Prized or Priced

The aim of this book is to evaluate the effectiveness of the commodity known as affordable housing. The starting point for this evaluation is a switch in policy goals from the priorities of need to concern about the price of housing. Needs-based housing policies addressed themselves primarily to use values and the provision of decent homes regardless of cost. Affordability referred explicitly to exchange values. It transformed the concept of need into an exchangeable commodity. This introductory chapter characterises affordability as an economic valuation of need, or the pricing of a prized goal. Price is made the standard against which housing priorities are measured. It is this act of valuation that guides the book&s;s critique of affordability, and it is the value form of affordable housing – its production, circulation, and exchange – that provides its trajectory.