Chapter 2). And a fourth has been the recentralization of high-order, producer-service employment
6.1 Housing submarkets
of their specific linkages (functional, historical, polit-ical, social and cultural) with the broader structural elements (economic, institutional) of the political economy. A comprehensive survey of the structures of building provision is beyond the scope of this book.
We shall, instead, illustrate the social production of the built environment: first of all by showing how the dynamics of housing supply are socially constructed through the dynamics of the major housing submarkets and, second, by showing how some of the key actors in these submarkets are implicated in the structures of building provision.
Collectively, realtors systematically developed and deployed strategies to sell houses that helped to reify this notion of home and neighbourhood as the ‘normal’
expectation for a ‘middle-class’ American family.
From about 1915 through the 1920s, US realtors collaborated with various government agencies and civic groups to promote single-family home ownership. Their Own-Your-Own-Home campaign sought to reinforce the idea of the home as a privileged consumer durable, worth sacrificing and going into debt for. When the housing market crashed at the onset of the Depression, the National Association of Real Estate Boards was in a position to work closely with President Hoover’s White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. In doing so, it secured support for a reduc-tion of taxes on real estate and endorsement for a federal mortgage discount bank to facilitate long-term mortgages. This became a key element in the ambitious programmes of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, part of a broad package of Keynesian macro-economic management in response to the overaccumulation crisis of the Depression. Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1934, played a key role in stimulating the labour-intensive construc-tion industry by stabilizing the mortgage market and facilitating sound home financing on reasonable terms.
The immediate effect of Keynesian policy was to reignite It was the boom in streetcar suburbs at the end of
the nineteenth century that prompted the first real boom in home ownership, and it was organized in large measure by the real estate industry, which emerged as a signific-ant influence on American housing policy by propagat-ing the powerful notion of the ‘American Dream’. The term was first coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America (1931). The product of Depression-era politics, the original notion of the American Dream built on the idea of American excep-tionalism, stressing individual freedom, especially the possibility of dramatic upward social mobility through ingenuity and hard work, with the promise that successive generations would enjoy steadily improving economic and social conditions. It did not take long, though, for the ideal of home ownership to be grafted on to the notion. As Jeffrey Hornstein notes (2005, p. 7):
The conception of real estate brokerage as an occupation-cum-profession depended upon the existence of ‘home’ as an intellectual and cultural object . . . Thanks in large measure to real estate brokers’ cultural and political work, the single-family home on a quarter-acre lot in a low-density suburban development became the
‘American Dream,’ and the vast majority of Americans bought into it.
Figure 6.1 Actors and institutions in the housing market.
Source: After Bourne (1981), Fig. 4.8, p. 85.
Figure 6.2 Intra-urban housing submarkets: traditional definitions.
Source: Bourne (1981), Fig. 4.9, p. 89.
offering all sorts of packages to help people afford houses that would otherwise be beyond their reach:
interest-only mortgages, graduated-payment mortgages, growing-equity mortgages, shared-appreciation mort-gages and step-rate mortmort-gages which supercharged the market and contributed to a housing market bubble of the first half of the 2000s.
Traditionally, banks and savings and loan com-panies (building societies) had financed their mortgage lending through the deposits they received from their customers. Together with the involvement of federal agencies, this has always limited the amount of mort-gage lending they could do, creating a natural stabilizing effect in the market. With the homebuilding boom of the early 2000s, however, mortgage lenders moved to a new model, selling the mortgages on to bond markets.
This made it much easier to fund additional borrow-ing, but it also led to abuses, as banks no longer had an incentive to check carefully on the borrowers. The new types of mortgages included ‘sub-prime’ lending to borrowers with poor credit histories and weak documentation of income, who were shunned by the
‘prime’ lenders underwritten by federal agencies. They also included ‘jumbo’ mortgages for properties over the federal mortgage limit of $417 000 (£202 000). Such busi-ness proved extremely profitable for the banks, which earned a fee for each mortgage they sold on. Naturally, they urged mortgage brokers to sell more and more of these mortgages. By 2005, one in five mortgages was sub-prime, and were particularly popular among recent immigrants trying to buy a home for the first time in the expensive housing markets of big metropolitan areas.
