In 2011 the late Neil Smith remarked that one of the greatest successes of neoliberal capitalism has been to “dis-educate people about class”.

He insisted that critical scholarship must retain the language of the ‘working class’ “because it connects to people’s experiences under austerity, budget cuts, fiscal crisis…..these measures are all aimed at the working class.”

Using Neil Smith’s theorisations of gentrification (rent gap) and class struggle (revanchism), Dr Tom Slater presents his analysis on the escalating UK housing crisis at the Centre for Urban Research. Slater’s analysis makes two intertwined arguments: First, that widespread ignorance of the causes and consequences of the housing crisis in Britain is directly related to the revanchist stigmatisation of working class people (and the places where working class people live).

Second, that grotesquely high housing costs, assaults on housing assistance under the banner of cutting the deficit, the criminalisation of squatting, demolition of social housing via urban regeneration, stealth forms of privatisation, and the unrelenting drive towards the fantasy of a property-owning democracy are helpfully understood via rent gap theory, where the circulation of capital in urban land markets results in staggering fortunes for those expropriating socially created use values.

Dr Tom Slater is a Reader in Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His work centres on the relations between market processes and state structures in producing and reinforcing urban inequalities.

Image by Pete via Flickr