all that is solid The Great Housing Disaster danny dorling

[...]... had to be otherwise poorer, often getting into greater debt, to keep up In the UK, for the poor, the state stumped up more and more of the growing bill In the US, trailer parks grew larger and multiplied Eventually the gap between housing costs and earnings became too great for many people in the middle of the income distribution in the US It was not surprising that the housing crisis began there It... see what is unreasonable about that; and those who receive $2 know this is only a tenth of what the richest boy in the class has, so they too can feel poor But it is the rich boy who is most isolated, who cannot see the other children as his peers; they are not, in effect, his peers, so even he does not have all he might want As the rich in the US began to take a greater and greater slice of the American... subsidy to the rich that you discover, there appears to lurk behind it an even greater sum of money that is being lent, risked or raised to try to maintain the crooked state of our housing system After all, it was the housing subprime financial crisis that triggered the trillions of pounds and dollars now spent on ‘quantitative easing’ And what is it exactly that this huge quantity of money is supposed to... engender the particular kind of capitalism that we are currently living through: Disaster Capitalism That is what occurs when people are allowed to profit out of a crisis The term was first widely used to describe how great profits were made in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina hitting the Louisiana coastline of the United States in 2005 and decimating New Orleans.26 In the United Kingdom the banks... given the current way in which economic growth is measured, the more that is spent, and the more frequently it is spent, and the quicker we throw possessions away and replace them, the better off we are all said to be Looking at the financial crisis through the prism of housing leads us to the nub of what’s gone wrong And to what will be required to make us both be, and feel, more secure again Neither... and the elderly They are the most vulnerable members of poorer households They, and impoverished childless adults, have the least choice in housing It is the most money, not the most needs, that gains you the most space In the UK one result of paying as high a rent as you could afford to, and charging as much as you could get away with, was that in the UK the housing benefit bill was allowed to balloon... property near the most expensive housing The rises in housing prices rippled out, and, although there was less of a hike lower down the hierarchy, the rise was always higher, proportionately, than the salary and wage increases received by the people further down For a time this continued regardless of the fact that less well-off people soon simply didn’t have the money to pay for their housing Everyone...1 Crisis If people hoarded food on the basis that its value was sure to go up when others began to starve and would pay anything, we would stop their hoarding But hoarding is now happening with shelter in the most unequal and affluent parts of the world Increasingly it is the financing of housing that is our biggest problem: the mortgage or rent, the bills and the inequitable taxes... imparities must eventually end There is usually nothing fundamentally wrong with the land in poorer areas, and nothing particularly special about the land in richer areas, other than that richer people live there Left unchecked, prices will rise and rise where they start off highest – until almost no one can afford to live there – and then who would be fool enough to buy or rent there? This is how a new cycle... importantly, in the wrong part of that city The buildings shown here are all that remains, in 2013, of over 130 houses that were the subjects of compulsory purchase orders in 2008 The rest were demolished, and all but this half-dozen are now nothing but air They were demolished because they came to be seen as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, located in the poor enclave of Fir Vale, in Sheffield They . x0 y0 w0 h0" alt="" Danny Dorling all that is solid The Great Housing Disaster Contents List of figures and tables Chapter 1: Crisis ‘Generation Rent’ Disaster Capitalism Recent inequality Chapter. http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/9279/together-at-home-a-new-strategy-for- housing) Figure 9. Income changes in the UK. (Source: Oxfam, The perfect storm: economic stagnation, the rising cost of living, public spending cuts and the. ‘Together at home: a new strategy for housing’, Institute for Public Policy Research, report, 21 June 2012, p. 53. http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/9279/together-at-home-a-new-strategy-for- housing)