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Modern Housing: An environmental common good

A recent paper on housing, written with Mariana Mazzucato, outlining some ‘home truths’ about homes, and exploring the human right to housing alongside the rights of the environment

Any of the numerous so-called ‘housing crises’, at least those littered across the countries of the Global North, cannot be solved simply through that bluntest of tools: mass home ownership, based on the house as a financial asset, delivered predominantly by the private sector’s construction companies and financiers, powered by supply-side subsidies and policies from government. Yet it’s precisely that narrow logic that has remained in place for half a century.

Mariana Mazzucato and I have written a paper for the Council on Urban Initiatives—Modern Housing: An Environmental Common Good—that highlights the fault lines that run through that model, drawing together a wealth of research and practice on this theme, indicating that how it leads directly to crushing inequality, diminished public health, economic stagnation, and a planetary-scale climate and biodiversity crisis.

We counter that increasingly hollow model with alternatives: vibrant, dynamic strategies, ideas, possibilities and examples for common good housing, lying around us and entirely within reach.

The paper is peppered with multiple case studies drawn from across the globe. Ultimately, after placing housing at the nexus of our various crises, we hope we have outlined a hopeful, progressive set of ideas and examples which reposition housing as the vehicle by which we might also systemically address these challenges. We see the possibility of housing as an environmental common good, in essence drawing from Mariana’s recent work on common good economics, and applying to my experience with the built environment sector.

Mariana and I are either based in, or have a long history with, European public policy and practice, and we draw from much inspiring work there—as well as noting its many issues. We’ve also worked hard to ensure that the paper coherently addresses the challenge of housing in the Global South, noting that the North is effectively built from the South at this point, in numerous problematic ways. We also point to inspiring projects and leadership across the Global South.

Writing from my perspective of Australia, most of the worst patterns are visible here, with politicians, policymakers, property sector, and the media all locked-in the same tired narratives, as if the problem is merely one of turning on a tap of ‘supply’, somehow ignoring the size of the bathtub, or indeed the systems of pipes, rainfall or reservoir at either end. Australia builds the largest new homes in the world, almost in direct relationship diminishing household size, indicating precisely, as we put it in the paper, that we are building mortgages rather than homes. (Watch for some forthcoming work from us at MSD on the deleterious impact of this supply-side approach in terms of embodied carbon, indicating that we actually cannot actually supply any new Australian homes if we are to stay within the planetary boundaries suggested by the legally-binding Paris Agreement.)

In terms of social justice, the economist Saul Eslake recently described how, “60 years of bad policies” had “needlessly” encouraged Australians to spend more on housing — through tax breaks for investors, shared equity schemes, stamp duty concessions, and lower interest rates.” As with other systemic challenges, representative democracy is rarely effective at shifting such lock-ins (Eslake said “Even the dumbest of our politicians can do the math,” given 11 million homeowners and 2 million investors.) It’s also worth noting the amount of multi-property ownership levels amongst Australian politicians themselves.

These patterns may be exemplified in the Australian housing market—as perhaps the clearest, most extreme example of an almost completely-financialised sector—but the patterns were drawn largely from the UK, which shows a similar lack of interest in actually addressing housing demand, as unpacked brilliantly our colleagues at UCL IIPP, Stefan Horn and Josh Ryan-Collins. (Just as Nancy H. Kwak suggests that the concept of mass home ownership was exported to the UK, and elsewhere, by the USA.)

I’ve been fortunate to be part of Mariana’s groundbreaking UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) from its start back in 2017, serving on its advisory board as well as being on faculty as a Visiting Professor of Practice. Building on our work together, and pointing it at cities, Mariana and I were also founder members of the Council on Urban Initiatives, a joint venture between between UCL IIPP, LSE Cities and UN HABITAT, chaired by Mariana and Ricky Burdett. So this paper on housing as an environmental common good continues the Council’s recent focus on housing, following Mariana’s paper with Leilani Farha on housing as a human right, as well as the publication I contributed to on Housing and the City: Case studies of integrated urban design (with Ricky, Richard Sennett, Rahul Mehrotra, Chan Heng Chee, and others), and our recent symposium on healthy housing and urbanism at the Healthy City Design Congress, with Sunand Prasad and Yonette Thomas.

