Overview

Affordable housing makes housing unaffordable. The Myth of Affordable Housing is a critique of the abject failure of affordable housing policies to address a global crisis of need. Affordability in housing has proved an excuse for unleashing financial speculation in real estate, channelling subsidies to profit landlords, developers, capital markets, and landowners. It is a regressive strategy to maintain demand without reducing price. The Myth of Affordable Housing is an evaluation of affordability as a policy goal, and it investigates the political economy of housing from a Marxist perspective. The displacement of need by affordability has made market price the standard against which all goals are valued. It is this act of valuation that guides the book’s critique of affordability, and it is the value form of affordable housing, its production, circulation and exchange, that provides its trajectory. Just like any other commodity, so-called affordable housing creates value and surplus value in production to realise value as money in exchange. The Myth of Affordable Housing demonstrates the failure of price to effectively fulfil socially needed goals, and it maps out a revolutionary new strategy to bring decent housing for all. This book will be essential reading for postgraduate and undergraduate students, as well as researchers, working in the areas of housing policy, urban studies, and planning, surveying, construction, and real estate management.

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9781041039174

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Author Information

Quintin Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Housing and Planning at Leeds Beckett University, and leads research into housing justice, community planning, and social movements. The Myth of Affordable Housing is the fruit of extensive research and engagement in housing rights campaigns and a career working to support and advise tenant-led organisations and residents engaged in housing and planning policy. A former investigative journalist, Quintin has published extensively in peer-reviewed international journals and is the author of Property, Planning and Protest published by Routledge in 2023, Localism and Neighbourhood Planning: power to the people? published by Policy Press in 2017 and The Tenants’ Movement published by Routledge in 2014.

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