Though the title image example is in Kyiv, the symmetry, imposing scale and classical design motifs marks the building as typical of the Stalinist housing development program throughout the former Soviet Union.
Strikingly at odds with Constructivist avant-garde development, like the Narkomfin building in Moscow, these nostalgic yet bombastic buildings came to signify and mostly dominate Soviet residential style during the early Cold War, culminating in the well-known “Seven Sisters” buildings in Moscow.
Some consider the change in style a popular reaction to the ascetic aesthetic of the early Soviet avant-garde.
Supposedly, on returning home from long hours of dull factory labour, workers were unimpressed by the all-too industrial-looking clean lines of their “social condensers”.
Sensing a crisis of legitimacy, Stalin’s new style diktat overturned virtuous didactic modernism in favour of a literal expression of the revolutionary promise of “palaces for the proletariat”.
The lesson illustrated here is the fundamental link between housing policy and political legitimacy.
So, the question is this; are we approaching a time when these same tensions will challenge Australia’s existing urban governance and its cosy policy settings?
Tensions
First, let’s look at “tensions”.
Alison Pennington’s Friday essay (an extract from her recent book Gen F’d?: How Young Australians Can Reclaim Their Uncertain Futures In The Conversation reviews the by-now well-known financial conditions that benefit older generations but confront young intending home owners and renters, whom she refers to as “Generation F-d”.
Pennington reminds us that despite our unique heritage, expressed and summarised in our determination to acquire a home of one’s own, and:
“…in a nation that defined itself against the rigid class hierarchies of Britain… Australia’s investor-dominated housing system has walked the nation to the cliff’s edge of our egalitarian history. ”
Her account is unapologetically blunt:
“Contrary to rudimentary supply–demand theory, individuals holding ownership of the hottest product in human life have zero interest in expanding supply to meet demand for affordable, decent homes. They sit and wait for prices to increase, and people borrow more and more to keep up… Many young people are locked out of a housing system dominated by rich older people. The housing industry is at pains to hide this…”
These policy conditions, which Pennington describes with barely concealed yet justified anger, now prevailing in proudly democratic Australia might usefully be compared with Stalin’s USSR.
Despite its totalitarian fear-driven coercive power, it seems the regime was politically sensitive enough to its citizens’ comparatively minor aesthetic concerns to direct a change in the mere style of its housing.
If the Soviet experience is an indicator of political legitimacy, any Australian government that fails to attend meaningfully to the much graver housing affordability crisis is destined for oblivion, though perhaps not to the Siberian GULAGs.
The housing system
A significant feature of Pennington’s account is her treatment of the housing system.
The production of new housing, purchase of that product, its rental, the exchange of existing housing, along with the supporting technical, financial, legal, and legislative conditions all comprise a single system that over time has changed to increase the wealth of one cohort of Australians at the expense of others, mostly the young.
The interlocking nature of interests and policy settings becomes evident when it is viewed as a single increasingly financialised production and consumption system, within which the shelter function has been commodified or sidelined in pursuit of profit, and which increasingly exploits or excludes those with less financial heft, such as the young, singles, or less well-off aged.
This interdependency explains why the system is such a Gordian knot for policy reformers.
Those with partial interests in any of its components nevertheless have a stake in perpetuating the entire system. As a result, the entire system is robustly defended by their accumulated yet diffuse efforts of many individuals and interests.
A good illustration concerns the nature of supply and demand under these conditions.
For-profit housing developers often characterise themselves as mere transparent mechanical intermediaries (for a fee) between unthinking and slow regulatory structures and a hungry market.
In this account, the clamouring market is hostage to government regulatory roadblocks; a supply failure supposedly due to slow planning approvals.
However, this analysis slyly conflates two components of “supply”; supply from the perspective of for-profit developers and supply from the perspective of home buyers.
A previous NSW Minister for Planning pointed out that approvals for land subdivision and residential flat development by his department either met or exceeded the number and rate of applications lodged.
Yet, home buyers encountered elevated prices in the competition for limited available stock.
The perceived inadequate supply now appears to be partly maintained artificially, set slightly below demand in order to maintain profits.
At the consumption end of this system, the interaction of taxation settings favouring the already wealthy, the treatment of housing as an investment class, and the market failure to deliver more affordable housing – all zealously defended – are now well known.
None of this is illegal but is due rather to the operation of normal market forces operating to generate profit and wealth. Indeed, most developers within the system generally provide a housing product that most – but not all – consumers want and value.
That is why this author suggested that further affordable housing policy reforms are unlikely to succeed if they persist in targeting components within the existing for-profit housing system. Such efforts will merely be absorbed by the system with no affordability improvement.
Instead, the only realistic alternative is to explore other pathways to secure rental tenure and affordable home ownership, such as amplification of the small but diverse and well-stablished not-for-profit (NFP) sector.
The existing system should merely be left alone – neither restricted nor enhanced in any way.
So, if housing affordability is recognised as a serious problem, warranting targeted national attention, then all these underlying conditions and interests must be recognised as a barren minefield, hostile to affordable policy cropping.
Effective solutions must entail the ploughing of other less dangerous more fertile fields.
Failure to do so now really does risk political oblivion, though not in the GULAGs.