Raising awareness of the economic factors behind rising housing costs and putting forward solutions for change.
Funding snapshot
Programme area: Tackling the housing crisis
Amount: £95,000
Length of grant: 2022-2024
Impact goal: A comprehensive government strategy to solve the housing crisis.
The challenge
In London, housing is expensive. House prices and rents have risen faster than incomes – meaning many Londoners struggle to find an affordable home. The dominant narrative of the housing crisis is that we simply need to build more homes.
But this fails to explain the rapid house price growth of recent decades – which has been caused by policies made over many years. These policies aimed to increase home ownership and make houses profitable financial assets. In reality, they’ve resulted in affordable homes becoming out of reach for more and more people.
The project
Positive Money is a group that campaigns for a fairer economy for everyone. With our funding, it carries out research and campaigns to highlight the policy and economic drivers behind the housing crisis. The team uses this work to put forward proposals for change. This includes:
- Carrying out research to show why housing is becoming unaffordable. Positive Money published ‘Banking on Property: What is driving the housing affordability crisis and how to solve it’ in 2022. Since publishing, they’ve worked to ensure it is accessed by policy makers, to try and shift the mainstream narrative on the housing crisis.
- Building connections with housing campaigner groups so that they have an increased knowledge policy and economic drivers of the housing crisis, and can use this to advocate for improved housing affordability. This has included workshops with renter campaigners and briefings.
- Engaging with national and regional policymakers including through briefings, consultations, inquiries, select committees and APPGs.
- Educating the public on the demand side drivers of the housing crisis through shareable, accessible content. This has included analysis into how the housing crisis affects different ethnic groups in London, which received wide media attention.
Read Banking On Property: What is driving the housing affordability crisis and how to solve it here.
