EDGEPROP. 13TH NOVEMBER: Is housing for all a utopia? Is it possible for us to imagine universal and unconditional housing for all, where homes are provided as a matter of a right, endowed upon us as human beings instead of treated as a commodity only for the privileged? I personally would like to think so.
With the upcoming 15th General Election (GE15) on Nov 19, political parties are talking up their manifestos, laying out proposals for economic rejuvenation, creating jobs, combating corruption, etc, etc. Of course, the topic of housing did not miss their attention. However, although some of their plans and offers are good and worth exploring, they are still stuck on “fixing” the problem rather than overhauling the entire ecosystem.
Universal and unconditional housing will never be realised if the costs and benefits of building homes are not equally distributed, which requires changing the current system. Housing and real estate need to be democratised and decommodified, and not be put in the hands of the market, with occasional government intervention to plug massive holes created by the market.
Unfortunately, none of the current manifestos from any of the parties seems to be aimed at democratising and decommodifying housing. This is a missed opportunity, as we need to take important steps to achieve this. I shall outline them here, borrowing heavily from the works of housing scholars David Madden and Peter Marcuse.
First, we need to stop housing from being treated as a commodity. The way towards this can include public ownership of land, public financing, limits on speculation, rent control and more secure tenancies.
The campaign by research organisation The Centre for rental housing rather than ownership is a step in the right direction. But we must provide the necessary protection for both renters and owners for this campaign to succeed. The creation of a housing tribunal to mediate any issues, as suggested in Pakatan Harapan’s manifesto, is very relevant indeed.
However, the offer from most parties to incentivise first-time home buyers through loan guarantees and other forms of assistance is not a good plan. Although it can be seen as a good gesture, and true enough young people – the obvious target group – would need a lot of assistance to own a home, the real beneficiaries of this offer are property developers. They can still sell their properties with exorbitant market prices, while home buyers will be stuck in debt.
A good plan is to improve and expand public housing. The problem that we are facing now in our public housing programmes has much to do with our view that this type of housing is just welfare for the poor. As a result, we get sub-par design, cheap materials and terrible management. If we break the monopoly of for-profit housing by private developers by building more public housing complexes for all, not just for the poor, we can control costs and provide a variety of high-quality public housing complexes. So instead of pushing young people into decades of debt, they can live debt-free in quality homes.
On top of that, we should explore other alternative housing modes. There are other forms of housing development and tenureship that exist in other housing systems that we can adopt, such as cooperative housing, experimental building techniques, community-owned properties and so forth. In Malaysia, we can certainly explore wakaf (charitable endowment) housing, for example. There is no limit to what we can imagine and explore, but the basic principle remains: provide an alternative to for-profit housing.
Lastly, we need to democratise housing management and policy. There was a suggestion that the government should take over the maintenance and management of low-cost housing because residents are not active on management committees. I would ask why they are not active, and work towards creating an environment where residents will have more meaningful participation. In most cases, residents are not interested because they do not have decision- making power, and their involvement in the committee is mere tokenism. They should instead be given actual decision-making authority as the true experts on and stakeholders in their own housing.
For housing policy, we need to broaden the process of policy-making, and downsize the power of so called experts and bureaucrats. As Marcuse said, “Housing is not a specialist concern, so it should not be the sole domain of specialists”. Housing policies need to be opened up to the public for scrutiny and input, or better still, they need to be co-created with the public, due to their significance in the public’s everyday life.
Many would say that universal housing is too idealistic, and that these suggestions are almost, if not outright, impossible to be implemented. And they would be right. What I would say is if you are unwilling to work towards the ideal, then you’re just in the way. If housing for all is impossible under current conditions, then we should change the current reality so that the ideal can be realised. If you’re not interested in that, then the next best thing you can do is to get out of the way of the people who are willing to do it.
Let’s make sure that the incoming government will be the willing party.