Housing Crisis or Immiseration? Revisiting the Housing Question under Urban Capitalism

Abstract

The phrase “housing crisis” proliferates in media, politics, and scholarship, and has become the go-to compound noun for depicting the urgency of the manifold social ills associated with widespread, deteriorating housing affordability. Instead of referring to a temporally and spatially bound event, however, the phrase now has become a ubiquitous signifier to encompass a protracted global urban condition. Such framings, both tacit and explicit, are problematic. First, should “crisis” elide with a state of quasi-permanence then, logically, we would require a new term to describe decisive turning points in time and space. Second, conflating “housing crisis” with long-standing structural immiseration shrouds more than it reveals about the nature of contemporary urban capitalism. Such operationalisations often underestimate both the extent to which housing systems can absorb disruption before reaching critical tipping points and the dynamic capacity of state and capital to preserve the existing nexus of asset wealth. We advocate for a more precise, historically grounded conceptualisation of housing crises—one that interrogates their structural roots and shifts the analysis from generalised “housing crisis” narratives to specific moments of housing system crisis.