The Housing Crisis

This chapter is centred on questions of some of the key social justice issues associated with housing, of how some people are able to afford housing, some are not, and some have no housing at all. At its core, this chapter is about class, age, and the distributional strand of justice, more so than recognition and or procedure, although they are certainly implicated in secondary ways, i.e. there is not enough housing and that this scarcity disproportionately impacts certain populations. These distributional gaps – what some now refer to as a housing crisis – revolve around the various generational differences in terms of who accessed certain resources before they became scarce and thus expensive. Finally, this chapter shows what happens when society and the state forget about bread and butter issues like housing, and the consequences of such lassitude on those who miss out on this essential resource. Along the way, we examine two areas of deep social geographical interest that are both extreme outcomes of the housing crisis: gentrification on the one hand and homelessness on the other.