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Housing and public opinion the world over
Question: what have China, Italy, Portugal, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain got in common? Actually, let’s add, the Netherlands, Canada and Britain and plenty more besides. Answer: an increasingly visible housing crisis which is holding them back with significant political as well as economic and social implications.
The Housing Theory of Everywhere
In 2021, economists Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood wrote an article titled the “Housing Theory of Everything” which made a direct link between housing and, well, pretty much everything:
“Where you live affects nearly everything about your life — where you work, how you spend time off, who your friends and neighbours are, how many kids you can have and when, and even how often you get sick. Most people’s most valuable asset is, by far, their own home. And housing is so important for the overall economy because it determines the location and supply of the most important ‘resource’ of all: people.”
A similar theme has been evident in the writing of Professors Danny Dorling and Bobby Duffy, and Hashi Mohamed. And, in politics, former British Prime Minister David Cameron apparently said, “all roads lead to housing”.
But Britain is not alone. In China, the property market overheated and major developers like Evergrande collapsed. This sparked a mass ‘mortgage boycott’ which, according to the BBC, “rattled authorities”. This crisis rippled out into the wider economy.
During 2023–24, spiralling costs and inadequate rights for renters prompted protests in Spain, Italy and Australia. Homelessness has increased sharply in many American cities. But this is not just a ‘first world problem’; an estimated 1.8 billion people around the world do not have adequate housing and 80% of cities worldwide do not have affordable housing options for most of their population.
Not a very British scandal
The ‘housing crisis’ has been part of national discourse in Britain since the mid-2010s. Polling by Ipsos has consistently found at least seven in ten Britons recognising the existence of a ‘crisis’ nationally (much less so locally). But during this time, we’ve sorely lacked for some sort of international benchmark. Until now.
In late 2024, Ipsos conducted a survey across 30 countries on the topic — its first ever global Housing Monitor. The Monitor’s headlines included some points of difference between countries and within them — with owner-occupiers and renters naturally having different perspectives. But it was striking just how similar public sentiment was. For example, while the Global Country Average of people who agreed that their country doesn’t pay enough attention to the issue of housing was 61%, it only dipped below half in three countries.
Very small proportions considered rising prices to be a good thing for them personally. Majorities in all but Japan agreed that ‘even if today’s young people work hard and get good jobs, they will have a hard time getting the right kind of housing’. For the most part, renters would prefer to own their own home but are pessimistic about their prospects of being able to do so.
Britain does differ in some respects — shown in the chart below — but mostly at the margins. Where there is relative difference, it comes in the form of more acute negativity and pessimism alongside more confidence that government can effect change (‘down’ on practice, ‘up’ on the theory).
Again, this is not a case of Britain versus the rest, more a signal of the extent of the challenge facing liberal democracies where dissent is more easily and readily voiced. Singapore, Thailand, India and Malaysia perform best when citizens are asked ‘In general, do you think that your country is on the right track or the wrong track when it comes to housing?’, while several European nations (and South Korea) perform worst.
These same patterns were repeated when people were asked to state their confidence in enough affordable new homes being built in the next few years. They correlate with a sense that there isn’t much that governments can do, suggesting a belief in market forces putting things right in at least some parts of the world.
Build, baby, build?
UN-Habitat estimates that the world needs to build 96,000 affordable homes every day to house 3 billion people who will need it by 2030. On that front, YIMBYs will be delighted by the Monitor’s findings although would be sensible to recognise its polling of general views and instincts, nothing more.
In all but five countries, majorities support more homes being built, and in all but one (Japan) there is a double-digit gap between the proportion agreeing that ‘We will not make housing more affordable in… unless we increase the number of new homes being built every year’ and those disagreeing.
Britons were relatively more likely than the Global Country Average to identify insufficient housebuilding as among the biggest housing challenges facing their country (by a margin of 8 percentage points) and, specifically, new ‘social’ or state-backed housing (a margin of 11 points). For the record, they were also relatively more sensitive to poor quality of housing — an 9-point gap — and to homelessness — a 11-point gap although still five points behind this issue’s salience in the U.S.
A new front
The housing crisis is global as well as national and local. It isn’t the same everywhere, but it is largely recognised and felt in most places by most people, most of the time.
The Ipsos Monitor has shown a new dimension of the housing crisis — a crisis in public confidence — but also, perhaps, points to a source of some potential solutions. While Britain’s housing crisis is Britain’s alone, it is not alone, and by looking elsewhere we might just find something to build on here at home.
