Housing for Degrowth

Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities

Anitra Nelson, François Schneider, Anitra Nelson, François Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351365239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

'Degrowth', a type of 'postgrowth', is becoming a strong political, practical and cultural movement for downscaling and transforming societies beyond capitalist growth and non-capitalist productivism to achieve global sustainability and satisfy everyone's basic needs.

This groundbreaking collection on housing for degrowth addresses key challenges of unaffordable, unsustainable and anti-social housing today, including going beyond struggles for a 'right to the city' to a 'right to metabolism', advocating refurbishment versus demolition, and revealing controversies within the degrowth movement on urbanisation, decentralisation and open localism. International case studies show how housing for degrowth is based on sufficiency and conviviality, living a 'one planet lifestyle' with a common ecological footprint.

This book explores environmental, cultural and economic housing and planning issues from interdisciplinary perspectives such as urbanism, ecological economics, environmental justice, housing studies and policy, planning studies and policy, sustainability studies, political ecology, social change and degrowth. It will appeal to students and scholars across a wide range of disciplines.

Part I

Simple living for all

1 Housing for growth narratives

Anitra Nelson

Our collection on housing for degrowth opens with this brief chapter on everyday narratives on mainstream housing for growth. Narrative inquiry focuses on subjective points of view and cultural paradigms for experiential understanding but here we are interested in mainstream aspirational narratives, narratives as they appear in the media, street and political discourses, both neatly reflecting and generating everyday practices and, by producing negative responses, even propelling counter-systemic change.

On the one hand, housing presumably intends to satisfy basic human needs, such as shelter, security and a context for sociability. On the other hand, it is a major sector of the economy. For instance, the construction sector accounts for around 9 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and 18 million jobs within European Union (EU) countries, with an internal market estimated at €13 trillion and clear significance for EU’s Europe 2020 plans (EC 2016). Furthermore, the sheer amount of materials and energy used by the sector – indicated further below – is widely acknowledged. Indeed, the European Commission has specifically identified that: ‘The great challenge faced by economies today is to integrate environmental sustainability with economic growth and welfare and “doing more with less”’ (EC 2016, 6).

This chapter summarises key characteristics of mainstream housing and the general context within which degrowth theories and practices spelled out in later chapters develop as forms of resistance and creative construction of alternative housing futures. It suffices here to define ‘degrowth’ (one type of ‘postgrowth’) as a cultural, political and economic movement for societal transformation beyond capitalist growth and consumerism, aiming to achieve global ecological sustainability and satisfy everyone’s basic needs. The chapter specifically introduces Chapter 2, which presents the umbrella narrative incorporating principles for creating homes, household practices, housing policies and planning strategies appropriate for degrowth housing futures. Chapter 2 also integrates how and where succeeding chapters fit in to address specific aspects of a holistic housing for degrowth trajectory.

The aspirational narrative: home ownership

The capitalist production of dwellings and residents buying and renting houses and apartments in the market are integral to the growth paradigm and growth narratives that dominate national politico-economic structures and global cultures in the early twenty-first century. The aspirational narrative of owning one’s own home, private ownership, has grown over recent decades even in countries where rental and social housing had become primary norms during the twentieth century. In 2015, 69 percent of residents in the EU-28 member countries were in owner-occupied dwellings, 20 percent were in commercial tenancies and 11 percent were tenants in either free or ‘reduced-rent’ accommodation (Eurostat 2017).

The own-your-own-home narrative runs like this: save, buy your haven (your ‘castle’) and, as you pay it off, it becomes your ‘nest egg’, your asset. Parents, peers, builders, developers and financiers iterate this line; it is a dominant ideal powering the housing construction and real estate sectors and associated advertising. Likewise, governmental housing policies are structured around this narrative as it has become a self-fulfilling dynamic of preferred, indeed ‘sensible’, practice in the everyday world. Simultaneously, tenants become second-class citizens and homelessness even occurs in the wealthiest countries.

Housing for growth is newly constructed on either cleared land or as a redevelopment after demolition. Large industrial, financial and commercial players envisage more housing and larger houses built and sold as quickly as possible so they can make more money and remain competitive. As such, there is no incentive to build either more sustainably or for durability. In a complementary way, glossy housing and homemaker magazines, television programmes and Internet advertising promoting large, unsustainable, dwellings have multiplied, even as average household sizes shrink. The multi-award winning British television series, Grand Designs, presented by Kevin McCloud (BBC Channel 4 1999–) is exemplary of the narrative. The home is a status symbol and ‘bigger’, or simply more expensive, is ‘better’.

