Book review: In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis

In Defense of Housing is a co-authored work by sociologist David Madden from the London School of Economics and urban planner Peter Marcuse, emeritus professor at Columbia University. The book starts with a topic that most people in the US and the UK are all too familiar with: the housing crisis. An increasing number of residents in many cities on both sides of the Atlantic are faced with rising housing costs and unaffordability, to a large part due to inflating property values against stagnant income growth. The results of this are well known: gentrification, displacement, evictions, homelessness and poverty to name only a few. However, while many recent analyses of the various dimensions and outcomes of the housing crisis are predominantly understood in market terms and hence as an interplay of supply and demand, Madden and Marcuse take a refreshingly different approach, rooted in the political economy tradition.