House and Home

Emmett has contributed the concluding chapter in Housing Beyond The Markets, a new book edited by Dr. Lorcan Sirr. The book is available for purchase here.

From the Editor: “Good housing policy is good social policy. Indeed, what is little appreciated is that good housing policy is good transport policy, good health policy, good fiscal policy, good planning policy, good gender policy, and so on. The list is almost endless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much money is spent on housing from multiple perspectives, a lot of discussion and analysis of housing – from policy to delivery – revolves not around issues of regulation, transport, gender, health and so on, but around the various internal subsectors of housing (private rental, social and private housing) and their respective markets. Issues in housing policy and outcomes are often couched in the economic narratives of price, value, costs, yields and opportunities. Indeed, due to the impact of (sometimes surprisingly ill-informed) discussion of the economics of development and the emphasis on market impacts, much analysis of housing provision sees construction as the beginning of the housing process rather than something that should be the outcome of analysis of its relationship with other, related issues. In other words, the physical manifestation of housing should be the culmination of other processes and not the start.”

Image: Noel Bowler

House: Steve Larkin architects, 2015