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Preface

Paul Mason

Over the past thirty years, Governments all across the world began to insert market mechanisms and market norms of behaviour into many parts of society where they do not exist.

Where there was resistance, they did it by force. Bus and train services that were once run in the public interest were forced to ‘compete’ with each other; so were schools, universities, even the people who serve school dinners and clean the offices.

At the same time, more and more of us were forced to behave as if we were a tiny, individual bank. We were taught to evaluate our success not just through our wages and what they can buy but through the ‘assets’ we own, and the numerous lines of credit we could command.

These two relentless forces – marketisation and financialisation – formed the core dynamics of a strategy known as neoliberalism. A third dynamic – globalisation – made us prey to the avarice of rich elites across the world, not just our homegrown ones; and forced us to compete in a labour market that begins at the local bus stop and ends at a bus stop in Shanghai.

As a result, in the space of two generations housing got transformed into a weapon in the hands of globalised finance.

This is how it works. If you can constrain the supply of something, the price of it should go up. With housing that means constraining the supply of land and buildings.

But if, at the same time, you put unlimited supplies of cheap money into the hands of people who already have money, something unusual happens. Land is acquired, apartment blocks are built – but the prices seldom fall. Because property has become a one-way bet.

The price of a home no longer responds to the supply and demand of buildings but the supply and demand for money.

As long as Central Banks operate a cheap money policy – whether to encourage speculation as before 2008 or to keep the economy on life support as after 2008 – the chances are that property prices rise faster than incomes and rents.

Since 2015, Ireland is second only to Canada in the developed world when it comes to house prices rising faster than incomes, and high up the global league table when it comes to rents:

https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/.

If you add in the boom for speculative commercial property building, the picture in many cities and large towns across the developing world is of a frantic building boom and a shortage of affordable places to live. The housing market no longer responds to human need, but to the rhythms of finance.

Supporters of free-market economics insist this outcome is natural and spontaneous. In fact it is the result of relentless coercion and intervention by the State. The rundown terraced house, with every room turned into a bedroom; the ex-council flat turned into an Airbnb while people huddle under sleeping bags in doorways; the lights-off apartment blocks, bought off-plan and left empty by some footballer or crook. We walk past the evidence every day.

Periodically it all goes bust, and some bankers flee the country, and some politicians are disgraced and people on radio phone-ins get shouty.

But then the State steps in, in the form of the Central Bank, saves the speculators and floods the market with more cheap money, pricing ordinary people out of affordable homes some more.

The only thing that’s going to break this cycle is political action by the State. In the first place, it’s a question of separating the market for housing from the market for financial assets.

You can place limits on foreign buyers. That means limiting the forces of globalisation that are worshipped with a religious zeal in politics; they will call it protectionism. But it is just protecting families, communities and social cohesion.

You can cap rents. That means limiting the power of finance – because rents are always set exactly at what the lenders to landlords need, not what renters can afford. They will say it’s impossible, and that it never works. Ask the rack-renting landlords of New York City why they devote years to ejecting tenants with capped rents: it works.

You can enforce a quota of affordable homes for buying and renting in every new private development. If you study the way developers systematically erode these quotas, once they’ve got planning permission, you can see how effective they might be.

But ultimately, the most important action the State must take is to build homes for social rent. It has to plan them, build them, own them, hold on to them and manage the allocation according to the most pressing need. It needs to build so rapidly that who gets what becomes a non-issue.

Across the western world, after the Second World War, where the private sector could not provide decent homes, the State did. As Ó Broin points out in this book, under Bevan the British Labour Government initiated a housebuilding programme explicitly premised on the idea of housing as a public good, not a commodity.

This time around we face different challenges to those that confronted the post-war generation. People are flocking to big cities – not just the young but the elderly – after a life of farming or small-town manufacturing.

More people want to live singly – or in shared accommodation. The rise of networked lifestyles has socialised many aspects of urban living, from Starbucks to the gym – so that what people want from the space they live in might be changing. There is also the challenge of meeting tough targets on carbon use and circularity (inbuilt recyclability).

The biggest mistake would be to look at the current state of the built environment and see it as the product of randomness plus demographic change. It is the precise outcome of planned action by the rich against the poor.

From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns. The lesson I take from it is: it can all be redrawn again, this time with the people in control.

In this hard-hitting and timely book, Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis. He also argues that change lies in the hands of a new generation of politicians and activists, and the question they face is this: are we to see homes as places to generate rent and interest from, or as places to live?

Paul Mason is a British journalist and author of

the book Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future