supply and demand – Michal Rozworski

The housing problem is the housing market, but it can be solved

We have lived to see the day of a condo boom in Hamilton, Ontario. We have made housing into an object of speculation that sucks in money from here and everywhere, foreign and domestic. For those still wondering, the problem isn’t at heart “foreign”, it’s “money.”

It’s that housing, a basic human right, has been left completely to the market. Ironically, the housing market might not follow the simple ECON 101 supply and demand story; that’s what the first part below is about. The second is a stab at a utopian response that pushes the boundaries of today’s acceptable solutions.

Beyond supply and demand

I’m increasingly sympathetic to arguments that the market for housing isn’t just about supply and demand, with the former not meeting the latter. Most markets are about more than that (as so many challenges to the reductive economic orthodoxy have claimed), but housing seems to be especially prone to a richer analysis.

This is because housing both plays many roles in our social and economic life, and because of its recent history. Housing has been particularly important to the economic transformations of the second half of the 20th century.

What’s the risk? Climate activism aiming at supply and demand

One way to think about climate activism is to see if it focuses on the supply of or demand for fossil fuels – pipelines or cars, hydrocarbons or carbon emissions. This distinction is not a new one, is doubtless very simplistic and has often been used to chastise activists. Here, I hope it will draw out some potentially useful thoughts that centre on the aims of activism and the idea of risk.

In an article published yesterday in The Nation, Chris Hayes makes an interesting analogy between the struggle for climate justice and abolitionism: despite numerous differences, both assume the destruction of potential future income streams – abolition by freeing slaves, climate justice by leaving fossil fuels in the ground. The weak link that climate activism can exploit is the capital-intensiveness of fossil fuel extraction. This is a re-framing of the supply side of the story.