Crisis, what(‘s the purpose of) crisis?

With a Cardiff Colleague, Professor Basham, I have been editing a collection of papers for publication in the Journal of Law and Society, under the rubric: “Dysfunctional Governance: Crisis, Scandal, Tragedy, Emergency”.  The argument is that we are using these terms, which once were used to describe exceptional events (such as natural events) now to describe a normal state of affairs.  We (collectively) argue that “Once understood as sources of order occasionally punctuated by moments of dysfunction, government and governance are now more often interpreted as sources of dysfunctionality”.  The collection will be published shortly, and contains a piece by myself and my long-suffering co-author, Alex Marsh, about the uses of crisis in homelessness law (this will be published open access, ie not behind a paywall).  I had this collection in mind when writing last week about the housing crisis as distilled in a political debate in which the different parties accepted the label and were showing their policy wares in response.  In this post, I want to reflect on the idea of housing crisis, and its uses.  I will be drawing on academic work here and will put references at the end if you are interested in following them up.  One final introductory comment – I am not wanting to suggest that there is no such thing as a “housing crisis” or other label selected; whether or not that label or any label is properly used, there are major structural issues in Welsh housing.

In academic crisis studies, crises are usually sudden events in which there is a moment of decisive intervention.  One of our propositions, consistent with the theme of the special issue, is that the housing crisis is of such longue duree that we might be tempted to say that this is the system behaving int he way it is set up to operate.  This is the position taken by Marcuse and Keating, I think, when they discuss the permanent housing crisis in the US as a failure of political imagination.  Their point, which can be ascribed to housing politics across the UK, is that “… despite significant differences between liberal and conservative approaches to housing policy, those differences remain within a narrow spectrum. Both approaches share certain basic and flawed assumptions, thereby excluding major alternatives that deserve serious consideration”.  They use that critique, and the idea of permanent housing crisis, to argue for a “right to housing” (something with which we in Wales are becoming familiar, but note that Marcuse and Keating have a rather different version of it).  However, the basic argument, I think, holds good – when these exceptional labels are invoked, and agendas are set, we reach for our policy playbook.  I am thinking here about one of the responses to the Grenfell Tower fire as being greater tenant involvement and its invocation as if it was something new, and not something which had been discarded by a previous Conservative government.  One can ascribe this to “an unfailing neoliberal housing policy and wider economic model” (Heslop & Ormerod, 158).

That discussion prefaces what much of the ever-burgeoning literature on housing crisis tends to argue.  The label (alongside “emergency” and other labels) is commonly being used discursively as an agenda-setting device.  Academic interest lies not with the label but the work it is doing, and the interests it serves.  We are interested in “… how dominant narratives of housing crisis … are constructed and received, and what actions are taken in its name” (Heslop & Ormerod, 146).  There is an important literature about how policy thinktanks and others have used the crisis of affordability to argue for planning and other deregulation.  Debates are framed and, as Foye argues, alternative voices are crowded out.  Foye’s (rather brilliant) paper demonstrates how apparently differently positioned thinktanks come to the same position about the cause of the affordability housing crisis, as being due to shortage of supply. Shelter, one of the thinktanks discussed, came to this position because “demand-side explanations were eschewed by Shelter (and other organisations seeking to influence policy) because they were perceived to imply policies, such as wealth redistribution, which are judged politically unfeasible (at least in the short-term)”.  This is now a smoothed-out, simplistic political narrative: more housing is required; the problem is regulation; therefore, we need enabling and facilitative planning (de)regulation (White & Nandekar).

In Wales, there is some difference in thought.  Our focus is not so much on ownership, but social housing, perhaps because property law is not within our jurisdiction, whereas social housing and housing law can be changed.  As discussed last week, there is a wide intersection of agreement between the policy-makers of different political hues.  The housing crisis is used to support those perspectives, and may be crowding out alternative ways of doing things and alternative agendas.  There is currently a limited repertoire of policy options on the shelf.

One other thing about the housing crisis is that we need to be clear-eyed about what aspect of it we are talking about.  There are (at least) three aspects which have been the concern of housing policy: quantitative – insufficient housing to meet the needs of the population; qualitative – the housing stock is poor quality and unhealthy; or economic – available housing is unaffordable.  However, these can break off or rupture or splinter (the adjective is yours, although academics seem to prefer the latter) into different crises.  For example, this week Community Housing Cymru published a report about the use of temporary accommodation, noting that its use has gone down slightly since 2024 but that “One in every 223 children was living in temporary accommodation in November 2025, compared to one in every 354 adults”.  CHC have used their data to set out a kind of manifesto for the delivery of 60,000 affordable homes over 10 years, and say that “recent improvements represent incremental progress rather than a fundamental shift in system capacity” – “This is a call to action: we need a bold, deliverable plan to end Wales’ housing emergency”.

This brings me to probably the most troubling aspect of the uses of housing crisis over the last 30 or so years – its use, or the leverage it gives, to those people who want to reserve the limited housing stock for locals, and exclude foreigners.  This is a return to the 1960s and 1970s system of public and private housing allocation.  I saw a post on Bluesky this week of Reform’s housing policy (it’s the only one I have seen) which, in essence, said (in Royston Vasey fashion) in a photograph that they would ensure that public housing would be for locals.  Without wholesale changes to social housing allocation and homelessness law, and unpicking long-cherished ideas of housing need,  I am not entirely sure how that would be achieved, but that’s not really the point.  The point here is about the way the crisis in housing supply is being used as an explicit discriminatory device.

As the US commentator, Janet Roitman, has put it: “The point is to take note of the effects of the claim to crisis, to be attentive to the effects of our very accession to that judgment”.

References:

D. Cowan & A. Marsh, The housing crisis goes to law”, Journal of Law and Society, forthcoming.

C. Foye, ‘Framing the housing crisis: How think-tanks frame politics and science to advance policy agendas’ (2022) 134 Geoforum 71

J. Heslop and E. Ormerod, ‘The politics of crisis: Deconstructing dominant narratives of the housing crisis’ (2020) 52(1) Antipode 245

C. Hochstenbach, ‘Framing the housing crisis: Politicization and depoliticization of the Dutch housing debate’ (2025) 40(5) Housing Studies 1226

S. Holgersen and T. Blackwell, ‘Housing crisis or immiseration? Revisiting the housing question under urban capitalism’ (2025) Antipode 1515

J. Roitman, Anti-crisis (2014) (Durham: Duke UP)

I. White and G. Nandedker, ‘The housing crisis as an ideological artefact: analysing how political discourse defines, diagnoses and responds’ (2021) 36(2) Housing Studies 213