Abstract
Early on June 17, 2017, a fire broke out in Grenfell Tower, a West London council housing highrise. The fire spread quickly through the twenty-four-story building, ultimately killing seventy-two people. An inquiry later determined that faulty aluminum cladding, added to the building’s exterior in a recent renovation, caused the fire to spread as quickly as it did. But pinpointing the fire’s physical cause is an altogether different task than understanding the complex political and social factors that made such a disaster possible. As Andrew O’Hagan (2018) argues in his sprawling piece in the London Review of Books, in the wake of the Grenfell fire, the public’s search for answers merged with broader debates about housing and urban problems in the United Kingdom.
The themes that emerged in this debate will be familiar to those interested in housing and urban issues across Europe and North America—neighborhood change and gentrification, the increasing privatization of public programs, and the role of housing in social policy more generally. Did the complex ownership and management structure of Grenfell Tower contribute to the lapse in oversight during the renovation? Was a disaster like this inevitable given the austerity policies of recent governments? And, more symbolically, what does it say about housing priorities that it was an exterior renovation that caused the fire? A renovation which some argue benefited the wealthy neighborhood more than the building’s residents.
As an American-trained researcher particularly interested in housing policy, but commonly ignorant of the urban politics of the United Kingdom, I found John Lund’s 2016 book, Housing Politics in the United Kingdom: Power, Planning, and Protest a helpful guide as I attempted to follow along with these debates. Although Lund published his book a year before the fire, it provides useful context to understand the context in which it occurred.
Lund presents his book thematically across ten chapters. While the first and the 10th are more theoretical, in the balance of the book, Lund provides chapter-length summaries of the politics of various housing issues as they have developed in the United Kingdom. In the second chapter, Lund describes attempts by U.K. governments to regulate land, including urban greenbelts and their ultimately ill-fated attempts at Georgian land value taxation. Lund’s next chapter covers urban renewal programs in the United Kingdom. In chapters 4 through 7, Lund turns to tenure-related housing issues. In chapter 4, Lund describes the various attempts to regulate private landlords; in chapter 5, he covers issues related to homeownership; and in chapters 6 and 7, Lund explains the political transformation of council housing and housing associations, respectively. In chapter 8, Lund discusses issues of homelessness. Finally, in chapter 9, Lund discusses the devolution of housing policies from the national to local levels.
Lund’s book is rich in detail. Accordingly, a wide audience—from local government officials, to planning scholars, to those with a general interest in U.K. urban politics—will find something of interest in it. There were two themes that I found particularly interesting.
The first, which Lund spreads across several chapters, is rental-housing subsidies. As in the United States, the United Kingdom started building public housing in earnest after World War II, with new development peaking around the 1970s. But starting in the 1980s, policy shifted away from new development. During this period, the government sold some properties to nonprofit housing associations. But the Right to Buy program, which gives council housing tenants the opportunity to purchase their homes at steeply discounted prices (without provisions to replenish the stock when a council sells a unit), has had a much larger impact on the size of the housing stock. Lund provides a well-researched description of the political development of these programs—generally, conservative support and Liberal Democratic and Labor opposition—that illustrates common tensions between low-income homeownership and rental housing.
The second theme emerges in Lund’s discussion of the politics of homeownership. Politicians on both ends of the political spectrum in the United Kingdom have viewed homeownership favorably, although this support is stronger in conservative governments. Political support for homeownership has manifest in several ways. First, the government has implemented policies that seek to expand homeownership, particularly among low-income populations. The Right to Buy program had perhaps the largest impact on expanding low- and middle-income homeownership, but Lund also describes the more recent Help to Buy program which provides loan guarantees and interest-free loans to help cover down payments.
Lund argues that the connections between the culture of homeownership in the United Kingdom and those in the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world are not coincidential. While similarities do exist, I found some of the differences that Lund describes revealing or, at least, informative. For example, although the United Kingdom once allowed homeowners to deduct mortgage interest from their taxes, politicians managed to roll back and ultimately abolish their mortgage-interest deduction (MID). Contrast this with the United States where recent tax-reform notwithstanding, significantly changing the MID, particularly for higher income borrowers, has largely been a political nonstarter. Lund’s description of the MID is but one place where planners and policy makers from the United States and across the Commonwealth can draw useful comparisons between their domestic experiences and the politics of U.K. homeownership.
Although Lund presents a coherent analysis, his book has several shortcomings. First, I wish Lund had given more concentrated consideration to the politics of land use and housing development. He refers to the chronic undersupply of new housing and the resulting inflation of housing prices throughout the book. And while he discusses some possible causes—particularly in the land policy chapter and conclusions—this topic seems to be important enough to warrant a chapter of its own. Indeed, some of the most interesting recent housing scholarship focuses precisely on the politics and political economy of housing development (see, for example, Schleicher 2013).
Second, I found Lund’s writing difficult to engage. In part, this is due to his choice to structure the book thematically instead of chronologically. Jumping around from issue to issue, rather than following the development of issues through various political transitions, makes it difficult to sustain a narrative or argumentative thread.
Clearly, Lund has dual expertise—one on U.K. housing policy and a second on economic, public choice, and political science theories. While Lund’s primary contribution in this book centers on his knowledge of the historical development of U.K. housing politics, he includes references to these varied theories throughout, drawing from the work of authors like Albert Hirschman, James Buchanan, and Michel Foucault (indeed, an admirably diverse group). But these theory-based sections were both intermittent and brief—in most cases too short for Lund to draw meaningful connections between the content of the book and the particular theory. Lund’s text would be much improved if he had removed these sections—perhaps giving these themes more complete consideration in a book of their own—focusing instead on the historical development of these housing issues.
These critiques notwithstanding, I found Lund’s book a useful introduction to the political economy of housing in the United Kingdom. Because Lund presupposes his audience has a basic understanding of the politics of the United Kingdom, international readers may find it intimidating. But perseverance pays off. Too often, urban planning scholars treat housing as parochial political issue—exclusively in the realm of local politics at worst and national politics at best. However, understanding how housing issues have developed in different political contexts is a useful exercise for planners, policy makers, and academics alike.
