Neighbourhood botch: the real-estate state and the empire of finance | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reviews/neighbourhood-botch-the-real-estate-state-and-the-empire-of-finance/10044516.article
Government policies have led to the egregious destruction of housing access for the poor, while lining the pockets of the elite
One of the most breached of rights declared by the UN at its inception is the right to be decently and securely housed, as Raquel Rolnik reminds the reader at the start of her book on the global housing crisis. Her panoramic, newly translated book from 2015, Urban Warfare, and Samuel Stein’s new short polemic, Capital City, both chart how housing ceased to mean a place in which to live as of right, and transformed instead into a financial instrument. Since the mid-1970s, successive governments across the world have helped along this transformation, regardless of the consequences for that original ‘right’. These changes have become the orthodoxy of the World Bank – it once lent 90 per cent of its housing budget to public housing schemes, but this has now shrunk to less than 10 per cent – and of that alleged champion of social democratic values, the European Union, which, in 2008, ruled that public housing could only be provided for those who couldn’t afford the market’s product. Offering decommodification to anyone who isn’t desperate is an impermissible interference with the free market.