and sleep. As we turn a house into a home, it becomes an expression of our personalities, filled with memories.
The mid-20th-century solution was to build houses quickly. The spacious Wheatley homes of the inter-war years gave way to the “deserts with windows” of huge corporation housing schemes. But for many years, the government ensured that there were about 300,000 new houses built in Britain per year. Then, dissolving the bulk of financial regulation, the government created a housing bubble. There was suddenly a “housing ladder” on to which young people scrambled, taking advantage of the availability of credit to buy a flat, then a small house, and finally a larger house, using the capital appreciation from successive sales to fund the next purchase.
There can be no better testimony to the short memories of many bankers than that after the housing crisis of 1989-90, British banks poured funds into the sub-prime asset markets in the US only 15 years later – finding out the hard way that loan securitisation was just another get-rich-quick fad balanced on top of a financial bubble.
Far from being a straightforward class of productive investment, the institutional structure of the housing market, including its links to financial markets, has meant that housing has repeatedly been the cause of economic and social fragility.