Yet finding affordable, environmentally sustainable and well-located housing either to purchase or to rent has become increasingly difficult in many cities and towns, especially in growing ‘global cities’, such as most national and state (provincial) capitals. Strong markets for housing tend to drive up prices, as apparent in certain Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2018a) countries over the last decade: the 2017 average price of Canadian dwellings rose to 153 percent on 2010 nominal prices (139 percent in real terms) and for Norway, over the same period, the rise was 147 percent in nominal prices (and 128 percent in real prices). Rising prices tend to favour homeowners, whose assets’ worth increases but makes entry to home ownership difficult. As house prices escalate, flowing on to rental costs and charges, it becomes more difficult for renters to save for a deposit to purchase a home. In certain global cities such phenomena are widespread.

Tenancy, squatting and homelessness

The aspirational narrative denigrates renting as a waste of money. Moreover, poor rental conditions and regulations structurally support and drive people to home ownership. In the United Kingdom (UK) and Spain, for example, tenancy is not well regulated regarding key aspects of security and comfort such as length of tenancy, limits on rental charges and ability to alter dwellings. In 2017, four in every five tenants in Australia did not have a fixed-term lease or had a lease fewer than 12 months; ‘thousands of tenants are being discriminated against and live in a climate of fear’ (Kollmorgen 2017).

Many highly regard German rental regulations yet, in Berlin where renting is a well-established and culturally acceptable norm, by the mid-2010s rent had been rising around 4.6 percent per annum (Brady 2017) and tenant harassment is detailed in Chapter 20. Adding to the precariousness and cost of renting a dwelling in global cities, erstwhile rental properties re-purposed for tourists (say via Airbnb) have risen in number. Governments in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona have moved to moderate the latter trend but covert rental continues, including through other platforms, and is not easily monitored (Gagnon 2018).

Late 2014, after squatting in, and being promptly evicted from, an abandoned bank premises in London, activist Clare Pauling (2014) ridiculed the legal system and police force who protected 1,500,000 vacant commercial and residential buildings while 110,000 people went homeless. That year a Guardian journalist also reviewed statistics across Europe to reveal 11,000,000 empty homes ‘enough to house all of the continent’s homeless twice over’ (Neate 2014). Charity Shelter estimated that the rising number of UK homeless totalled one-quarter million by late 2016 (Butler 2017).

In short, secondary narratives on perceptions and experiences of renting, squatting and homelessness work to support the dominant one idealising home ownership.

The underbelly of the housing for growth narrative

Clearly, top-down housing for economic growth, does not produce housing that simply and universally meets the needs of people and the planet. The underbelly of the growth narrative is, perversely, insufficiency of housing for all, serious environmental impacts from housing developments and a political dynamic binding householders to growth capitalism.

Insufficiency: unaffordability

Home ownership comes with massive costs and risks. If you purchase an average-priced dwelling, say for £250,000 in an English city or £500,000 in London, you might well say ‘I paid £250,000 (or £500,000) for it’. However, if you incurred an associated 25-year mortgage at a 5 percent interest rate for £200,000 or £450,000 respectively, think again: the cost over the life of such loans would be either more than £350,000 or close to £800,000, respectively. Adding in your deposit, as a mortgagor, your ‘£250,000’ or ‘£500,000’ dwelling will have cost you either more than £400,000 or more like £850,000. If interest rates rise, you pay out more. Meanwhile, if house prices fall, then selling the house – say to avoid defaulting because you have lost your job, need to move for employment or someone in the household suffers a serious illness, accident or death – could mean substantial loss of money or eviction and bankruptcy.

Indeed, household debt has risen during recent decades of neoliberal reforms that reduced social housing and other affordable housing policies, and increased private rental and home ownership in many countries. International Monetary Fund (IMF 2017) statistics for 2006–2016 show that housing price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios in many advanced capitalist countries of the Global North deteriorated. The average householder’s capacity to comfortably afford either to buy or to rent housing that was convenient to work and basic services fell as wages in general failed to keep abreast of housing costs for either owner-occupiers with mortgages or tenants (IMF 2017, 1, 11). Accordingly, OECD (2015a) data shows widespread indebtedness with the average household debt in member countries varying between 51 and 292 percent of net disposable incomes.

