A crisis is sudden. This was built slowly, on purpose, over thirty years.
Every few months, someone at City Hall or in the Assembly stands up and declares that Calder is in the grip of a housing crisis. The phrase has become so familiar that we barely notice it. But words shape what we think can be done, and I have come to believe this one is doing real harm. A crisis is an earthquake, a flood, a sudden collapse. What has happened to housing in this city was not sudden, and it was not an accident. It was a series of decisions, taken over three decades, by people who knew what they were doing.
Calling it a crisis lets everyone off the hook. It suggests that something unforeseen has happened to us, and that the right response is emergency measures – a task force, a summit, a one-off fund. When the emergency passes, or the headlines move on, so does the attention. Meanwhile, the slow machinery that produced the problem keeps turning.
Thirty years of choices
Consider the record. In the early 1990s, the city owned around 31,000 homes. Today it owns fewer than 12,000. Most of the rest were sold at large discounts, and the money raised was not allowed to be spent on replacing them. That was a choice. Over the same period, planning rules were relaxed to allow offices to become flats without the usual requirements for space, light or affordable units. That was a choice too. The canal basin flats, sold off-plan to investors, were approved with a promise of 30 per cent affordable housing that was quietly negotiated down to 8 per cent after the developer argued the scheme would not otherwise be viable. Another choice.
None of these decisions was made in secret. They were debated, voted on, reported. Each made sense to somebody at the time, often for reasons of short-term budget or political advantage. Added together, they produced exactly what we have now: average rents that take 42 per cent of a typical take-home wage, a waiting list of 9,800 households, and young people who grew up in the valley commuting in from Port Selwyn because they cannot afford to live where they work.
“We did not run out of houses. We ran out of the will to build the kind of houses people on ordinary wages can live in.”
That line came from Eamon Grady, a retired council housing officer who spent thirty-five years in the department, when I asked him last month what had gone wrong. He was not angry, merely precise. He had watched every one of those decisions go through committee.
The other side
There is a fair objection to all this. Some will say that language does not matter, and that “crisis” at least conveys urgency; that if we describe the problem as structural and slow, we invite people to shrug and accept it. Others point out that some of the pressure really did arrive quickly – the jump in interest rates three years ago, the arrival of short-term holiday lets in the old town – and that politicians are right to treat those shocks as emergencies.
I accept that urgency matters. But I would rather we were urgent about the right things. If the problem was built, it can be unbuilt, and the tools are the same ones that built it: the land the city still owns, the planning rules it writes, the conditions it attaches to permission, the borrowing it chooses to take on for homes rather than for car parks.
So let us stop calling it a crisis. Let us call it what it is: a policy, sustained over thirty years, that has produced predictable results. And let us ask the people who now want our votes, in the Assembly and at City Hall, which parts of that policy they intend to reverse – and by when.
