Yet the years in which the state built the most were also those in which the market did the same. State-owned housing gained momentum postwar, when the opportunity (and necessity) for reconstruction allowed many European countries to secure enough public land for building an unprecedented quantity of public housing. Against this process of speculation, in the early twentieth century, several European states such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Netherlands initiated massive purchases of land in order to support local municipalities to build social housing. 6 This has meant a dramatic increase of inhabitants in cities, which provides an opportunity for landowners to speculate on land for housing. Since the second half of the nineteenth century in industrialized countries like England, only a relatively small fraction of the population (20%) has worked in agriculture, the rest working in manufacturing and living in cities. 5 For landlords, owning land through property titles was not just a way to extract more surplus from agricultural production, but also a way to raise capital through the use of land as a financial asset. 4 Still today, lending money against landed property is the largest source of credit and money creation. 3Ī crucial consequence of the transformation of land into private property was the possibility for the landowner not only to sell land as any other commodity, but also to use it as collateral for financial loans. This process of privatization was justified by discourses on improvement and efficiency: for landlords only a piece of land that was securely owned by one proprietor could be easily governed while increasing production. Such titles, granted by the state, enabled them to unite huge swathes of land as their own private estates. Against rights of customs, landlords invoked individual property titles. The basis of this collective system was an informal set of rights of customs, which derived from consolidated practices concerning the occupation and use of land. This was possible through a gradual process of suppression of the common field village, in which ownership of land was organized through the form of selions, or scattered pieces of arable land that farmers cultivated individually and cooperatively. 1 During this period, peasants living in rural areas of England were expropriated through a process of privatization enacted by landowners who used the state to create a legal structure that revoked the peasant’s traditional rights. The legalized theft of land began with the rise of the nation state (specifically England) between the fifteenth and eighteenth century. The privatization of land is nothing new: it is and has always been a legalized theft perpetrated by landlords with the active support of the state. To put it bluntly: there is no housing affordability without access to land. What often goes missing in this assessment is the very origin of this crisis, which coincides with the long and controversial process of the privatization of land. When addressing contemporary housing crises, it is common for architects, planners, and the public to refer to a shortage of affordable housing and social housing.
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