ownership of property, or even multiple properties, then becomes increasingly important in shaping economic position and drawing class lines.

These housing classes do not only have disparate economic positions but also disparate class interests. As many countries are dominated by an electoral majority of homeowners, who typically find themselves in higher social positions than renters, this makes them a powerful class interest group able to exercise electoral power to prioritise pro-homeownership and anti-welfare policies, such as redistribution through de-commodified housing while supporting high house prices to facilitate wealth accumulation. 

The result is a reproduction of a forceful ideology of homeownership, promising not only financial security through owner-occupancy but also status, control, autonomy and other merits. The electoral majority of homeowners, then, makes it politically unfeasible to pursue policies that reduce inequalities between property-owning insiders and outsiders struggling with rental unaffordability and precarity.

Research from the Netherlands (Schakel 2021) and elsewhere has shown politics to be much more responsive to the concerns and desires of a higher-income and highly-educated electorate – which are highly overrepresented among homeowning majorities. Conversely, government policies appear virtually unresponsive to the concerns of lower-income populations. Their concerns are often only taken up when they line up with those of more affluent groups.

Schakel proposes three key causal mechanisms that may explain this unequal responsiveness: (1) political participation tends to be weaker among lower-income groups, (2) politicians tend to be disproportionally selected from more affluent backgrounds leaving low-income groups underrepresented, and (3) the interests of high-income groups may be more aligned with those of influential interest groups, lobby organizations and corporations. 

Already in the 1970s, it was furthermore noted that politics is more responsive to protest groups when these are more resourced. Protestors with more economic, social or cultural capital are more likely to get their demands met. Policymakers, meanwhile, also tend to follow a problem-solving approach, often depoliticising political debates to technical measures they deem effective, executable and politically feasible.

Recent studies on the US and European countries find similar class biases in media coverage, although these patterns are weaker and more variegated in European countries. These studies find that economic news coverage is strongly skewed towards the interests of rich households. Here, the vested interests of media owners, the middle-class habitus of many journalists, the ideological preferences of their readership and the focus on overall economic growth are offered as causal explanations.

These classed dynamics in politics and media may result in disproportionate attention to the housing fortunes of the middle classes and their inability to buy a home, and centre on questions of how to reinstate the “ideal” of homeownership while disregarding the structurally different housing struggles of those lower on the economic ladder. These dynamics of unequal responsiveness will structure if, when and how housing problems are problematised and, indeed, framed as a “housing crisis”.

This point has broader currency: a close analysis of the selected newspaper items reveals most attention is directed towards the housing woes of middle-income residents as well as young adults. These two groups are often mentioned in one breath, with the lines between the two blurring. Evidence indeed suggests young adults and middle-income households do increasingly struggle on the housing market, with homeownership increasingly too expensive and social rent reserved for the lowest income groups and allocated based on long waiting lists, making them dependent on an expensive and precarious private-rental tenure.

The idea that housing problems of the young and middle classes play a central role in housing crisis narratives is also forwarded by journalists as they reflect on their own middle-class position and that of their colleagues and social networks. As one housing journalist said: “It started to hit the people from the higher classes, although of course in a very minimal way... That wasn’t the case six years ago. The pain that comes with this, is now much more felt.”

The journalists interviewed thus suggest the housing problems of the middle classes were central in putting the issue on the public agenda. This paper does not provide conclusive evidence for this argument, but does underscore that the housing crisis narratives during this period have a strong, arguably disproportionate, middle-class focus.

The middle-class bias allows different stakeholders with different interests to rally behind the frame, also in an effort to defend status-quo interests, essentially representing an attempt at (again) depoliticising the crisis. One telling example is that market players such as developers, investors, lobby groups and interest organisations also expressed sympathy for the housing protests. 

This move should be considered part of a broader frame forwarded by developers, investors, lobby organisations and market-liberal political parties in which they recognize the housing crisis and seek to put blame on regulations restricting market players from addressing the housing crisis, a narrative that seeks to return to previous frames centred on housing shortages due to a lack of supply.

This brings us to a tension: on the one hand public and political debates around the Dutch housing crisis have been subject to politicisation. Emerging housing movements and other societal actors have been important in popularising frames pertaining to the right to housing that is not being met and housing as a site for care and solidarity through non-market based social relations. 

On the other hand, the strong focus on middle-class housing struggles in debates hints at depoliticisation. The skewed focus can allow status-quo actors such as incumbent politics, think tanks and influential market players to forward incremental reforms which may alleviate (some) middle-class struggles but do little to help more disadvantaged populations. For example, a focus on the middle-class experience will likely reinforce the “ideal” of homeownership e.g. by fuelling the owner-occupied market through tax breaks and mortgage credit while encouraging the further privatisation, debasement and residualisation of social housing. The tension between politicisation and depoliticisation also points to the importance of taking a dynamic approach to understand how political and public understandings of housing problems evolve, rather than static interpretations.

The findings hold relevance for the political economy of housing more broadly. Ample research in this field have studied how housing positions specifically tenure and (un)affordability, shape individuals’ voting preferences. Other studies take a more macro approach, to understand, for example, how middle-class ideologies centred around private ownership and capital accumulation permeate political ideologies and manifestos, and subsequently shape and maintain housing policies. 

This points to the importance of considering the dynamics of ongoing public and political debates in shaping our understanding of housing crises from a political economy perspective. These debates can shift towards a more politicised and fundamental understandings of housing, even without the support of electoral majorities or powerful vested interests.

Rather than only focusing on housing outcomes, it is also imperative to study the debate itself. How the housing crisis is framed, by whom, where and when are crucial in understanding which measures, or solutions, will be taken into consideration. It is a plea to take into consideration framing processes alongside analyses of the actually-existing housing exclusions and injustices at the heart of contemporary housing crises.

An excerpt of a research paper by Cody Hochstenback, Urban Geographies, University of Amsterdam. First published in Housing Studies, reproduced and edited under Creative Commons.