You can download the discussion paper ‘Modern Housing’ here

The paper’s title was my deliberate allusion to Catherine Bauer’s 1934 book Modern Housing—there’s a great essay about that book at Places Journal—and I drew from Bauer’s often brilliant text throughout. Although aspects of Modern Housing have predictably dated, reading it now implicitly asks us to consider alternate futures: what if countries like USA, UK, Canada and Australia had wholeheartedly pursued the trajectories Bauer described? What if they did so now? We opened the paper with one of Bauer’s progressive quotes about housing as ‘shared public infrastructure’ and counterpointed it with one of Ayn Rand’s many appalling ideas, before noting that the latter would ultimately be more influential, in many countries at least, than the former—at least until now.

Original cover of Modern Housing, by Catherine Bauer (1934)

Whilst some of Bauer’s book does not hold up, most of it does, which is perhaps both inspiring and depressing some 90 years on.

Unlike many other papers of this ilk, I wanted to ensure—following IIPP’s mantra of ‘practice-based theorising’ and well as the core tenets of strategic design practice—that the ideas were grounded in tangible, meaningful actionable and adaptable examples, stories, and demonstrators. So the paper draws heavily on cases, and thanks to all the architects, designers, policymakers and activists who shared photographs and drawings of their wonderful projects.

I drew a few diagrams for the paper, trying to bring together the ideas in the text in different ways, and complementing the photos from case study projects. These were re-drawn by the Council’s graphic designers to fit the house style—fair enough—but I’ll share and describe my originals below, just if of interest.

Housing policy and climate policy are usually treated as if separate things: yet both are pointing at exactly the same materials. Housing’s climate footprint is generally appalling; the built environment sector is responsible for 37–40% of total greenhouse gas emissions, and much of this is in new housing build. The sector is slowly realising that much of that is in embodied carbon, in construction, upstream in the supply chains. Operational emissions are the easy bit, the low-hanging fruit. This embodied carbon is much harder, and if left unchecked will negate any climate policy. The Danish Reduction Roadmap project, described in the paper, makes that clear. (We are working with the Danes on an Australian Reduction Roadmap; watch this space. So ultimately, we cannot see them as separate policies. They must be drawn together, as a common good housing policy, addressing the social justice, public health and economic challenges at the same time as the environmental challenges. They are one and the same thing.)

The aforementioned Reduction Roadmap, by a collective across the Danish built environment sector led initially by EFFEKT Architects, has its own wealth of beautiful diagrams. I thought I’d redraw them to fit the report’s approach, but I’m not convinced I improved them! Either way, they make clear the reduction we need to stay within planetary boundaries, in both embodied carbon equivalent per square metre and the volume of new housing construction.

This very simple diagram describes how much slack we have in the housing system i.e. we have over-produced housing, rather than under-produced, and could house Europe’s homeless many times over. The same applies in many other countries, including Australia and USA. In the paper, we note Finland’s highly purposeful, typically pragmatic yet visionary approach to fixing homelessness—give the homeless homes—and ask why that apparently cannot work elsewhere; or could it?

This didn’t make the cut, was an attempt to build on the ‘wedge’-like reduction diagrams, indicating both a reduction in overall construction (both new-build and retrofit) linked to declining population growth rate as well as a major shift in the proportion of new-build versus retrofit, swing towards the latter. If we’d been able to use a cover image, some variation on this may have worked.

Finally, this diagram describes an approach to balancing a housing sector. It is not a detailed proposal, or precise suggestion, but simply asks what a better balanced system might be, and thus makes the implicit point that a market is designed, and can be tilted in various directions. Many housing markets are tilted towards private housing—in Australia, there is little social housing (shared housing) and public housing hovers around 3–4%—with predictable results, far from a ‘common good’ approach. Whether a better balance could ever be something like the diagram’s implicit suggestions—30% public, 30% social, and 40% private housing—is questionable, depending on where you are—but I’d suggest it might stand a better chance of producing ‘common good outcomes, environmental and otherwise’.

One excellent indication that people are building on the report’s ideas was seeing how the burgeoning not-for-profit homes sector picked up on it, not least the brilliant WeCanMake project in Bristol’s Knowles West, who modified the diagram in the report to insert much of the UK’s non-profit community-led homes initiatives into it. Thank you, WeCanMake!

I hugely appreciate the brilliant WeCanMake modifying the diagram to insert much of the UK’s not-for-profit community-led homes sector into the middle of the diagram! This is why we make diagrams—to communicate strategic ideas in ways that others can adapt and adopt.

You can download the discussion paper Modern Housing: an environmental common good, by Dan Hill and Mariana Mazzucato, at the Council on Urban Initiatives. As noted, we are grateful in particularly to Carla Rainer and Isadora Spillman-Schappell at IIPP for their support, as well as Alice Haugh, Marco Steinberg, Chan Heng Chee and Alcinda Honwana, for their comments and contributions to this text.