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The Global Housing Crisis: A Crisis Unlike Any Other

This crisis is unlike any that has come before. It is not caused by a decline in resources or an economic downturn but rather by economic expansion coupled with growing inequality, which in many countries is encouraged through legislation and policy. The use of housing as a financial tool, known as financialisation, prioritises dwellings as an asset – rather than as a human right and the foundation for a dignified life. Governments offer low-interest rates, preferential tax treatment, and quantitative easing policies that benefit financial actors while providing little to no protections for tenants.

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Featured

 Housing Breaks People’s Brains

Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes.

 Housing Is A Global Wealth Apocalypse

It has become the hollow refrain of the modern age in cafes and bars, around dinner tables, and between office cubicles. We ask each other invasive questions that would have been unthinkable in past years — “Are you renting, or did you buy?” has become an acceptable topic to raise with new acquaintances over happy hour drinks. Housing is required, desired, despised, and utterly inescapable.

 What has caused the global housing crisis - and how can we fix it?

How are rising housing costs affecting people? Rising housing costs mean people have less money to spend on other essentials, like groceries, bills, transport and looking after their families. So it’s harder to get by. Unaffordable housing also fuels homelessness. An estimated 100 million people globally don’t have a home, according to UN-Habitat, the United Nations programme for human settlements and sustainable urban development. And a quarter live in conditions that are harmful to their health, safety and prosperity.

Articles of Interest

Solving the Global Housing Crisis

The global housing crisis across the high-income world, particularly in the Anglosphere, represents perhaps the single biggest challenge to the future of the middle class. From the United Kingdom to Australia, an entire generation is facing a future that will preclude even those with decent incomes from ever owning a house or acquiring assets.

Global Housing Crisis: A Closer Look at the US, China and UK

READ NEXT Has the International Community Failed Haiti? The housing shortage has historically been an underlying issue across the United States. Unfortunately, with inflation happening in America and with the rest of the world slowly following, this has triggered economic instability. The housing shortage is not new to the world. The supply crisis has been around for a decade, partly due to the decline in the construction industry. While demand for construction workers is highly sought out, there are few skillful workers available for the job.

Opinion: Inflation isn’t the real problem for the U.S. economy. The housing shortage is

The only effective long-term answer is of course to build and rehabilitate more housing — a lot more. America’s housing crisis is a big problem that requires an equally big solution, with various estimates putting the nationwide shortfall between 1.5 million and 5.5 million units.

Solving the global housing crisis

Prior to the pandemic, lack of affordable housing was already a major issue. A growth in luxury tower blocks in cities across the world contributed to this, with this increase being partially aimed at the rise of foreign investors. This consequently contributed to a shortage in housing for the low and middle-income people in these cities. Vancouver has been viewed in recent decades as a place abroad for the wealthy Chinese to keep their assets. This has led to an increase in how upmarket certain areas of the city are, which has subsequently decreased how affordable the city is to locals.

Tackling The Global Housing Crisis: Is The Future Modular?

Countries all over the world are facing a housing crisis, with a massive shortage of homes for expanding populations. About 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing and 100 million are homeless, according to United Nations’ statistics. While traditional construction methods struggle to provide solutions to the global housing crisis, Estonian design and engineering firm Kodasema believes that the answer, in part, could lie in modular homes.

The Global Housing Crisis

Scarce, unaffordable housing is not a local problem in a few places, but is baked into the 21st-century global city. It’s time for cities, nations, and global leaders to start acting like it.

The Global Housing Crisis: Facts, Figures, and Solutions

Countries around the world are experiencing a housing shortage that has left millions of people homeless. The main causes of this major crisis are a depleted labor market, shortages of construction materials and worsening effects of climate change. If we want to solve the housing crisis, we also need to solve these three big problems. Where do we begin?

The Permanent Crisis of Housing

The symptoms of housing crisis are everywhere in evidence today. Households are being squeezed by the cost of living. Homelessness is on the rise. Evictions and foreclosures are commonplace. Segregation and poverty, along with displacement and unaffordability, have become the hallmarks of today’s cities.

What Can Be Done About the Global Housing Crisis? Plenty

This problem has been compounded by those with the money to invest choosing property over bank accounts after years of low interest rates, leaving the rest to spend their income on rent, rather than saving to buy a home of their own.

What is affordable housing?

In Europe alone, the housing crisis sparked by the 2008 global financial meltdown is far from over. An in-depth look at the region in Habitat for Humanity’s Housing Review show this ‘silent emergency’ is getting worse and at a faster rate.

Resources

Global Housing Foundation

The Global Housing Foundation (GHF), in partnership with UN-Habitat, facilitates alliances between Public, Private, Academic, Foundational, Community and Governmental organizations designed to develop and leverage their power and effectiveness for the common cause of providing innovative solutions for workforce housing challenges.

Habitat for Humanity

Habitat for Humanity is a nonprofit housing organization working to empower people in the world’s poorest communities to overcome the chronic lack of decent housing. Our vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. We are therefore constantly looking for new solutions that would make adequate housing accessible and affordable for all.

National Low Income Housing Coalition

he National Low Income Housing Coalition is dedicated to achieving racially and socially equitable public policy that ensures people with the lowest incomes have quality homes that are accessible and affordable in communities of their choice.