The problem was that these sub-prime mortgages were ‘balloon’ mortgages, whereby payments were fixed for two years and then became variable and much higher. Inevitably, this led to defaults and, as the bad loans added up, mortgage lenders found themselves, in turn, unable to meet their repayments. The inter-nationalization of finance meant that the first casualty was a British company, Northern Rock. Meanwhile, a wave of foreclosures and repossessions began to sweep America, leaving many neighbourhoods blighted by empty homes and prompting the first national decline in house prices since the Depression of the 1930s (see also Box 6.1). Figure 6.3 shows the distribution of sub-prime lending in the Cleveland metropolitan area suburban growth, creating a ‘spatial fix’ to the
over-accumulation crisis. Whereas housing starts had fallen to just over 90 000 in 1933, the number of new homes started in 1937 was 332 000, and in 1941 it was 619 000.
After 1945 there began a second spurt of growth in homewnership. There was a backlog of unfulfilled demand for housing from the Depression and war years, combined with the post-war baby boom. During the war there had been a moratorium on new construction, so that by 1945 there was an accumulated backlog of between 3 and 4 million dwellings. In 1944 the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the ‘GI Bill’) created the Veterans Administration, one of the major goals of which was to facilitate home ownership for returning veterans. It did so through a programme of mortgage insurance along the lines of the FHA, whose own lend-ing powers were massively increased under the terms of the 1949 Housing Act. The result was a dramatic spurt in suburban growth. David Harvey (1985) has argued persuasively that it was part of an overall strategy to create and maintain a long-term cycle of growth, an extended ‘spatial fix’ underwritten by massive outlays for defence and freeway construction and subsidies for the suburban real estate sector. The combined effect was to stimulate jobs not only in defence industries and construction but also in automotive industries and consumer durables. Historian Lizabeth Cohen (2003) has traced the development of a ‘consumers’ republic’
in the United States in this era: a society based on mass consumption of automobiles, houses and manufactured household goods, all celebrated by the new medium of television.
More recently, the boom in the ‘new economy’ of the 1980s and 1990s, driven by the growth of indus-tries based on digital technologies, biotechnology and advanced business services, fuelled a housing boom, especially at the top end of the market. This was at a time when mortgage interest rates hit their lowest levels in more than four decades. Then, with the collapse of the dot-com speculative bubble in 2000–2001, property markets received a further boost as the built environ-ment became a refuge for capital. The collapse of the heady dot-com boom made real estate an attractive investment for affluent households: people traded up as fast as they could, aided by a credit industry that became increasingly competitive and increasingly lenient,
between 2005 and 2008, a map that shows a striking correspondence with the distribution of African-Americans in the same city (Figure 6.4).
In Britain, a broadly parallel set of events has resulted in a variety of policy instruments that have been used to encourage homeownership, including:
➤grants to building societies in order to keep interest rates below market rates and to encourage the purchase of pre-1919 dwellings that were formerly rented;
➤the abolition of taxation on the imputed income from property while preserving the taxpayer’s right to deduct mortgage interest repayments from gross taxable income (now abandoned);
➤the exemption of homes from capital gains taxes;
➤the provision of mortgages by local authorities;
➤the sale of local authority dwellings to ‘sitting tenants’
or newly married couples at a substantial discount from the market price;
➤the introduction of the ‘option mortgage’ scheme to provide cheap loans for first-time housebuyers from lower-income groups;
➤the utilization of public powers of compulsory purchase to acquire development land on which owner-occupier houses could be built;
➤the underwriting of the ‘voluntary sector’ of house-building for home ownership through housing associations; and
➤the discounted sale of the stock of public housing.
Figure 6.3 The distribution of foreclosures (repossessions) in the Cleveland metropolitan area between 2005 and 2008.
Source: Western Reserve University, Coulton, C et al. (2008), p. 13.
Figure 6.4 The distribution of foreclosures (repossessions) and the African-American population in the Cleveland metropolitan area between 2005 and 2008.
Source: Western Reserve University, Coulton, C et al. (2008), p. 14.
A terrace of older working-class housing in the United Kingdom: the legacy of the industrial city.
Key trends in urban social geography – the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis (the ‘credit crunch’)
The enduring power of housing and home ownership to affect Western economies was vividly illustrated in 2007 through what became known as the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis – also commonly known as the ‘credit crunch’. The root of the problem was the widespread award of mortgages for housing in the United States in the early part of the twenty-first century to individuals in low-income groups with risky credit histories (the so-called sub-prime market – also pejoratively referred to as the NINJAs – those with no income, no jobs and no assets). In fact, most of those awarded mortgages did have jobs but little diligence was employed by the lenders in checking the reliability of these incomes since they typically relied on self-certification of crucial employment details. Further-more, it would seem that unscrupulous business practices were employed to entice these groups into home owner-ship. Initial low-interest ‘teaser’ deals were offered in the first few years of the loans but many borrowers did not realise that interest payments could rise considerably once the loans shifted to a variable interest rate. Most US home loans in the more secure
‘prime’ market are at fixed rates and so many borrowers – especially the frail/elderly or less educated – were, unsurprisingly, unaware of hidden details in the small print that might not have been fully explained by the lenders. In addition, in a period of (then) rising house prices there were tremendous pressures on those who were not home owners to grasp some of the rising equity in property.
