Frihet, sikkerhet, forstaden: Brev fra Amerika

Why have countries formerly leading public policies of housing – Norway, the U.K., France, etc. – shifted towards privatizing accommodation from the late 1970s? Have these States merely let go of housing and handed it over to private interests in the name of economic freedom? Are some of the defining characteristics of housing today – a privately owned asset, a speculative investment, a mortgage collateral, an alternative store of value to currency, and a highly individualized commodity stripped of public services – deriving from ‘free-market,’ ‘liberal,’ and ‘neoliberal’ policies? Are public agents seeking their own decay in the latest episode of a centuries-old class struggle? At first glance, blaming the liberal regime for the current housing condition seems obvious. However, there are vast discrepancies between liberal narratives, liberal philosophy, and actual policies of housing. The diverse players in homebuilding — policymakers, developers, builders, bankers, insurers, and urban planners — have leveraged housing and discourse to meet their interests at the expense of others; they have done so within an ambiguous, if not contradictory, adhesion to liberal philosophy. Here, we will go through a history of growing State intervention in shaping the current housing condition. Transposing Foucault’s analysis of liberal political economy, we argue that, to face threats such as economic depressions, public policies have produced new apparatuses of security bound to new liberties. Essentially, the States mentioned above have ensured a much easier access to private homeownership and construction, especially in the form of suburban single-family housing. Yet, this freedom has, in turn, produced enormous threats of an environmental, financial, and social nature. In a word, the current condition of housing, in its dominant suburban form, is a policy through which the State manages the relationship between liberty and security for the benefit of some social groups, and in the name of liberalism.