The Great Housing Disaster: An Interview with Danny Dorling
By Jonathan Derbyshire | Published: March 5, 2014

Everyone agrees that there is a housing crisis in this country. Most people think this is a crisis of supply and many trace the origins of the crisis back to the 1980s. For example, journalist James Meek, in an essay in the London Review of Books, argues that the Thatcher government “artificially raised market rents by choking off supply—by making it impossible for councils to replace the houses sold off under the Right to Buy scheme.” We’re paying for those policy choices today, Meek suggests.

Danny Dorling, a professor of geography at Oxford and the author of several books on social inequality, tells a rather different story of what he calls the “great housing disaster” in his book All That Is Solid. I spoke to Dorling about the book last week.

On Housing Efficiency and Space

DD: I look at the number of rooms in houses rather than buildings. I’d be very happy with building upwards in London or expanding into the Green Belt in parts of the south-east of England. Where there’s high demand, we should meet it. But I think we could house ourselves better with what we already have. We’re using housing less efficiently, which wastes resources.

JD: So under-use and under-occupation are, in your view, significant parts of the problem?

DD: Yes. After the 2011 census, which was the first to count bedrooms, the problem became stark. Our ratio of people to rooms has never been lower. Yet we’ve built many extra rooms—into attics, garages, and extensions. Families expand, build extra space, and then children eventually move out, leaving unused housing behind.

Inequality and the Deeper Problem

JD: For you, then, supply is real, but it’s actually a tributary of a deeper problem—inequality?

DD: The housing crisis is a repercussion of income inequality, which began rising in the early 1980s. Wealth inequality followed with a lag. Unless we address income inequality, we’re only patching symptoms. The bottom half of the population has too little money to afford housing, while wages stagnate and benefits fall. Meanwhile, people at the top have unprecedented wealth—so they buy additional property. You end up with accidental two-home couples.

Housing Then and Now

JD: You draw a distinction between today’s housing crisis and the one Britain faced in the 1930s. Why?

DD: Our peak inequality year was 1913. We became more equal up to the late 1970s, most of it before 1939. The U.S. had a different pattern—it equalised after WWII. The 1930s housing boom occurred while incomes converged. Today, inequality is rising. The 1930s boom might not have lasted if not for wartime regulation. People then had secure jobs, which allowed them to pay 25-year mortgages—unlike today’s economic insecurity.

The Home-Owning Precariat

JD: You write that what we’re seeing today is the formation of a home-owning “precariat.”

DD: Yes, another form of precarity. It includes people anxious over small interest rate changes. In social housing, under-30s are often treated like children in terms of entitlement. Housing insecurity is now one of the most visceral forms of precarity—driven more by anxiety and fear than actual eviction numbers.

Policy and Rent Control

JD: You place emphasis on the 1980s repeal of the Fair Rent Act. Was that as consequential as Right to Buy?

DD: Yes. It encouraged landlordism for speculative gain. The rent debate is polarised—strong rent controls on the left, fear of slums on the right. This makes reform difficult. Rising rents help affluent landlords outbid families. We need an efficient private rented sector for mobile workers and the elderly, not one dominated by families with kids. One in four families now rent privately.

New Solutions Needed

DD: My main difference with writers like Meek is that I don’t support a mass council house–building programme. That was a great solution fifty years ago, but the left often romanticises outdated models. Good policy must reflect current aspirations. The left’s past successes came from imagination, not nostalgia.

Danny Dorling’s “All That Is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster” is published by Allen Lane (£20).