A heady cocktail of circumstances soon led to economic disaster: increasing economic uncertainty and unemploy-ment for low-income groups; rising interest rates and over-supply of hous-ing, all precipitating falling house prices. Between 2005 and 2008 there were massive levels of defaults of loan repayments and widespread repossession of housing, usually at values far less than the initial loans.
The consequences were experienced at two levels. First, at the macro-economic level the worldwide banking industry was thrown into crisis. This arose because these sub-prime mort-gages were bundled into packages known as CDOs (collateralized debt offerings) or SIVs (structured invest-ment vehicles) and resold on to other banks and financial institutions. It was hoped that this financial re-engineering could spread the risks associated with these loans and lenders could escape the 10 to 1 regulatory limits on their lending–capital ratios. However, it appears that few in the financial ser-vices industries fully understood what they were buying and the various risk assessment agencies were seriously at fault in underestimating the risks associated with these loans. The upshot was massive losses in many banks around the world leading to risk aversion and a lack of liquidity for credit – the so-called ‘credit crunch’.
Second, at the micro-level the credit crunch has had severe impacts on households and many of these have been concentrated in particular geo-graphical areas. As a proportion of all loans offered, sub-prime loans were
above 40 per cent of the total in two belts of US states that formed an L shape, with one arm running down from North Dakota to Texas, and the other running across from Texas to South Carolina (New York Times, 3 November 2007). In terms of abso-lute numbers California, Illinois and Ohio were especially hit by the mort-gage crisis. Cleveland is a city that was particularly affected by mortgage defaults, repossessions, housing abandonment and neighbourhood decline. Furthermore, it appears that African-American groups were dis-proportionately affected by the loans crisis. In effect, the credit crunch amounted to a massive redistribution of wealth away from the African-American community in the United States.
Key concepts associated with the sub-prime mortgage lending crisis (see Glossary)
Culture of property, race-preference hypothesis, ‘redlining’, underclass hypothesis.
Further reading Turner, G. (2008) The Credit Crunch: Housing bubbles, globalization and the worldwide economic crisis Pluto Press, London
Links with other chapters Chapter 2: Keynesianism and the
‘long boom’ of Fordism
Chapter 6: Box 6.3 Susan Smith
Box 6.1
dated government securities. One of the major factors influencing the relatively low returns on investment in rental housing (thus impeding its supply) has been the existence of rent controls. These were introduced in many countries to curtail profiteering by landlords in the wake of housing shortages during the First World War. Once introduced, however, rent controls have tended to persist because of government fears of unpopularity with urban electorates.
The effect of such controls has been to restrict the ability of landlords to extract an adequate profit in the face of the costs of covering loan charges, maintenance and management. This situation has been worsened by taxation policies that do not allow landlords to deduct depreciation costs from taxes and by the introduction and enforcement of more rigorous building standards and housing codes. Meanwhile, the incomes of tenants in the privately rented sector have, in general, risen more slowly than the average. With inflation increas-ing landlords’ costs sharply, many have responded by selling their property, either to sitting tenants or to developers interested in site redevelopment.
The spatial effects of disinvestment
In some inner-city neighbourhoods, the deterioration of the housing stock has reached the stage where land-lords can find no buyers and so are forced to abandon their property altogether. In other areas, where there is a high level of demand for accommodation, specialist agencies have moved in to expedite disinvestment. This has been especially noticeable in London, where large numbers of purpose-built flats in inter-war suburbs such as Ealing, Chiswick and Streatham and in some central areas – Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster – have been sold by specialist ‘break-up’ companies on behalf of large landlords such as property companies and insurance companies.
Overall, nearly 4 million dwellings have been sold by landlords to owner-occupiers in Britain since the Second World War. Relatively little new property has since been built for private renting, so that what is left of the privately rented sector is old (about 70 per cent of the existing stock in Britain was built before 1950) and, because of a succession of rent controls, most of it During the 1970s, tax relief subsidies to mortgagees in
Britain grew fivefold in real terms, and by the early 2000s state subsidies to owner-occupation were 40 per cent higher than to public sector housing. Similar develop-ments have occurred in other countries, though the policy instruments have sometimes been different. In many West European countries, for example, direct sub-sidies to owner-occupation have played a major role in the expansion of home ownership, with subsidized loans being made available to lower-income households.
