Introduction: Neoliberal housing policy – time for a critical re-appraisal
- 21 January 2013
- journal article
- editorial
- Published by SAGE Publications in Critical Social Policy
- Vol. 33 (1), 3-16
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018312457862
Abstract
This paper introduces the themed section of Critical Social Policy on social housing, privatization and neoliberalism. In tracing the key elements in the development of privatization and residualization since 1979, it argues that these can only be fully understood as part of a wider neoliberalizing agenda, an agenda that is driven by a particular class project. The paper also seeks to re-assert the importance of a critical approach to successive decades of social housing policies in the devolved UK, arguing that the classed basis of housing privatization policies has been largely overlooked by academics in favour of an evolutionary and ‘modernizing’ framework which isolates developments in social housing provision from other wider shifts in social welfare and in labour markets. Understanding such processes, it is claimed, is a necessary step in the development of a more socially just and sustainable form of housing provision.Keywords
This publication has 36 references indexed in Scilit:
- A Critical Approach to the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in the United States: Rethinking the Public Sector in HousingCity & Community, 2009
- What is critical urban theory?City, 2009
- ‘Underclass’ and ‘ordinary people’ discourses: Representing/re-presenting council tenants in a housing campaignCritical Discourse Studies, 2008
- Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐SpaceAntipode, 2008
- Mobilising opposition: The campaign against housing action trusts in Tower HamletsHousing Studies, 1991
- The Housing Act, 1988 and its policy context: a critical commentaryCritical Social Policy, 1989
- Towards the Decommodification of Housing?Critical Social Policy, 1982
- Socialist Housing Strategy and Council House Sales: a Reply To Ginsburg and KarnavouCritical Social Policy, 1981
- RejoindersCritical Social Policy, 1981
- The Sale of Council Houses: Does It Matter ?Critical Social Policy, 1981