William Davies – Housing after crisis

Through his reading of the new genre of media production dedicated to houses and the production of domestic space, that arose with the speculative bubble in housing that affected so many countries, William Davies argues, asset price inflation for housing perversely led to a collective suspension of orthodox economic reason. Rising exchange values of property had the peculiar effect of making the houses use value into a national obsession. With the current collapse in the housing bubble, the housing market is once again represented as a market once more. To own a house is to be a victim of malign mathematical probabilities, probabilities that had mysteriously sublimated during the period of expansion.

One of the most pronounced cultural symptoms of Britain’s speculative bubble of 1992-2008 was the emergence of a new genre of media production dedicated to houses and the production of domestic space. Fuelled as it was by cheap credit and surging property values, this era of economic excess placed the home at the epicentre of the nation’s cultural and economic psyche. It followed, so it appeared, that audiences and readers had an insatiable appetite for cultural content that celebrated the home and all of its material and organic possibilities.

The BBC led the way with its epochal reality TV show, Changing Rooms, in which teams of interior designers competed to transform contestants’ homes. Ground Force did the same for domestic gardens. Other TV channels followed suit with property shows such as Grand Designs and Location, Location, Location. Newspapers developed new sections and entire supplements for the purpose of educating, informing and entertaining their readers about houses, their interiors and exteriors. One wonders whether two other big growth areas of mass cultural interest during the Tony Blair years, namely cookery and architecture, were not also somehow symptoms of this fetish. Neither was confined to the domestic sphere, but in retrospect it may well be where each was spawned. TV chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson were often filmed in their actual homes, cooking for their actual friends, making it deliberately unclear exactly where the culinary recipes ended and the domestic lifestyle recipes began.

It is not hard to understand how the house came to occupy this pivotal cultural position in Britain. Economically, it occupied every point in a reassuringly virtuous circle. Its swelling value provided a basis for consumer credit that could then be expended on objects that would decorate it, improve it, and then grow its value further. Home improvement stores such as B&Q and IKEA boomed, sitting at the nexus of investor and consumer psychology. The conflict in the spirit of capitalism, between the protestant ethic of waiting for gain and the post-68 ethic of instant gratification, is overcome via a form of pleasure that can be consumed and delayed simultaneously.

Looking back on this cultural eruption, what is both ironic and disturbing was the absence of any explicit financial consciousness. This period of vast asset price inflation, benefiting around seventy per cent of the UK population, had the perverse effect of primarily nurturing new technological and aesthetic appreciations of the house. What was for Aristotle the founding economic unit – the oikos – became represented in anything but economic terms. During Britain’s sixteen-year cultural circus of domesticity, the house could be a ‘machine for living’, a canvas for artistic expression, a sphere in which to reinvent masculinity and an anchor for emotional expression. The fact that its value might also rise twenty per cent in a single year was the condition of possibility for these famed cultural phenomena, but it was rarely amongst them. In the years of the home’s surging exchange value, its use value became our national obsession.

For confirmation of this, look at how the economic crisis unfolded. Housing was of course at the financial epicentre of the crisis, just as it lay at the psychological epicentre of the euphorically indebted consumer. It is entirely appropriate that the world’s banks were crippled by an appetite for domestic ownership that had long-since taken leave of any economic rationality on the ground. Mortgage lending to low-income Americans may have been the tangible cause, but we British reclining in front of flickering images of another bathroom being repainted were clearly in a similar mood. The sheer scale of asset price inflation led, perversely, to collective suspension of orthodox economic reason. A more expansive, wasteful economic consciousness was at work, that renounced the petty bourgeois routines of exchange and saving. When it came to houses, the bubble signalled the truth in Georges Bataille’s claim that “it is not necessity, but its contrary, “luxury” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problem”.

Something about the house successfully defied the supreme rationalising machine that was the global financial system. It is worth reminding ourselves that capitalism neared the brink of collapse, not due to class conflict or any crisis of over-production, but a primary drive for more shelter, more comforts, more privacy. IKEA’s advertising slogan “home is the most important place in the world” turned out to be correct, but few imagined the devastation that the world would suffer at the hands of this, its ‘most important place’.

The fall-out from the crisis has sent these trends into reverse. Economic reason might suggest that a recession would be the time to rediscover the pleasures of gardening, cooking and DIY, as welcome retreats from a dysfunctional world of exchange and money. Once labour markets and credit markets become too perilous to depend on, surely the technological and aesthetic comforts of the house would come to the fore, as the calculative psychology was given a rest for a moment. But the opposite is happening.

Culturally speaking, the housing market is now explicitly represented as a market once more. To own a house is to be a victim of malign mathematical probabilities, probabilities that had mysteriously sublimated during the period of expansion. News reports include graphs, images of whole streets of standardised houses, pictures of worried estate agents. Our society’s ‘financial literacy’ is rising, while our concern to install wooden ‘decking’ in our back gardens has been temporarily put on holsd. Home improvement shows, no doubt commissioned before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, suddenly appear out of touch with the zeitgeist. At the precise moment when the home’s use value might come to the fore, our cultural reaction is to panic about its exchange value.

A materialist perspective on these events would celebrate the crisis as the moment when all aesthetic veneers are stripped away to reveal the hard mechanics of the financial system that had been driving our housing obsession. Just as Marx saw industrial capitalism as accidentally creating the institutional and spatial conditions of proletarian class consciousness, the housing crisis may have had the unintended effect of arousing the middle classes to their economic sameness and vulnerability. JG Ballard’s Millennium People imagined such bourgeois consciousness tipping over into polite revolt.

But this ignores the curiosity of the house as a component part of recent capitalism. It is a capital asset that we only represent as such when it is shrinking. And it is a place of food, laughter, invention and beauty that our culture only represents as such when it is swelling with latent economic potential. We should now hope for a decade without house price inflation, to escape this unpleasant riddle. Architecture, food, family and home need their intrinsic values restored, such that their cultural status is de-coupled from surging exchange value. A recession offers the perfect opportunity to explore and represent these anew.

Special issue: read also, representing the crisis
Tags: capitalism, economic crisis, housing, William Davies