The decline of private renting
The corollary of the growth in home ownership has been the decline of privately rented housing. In cities everywhere in the early to mid-twentieth century, between 80 and 90 per cent of all households lived in privately rented accommodation, whereas the equival-ent figure now stands at between 25 and 35 per cequival-ent in North American cities and between 10 and 20 per cent in most European and Australian cities. Nowhere has this decline been more marked than in Britain, where just over 10 per cent of the housing stock is now rented from private landlords, compared with around 60 per cent in 1947 and 90 per cent in 1914.
In general terms, this decline reflects: (1) the response by landlords to changes in the relative rates of return provided by investments in rental accommodation; and (2) the response by households to the artificial finan-cial advantages associated with home ownership and (in Europe) public tenure. It is, therefore, unrelated to any decline in the demand for privately rented accom-modation as such: it is the product of wider economic and political changes.
The effects of rent controls
It is not difficult to understand landlords’ desire to dis-invest in rental accommodation. Before 1914, dis-investment in rented property produced income that was almost double the return of gilt-edged securities, even allow-ing for maintenance and management costs; but after the Second World War landlords in Britain could obtain only around 6 per cent on their investment, compared with the 9 per cent obtainable from
has deteriorated badly. This deterioration has itself led to a further depletion of the privately rented stock in many inner-city areas, as urban renewal schemes have demolished large tracts of housing.
This decline in the quantity and quality of privately rented accommodation has affected the social geo-graphy of the city in several ways:
➤It has hastened the decay of inner-city areas while reinforcing the shift of a large proportion of the lower-middle and more prosperous working classes to owner-occupied housing in the suburbs.
➤It has led to a re-sorting and realignment of inner-city neighbourhoods and populations as the various groups requiring cheap rented accommodation are squeezed into a smaller and smaller pool of housing.
These groups encompass a variety of ‘short-stay’
households, including young couples for whom private rental accommodation is a temporary but essential stepping stone either to owner-occupied or to public housing. In addition there are the more permanent residents who have little chance of obtain-ing a mortgage, savobtain-ing for a house or beobtain-ing allocated a house in the public sector. These include some indigenous low-income households, low-income migrants, transient individuals, single-parent families and elderly households on fixed incomes.
➤Fierce competition for the diminishing supply of cheap rental housing between these economically similar but socially and racially very different groups inevitably results in an increase in social conflict that in turn leads to territorial segregation and the development of ‘defended neighbourhoods’.
Finally, it should be noted that the shrinkage of the privately rented sector has been selective. In larger cities, the demand for centrally situated luxury flats has been sufficient to encourage investment in this type of property. Thus, in cities such as London, Paris, Brussels and Zurich, the more expensive element of the privately rented sector has been preserved intact, if not enhanced.
It must also be recognized that in some of the larger and more affluent cities of Australia and North America the privately rented sector has maintained its overall share of the housing stock through the construction of new high-income apartments for rent, at about the
same rate as low-income rental accommodation has been disappearing. Shortages in the supply of land and capital in the faster-growing cities of North America have further restored the position of rental housing.
The development of public housing
Like the other major changes in the long-term pattern of housing supply, the emergence of public housing is a product of wider economic and political factors rather than the result of secular changes in the underlying pattern of housing need or demand. Public housing is supplied in a variety of ways. In Britain, until recently the bulk of all public housing was purpose built by local authorities, but the not-for-profit voluntary sector is now playing the dominant role through the work of housing associations; in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden much public housing is supplied by way of cooperatives; while in Germany the public housing programme has been dominated by Neue Heimat, an adjunct of the trade union movement.
But, whatever the organizational framework, the qual-ity and extent of public housing supply are ultimately dependent upon the resources and disposition of central and local governments and public institutions. For this reason, it is difficult to make sense of trends in the pro-vision of public housing without recourse to specific examples. Here, attention is focused on the example of public housing in the United Kingdom.
Public housing in the United Kingdom
Although it has been much reduced in recent years by policies of privatization (see below and Box 6.2), public sector housing still accounts for a large propor-tion of the housing stock in UK cities: 20 per cent on average, rising to well over 50 per cent in Scottish cities.
The provision of low-rent public housing dates from the late nineteenth century, when it emerged as part of the reformist public health and town planning movements.
Nevertheless, public housing was slow to develop. The nineteenth-century legislation was permissive: local authorities could build housing for the poor but were under no obligation to do so, and there was no question