In 2015, 11.3 percent of the populations of EU-28 countries lived in households that needed to reserve 40 percent or more of their equalised disposable income for housing. Those so affected included one in four tenants. While in certain countries, such as Ireland, Finland, Malta and Cyprus, fewer than one in 20 households had such onerous accommodation costs, two out of every five in Greece spent more than 40 percent of their equalised disposable income on housing. (Eurostat 2017.) Furthermore, with millions of homeless across Europe, reports from Spain, where mortgage terms and conditions have been particularly severe, show that in 2014 an average of close to 100 households were evicted each day as a prolonged recession had one in four unemployed (White 2015).

There is a distinct irony in current costs of housing when one compares the typical family household of half a century ago with one today: then, it had five members and one breadwinner, today it has four members and two income-earners, even if one works part-time. ‘Home’ is far from a haven, in fact a burden, for many households. Housing for growth is far from fulfilling all people’s everyday needs for secure, modest and affordable shelter.

The environmental cost of dwellings

Capitalist production not only fails to fulfil human needs but also environmental efficiency. As with other commodities, the supply of housing is determined in quality and quantity by market producers, developers and builders in concert with investors and financial institutions. As these forces focus on opportunities to make money, dwellings are often made with newly extracted and manufactured materials using energy from non-renewable sources and tend to be as big in sheer size as the market, and banks providing the credit, can bear.

By the latter half of the twentieth century, larger homes – trending in the opposite direction to falling household sizes – have encouraged over-consumption. New housing incorporates storage and power points for appliances and even entire rooms for smart digital communication technologies, television screens and sound theatre systems. With housing for growth extending suburbs in newly cleared ex-agricultural lands, ostensibly affordable housing in outer suburbs of cities is generally in inconvenient locations, with poor local services and facilities, demanding higher environmental costs such as mandatory, excessive one-passenger private car use.

According to a study of building sector resource and material use and their environmental impacts, 75 percent of the total floor area of EU building stock is residential (Herczeg et al. 2014). Average newly built house sizes in specific European countries were reported in the early 2010s: France – 112m²; Denmark – 137m², Germany – 109m²; and Spain – 97m² (with Australia, the United States (US) and Canada at 214m², 201m² and 181m² respectively!) (Wilson 2013). Environmental impacts of building sector resource and material use range from cradle to grave, i.e. related to extraction or harvesting, processing and production of building materials to activities of building and later the maintenance, renovation, demolition and final reuse of such material or their treatment as waste.

The Herczeg study estimated embodied energy in building products (2011) at around 1.9 million terajoules (one trillion joules), two-thirds accounted for by steel, aluminium and concrete. Comparing embodied energy in building products with the EU-27 industry’s final energy consumption (2006), building products made up 20 percent (equivalent to Poland’s total – or half of Italy’s total – energy consumption). Moreover, the largest component in construction and demolition waste of around 850 million tonnes per annum, was concrete (Herczeg et al. 2014, 7–8, 36–7). Olivier et al. (2014, 31) have calculated that cement production was responsible for around 9.5 percent of global carbon emissions. Top-down and bottom-up observers note that residential building is ‘low hanging fruit’ for more sustainable building and home living practices, and that the mainstream housing sector is conservative (shy) with respect to using environmental designs, practices and materials (IPCC 2015).

Furthermore, clearing landscapes of vegetation for residential settlements eliminates habitat for native birds, wildlife and biodiversity, disrupting water systems, fragmenting and clearing forests, i.e. critical carbon sinks for absorbing emissions and ameliorating global warming. This is happening at a point in history when tens of thousands of species are being extinguished each year, thousands above the background (‘normal’) extinction rate. Between 1990 and 2015 an area equivalent to the size of South Africa was deforested (WWF n.d.). Bren d’Amour et al. (2017, 8941) have examined global patterns of urban expansion to estimate impacts on prime croplands; each year between 2000 and 2030, urban expansion globally has and will eradicate around one million hectares of...