Jean-Pierre Levy and Julien Salingue have just published a book entitled An Artificial Crisis: The Housing Issue in the 21st Century with Presses de Sciences Po.
Summary
Successive governments have regularly cited a ‘housing crisis’. In response, they have proposed the construction of new social housing schemes intended to accommodate the most disadvantaged. At the same time, they have also supported the growth of a home-ownership culture, encompassing people of all ages, from the young to the elderly, and households ranging from the well-off to those on lower incomes, often living in peri-urban areas. These policies, both national and local, have not had the desired effect: poor housing conditions persist.
The authors of this book aim to deconstruct these responses to a ‘crisis’ whose validity they question. They view 21st-century housing as a housing system within which social housing, the private rental sector and home ownership, provision for the poor and the rich, and households’ residential trajectories – whether they are excluded from the market or more firmly established – must be analysed together. This approach enables us to understand the links between these different social and residential realities and to anticipate their likely future developments.
