Confronting the Global Housing Affordability Crisis: Political Economies, Cities and Housing (Explorations in Housing Studies)

This timely book problematises growing structural housing unaffordability and the lack of affordable housing across the advanced economic world.It offers both a historically and geographically sensitive critique of why we face these issues and struggle to adequately respond, and informed speculation towards addressing this crisis collectively, equitably, and longitudinally. Utilising a ‘Critical-Relational Political Economy’ approach, the unaffordability dilemma is linked to converging patterns of cumulative neoliberalising and globalising developments during intense capitalist expansion from the 1970s onwards.Housing unaffordability is not explained by regulatory and planning failures but by a growth model transformation under de-industrialisation, away from labour-inclusive capitalism to city-centric, private landed property-directed political economies.Whereas residential accumulation is characterised by inflationary tendencies, households’ capacity to pay for housing largely follow