A housing question
The article “The Immigration Question” (July, p. 123) says: “The housing problem has been acute throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, yet at all times sufficient houses have existed.” (My emphasis.) Is there reliable statistical evidence of this?
The article continues: “A report in The Times on 22nd April 1976 said: ‘There is a surplus of about 850,000 houses in the United Kingdom, according to the Nationwide Building Society, which yesterday published its latest survey on housing trends.’ ” Is this a REAL surplus of 850,000 houses or—as the source would suggest—merely a surplus in relation to the MARKET demand?
I ask these questions from no standpoint of nitpicking querulousness. It happened that I was putting the case recently to a friend and found that while trying to illustrate the nature of the housing problem under capitalism and using the above quotes I could not “prove” them.
Alec Hart
Johannesburg
Reply:
The figures on housing come basically from census returns, supplemented between censuses by surveys and calculations such as the building societies’; these use the Registrar General’s returns plus figures from local authorities.
The surplus or shortage in housing is the difference between the number of households and the number of houses. A household is officially defined as people who eat at the same table, but includes persons living alone; it also includes families lodging in other families’ houses, in accommodation for the homeless, etc. On this basis, the two periods of shortage in this century have been at the ends of the two world wars. Between 1939 and 1945 only 162,000 houses were built, i.e. less than half the number built in 1939 up to the war. 458,000 houses were destroyed or made unfit for habitation, and about 300,000 were temporarily lost through war damage, requisitioning, etc. At the same time the number of households increased, by what is called the “natural increase”, by 804,000.
The figures drew more or less level again by 1960. The figures for 1961 (in this case from the Co-operative Building Society’s data) were 15,029,000 households and 15,526,000 houses and flats. Of course new building does not mean absolute additions to the numbers. A lot of local authority building is to replace obsolete housing stock (19th-century shoddy replaced by contemporary ditto), and in the last two or three years there have been reports that this often produces a loss in the numbers of dwellings.
Thus, to answer your question, the present surplus of 850,000 is the “social” figure, not a market- demand one, and it is clear that apart from the post-war periods there has always been a physical sufficiency of housing. In The Housing Question written in 1872 Engels said: “But one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real ‘housing shortage’, given rational utilization of them.”
The inaccessibility of surplus housing expresses itself in a shortage of houses to rent, and this is the result of legislation which began with the Rent and Mortgage Restriction Act of 1915 and culminated in the Rent Acts of the last twenty years—all designed professedly to protect workers from high rents, actually to hold down wage demands. The results of this legislation have been (1) that since the 1914-18 war private building for rent has practically ceased and (2) that following the last Acts the companies and individuals owning houses have found them no longer profitable and, as they fall empty, sell them for owner-occupation. In house sales there is a handsome buyers’ market; it is the people without the means to buy who can find nothing. This is the result of the operation of capitalism. If we changed to Socialism tomorrow, there would be housing for all.
Editors.
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