In the United States, public housing is in full retreat. Since the 1990s, more than 260,000 public housing units across the United States were either sold off to private owners or demolished in order to sell off the land beneath them. The situation is even grimmer in Britain, where public housing represented a much larger piece of the residential sector. Since 1981, nearly 3 million units of council housing have been sold or transferred. In the post-socialist world, the privatization of housing since 1989 has probably constituted the largest transfer of property rights in history. The hard-won spaces of partial decommodification developed in the postwar period have been eroded. For all its far-reaching consequences, deregulation has not meant the subtraction of the state from real estate markets. It has not meant getting rid of regulations so much as rewriting them to make real estate a more liquid commodity.
David Madden & Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The politics of Crisis
