Housing Challenges in Cities: Rolnik, Marcuse and Madden

Housing challenges in contemporary cities come down to a paradox: never was so much built or invested in housing and never was it so hard to access for those who need it to live. UN-Habitat estimates that more than 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing, and in the prosperous metropolises of the North prices have detached from wages to the point of expelling teachers, health workers and service workers. Three authors have explained why: Raquel Rolnik, United Nations rapporteur on housing from 2008 to 2014, in Urban Warfare; Peter Marcuse, co-editor of Searching for the Just City (2009) and Cities for People, Not for Profit; and David Madden, who with Marcuse wrote In Defense of Housing (2016). Their common diagnosis is that housing has stopped being treated as need and right and is treated as an asset.

Raquel Rolnik: the financialisation of housing as a global crisis

Rolnik describes financialisation. Since the 1980s, states replaced public construction and rent regulation with mortgage credit, the sale of public stock and deregulation, and global capital found in urban land its favourite destination; the crisis of 2008 showed the result with millions of evictions while funds bought at bargain prices. Her experience as rapporteur led her to document the same pattern in Chile, Kazakhstan, Spain or Brazil, including the removal of settlements for mega-events, and to conclude that the housing crisis is global because the logic producing it is.

Peter Marcuse: the just city beyond access and affordability

Marcuse supplies the criterion of justice. The just city, he argues, is measured not only by access and affordability but by quality, location and spatial justice: an affordable home on a periphery without services does not fulfil the right, and a policy that only builds units reproduces segregation. Marcuse also distinguishes among different rights to the city, that of those who lack the basics and that of those who have a roof but no power over their surroundings, and proposes planning oriented to social welfare, with public housing, rent control and participation, against planning that serves real estate capital.

Madden and Marcuse: the crisis is not a failure but normal functioning

Madden and Marcuse formulate the most uncomfortable thesis. Housing, they write, is at once need and asset, and those two roles clash: when the asset wins, the need goes unmet for those who cannot compete, and the housing crisis is not a system failure but its normal functioning. A market designed to maximise land rent produces, by design, high prices and expulsion, which is why solutions that only add supply or subsidise demand without changing ownership or regulation end up captured by prices. Their proposal is to decommodify: public, cooperative and limited-profit housing, and democratic control over land.

Vienna, Berlin, Singapore against London and Madrid: who owns and who regulates

Cities offer evidence in both directions. Vienna keeps more than half its population in social or limited-profit housing and sustains stable prices; Berlin voted in 2021 to expropriate large landlords; Barcelona and Amsterdam limit tourist rental and speculative purchase; Singapore houses most residents in owner-occupied public housing. Against them, the cities that trusted the market and sold their public stock, from London to Madrid, now have the worst affordability indicators. The difference, the three authors show, lies not in how much is built but in who owns, who regulates and for whom.

The lesson of Rolnik, Marcuse and Madden is that housing challenges are not solved with more of the same. As long as housing is capital's favourite asset, every improvement, every park and every metro line will turn into price and expulsion; only a policy that treats it as a right, with public stock, regulation and land control, can make contemporary cities house those who make them work. The question they leave every government is simple: whether housing is need or asset, and which of the two its laws serve.