Affordable Housing: Policies That Work According to Marcuse and Rolnik

Affordable housing is housing whose cost, in rent or mortgage payments, does not exceed roughly 30 percent of a household's income, the threshold beyond which families cut back on food, health or education to keep a roof over their heads. That millions of urban households exceed that limit is not an accident of the market but the result of public policy decisions, and two authors have explained it with particular clarity: Peter Marcuse, planner at Columbia University and co-editor of Searching for the Just City (2009), and Raquel Rolnik, Brazilian architect, United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing from 2008 to 2014 and author of Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance (2019).

Peter Marcuse: housing policy as a mirror of inequality

Marcuse argues that housing policy reflects and reproduces each society's structure of inequality. When the goal is to facilitate the real estate business, the city produces luxury housing in the centre and relegates affordable housing to the periphery, if it produces it at all. When the goal is to guarantee a right, it produces public housing across the whole city, protects tenants and curbs speculation. His proposal of a just city requires that every plan and every project be judged by its effects on those who have least, and that planning stop being an instrument for raising land values and become a guarantee of the right to stay.

Raquel Rolnik and housing under the empire of finance

Rolnik supplies the global scale. In Urban Warfare she describes how, from the 1980s onward, governments around the world dismantled public housing, promoted ownership through mortgage credit and opened the sector to financial markets. The result was the conversion of housing into an asset: mortgage securitisation, investment funds buying whole neighbourhoods, short-term rental platforms and one bubble after another. Her UN mandate documented forced evictions in Brazil, Spain, Kazakhstan and the United States, and led to defining adequate housing as a human right that states must protect against financial logic.

Proven instruments for guaranteeing affordable housing

The instruments both authors endorse are well known and proven. A large, permanent public rental stock: Vienna houses more than 60 percent of its population in municipal or subsidised housing, and Singapore close to 80 percent in Housing and Development Board flats. Mandatory affordable quotas in every new development, such as the 30 percent Barcelona approved in 2018. Rent regulation with caps on increases and protection against eviction. Public land that is not sold but leased under ground rights. And taxation that targets empty homes and speculative purchases.

Informal settlements and security of tenure

Rolnik also insists on the housing of those who already live outside the formal market. In cities of the Global South, most affordable housing is self-built in informal settlements, and the most effective policy is not to demolish them to erect blocks their residents cannot pay for, but to regularise tenure, bring in services and upgrade what has been built with residents' participation. Security of tenure, more than formal ownership, is what protects families from eviction and allows them to invest in their homes.

Access to affordable housing is, in the end, a decision about what kind of city is wanted. Marcuse and Rolnik agree that no policy works if it merely stimulates private supply and waits for prices to fall, because the market builds for those who can pay. What is needed is a public and cooperative sector that competes with the market, regulation that protects tenants and occupants, and planning that treats housing as social infrastructure rather than a commodity. The cities that have done so, from Vienna to Singapore, are not utopias: they are policies sustained over decades.