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This chapter addresses housing policy in England since 2007 and changes in housing opportunities and inequalities. The credit crunch and its aftermath were experienced across the United Kingdom, and speeded the established trend to greater inequality. Many problems identified in England are relevant elsewhere, but the distinctive housing policies adopted in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not discussed here. The chapter argues that the policy direction adopted since 2010 failed in its ambition to increase housing supply and home ownership and further increased social and spatial inequalities.

Although rental housing has historically maintained a peripheral position within the community-building sphere, the current economic volatility is evidence of how imbalanced housing policy can impact overall stability, particularly among low-income people within low-income communities. Economic and other macro-environmental shifts will have lasting and poignant impacts on low-income geographies; therefore, the state of rental housing within the context of urban neighborhoods will continue to be a critical policy matter. This research explores whether the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program encourages the development of housing with the physical and operational attributes that strengthen low-income neighborhoods. Given the program's growing dominance, this study analyzes whether specific characteristics associated with neighborhood revitalization are prevalent in LIHTC properties located within qualified census tracts. Also examined are the methodologies among nonprofit developers and for-profit developers relative to these development characteristics.

The findings indicate that properties under 50 units are more likely to be located within suburban qualified census tracts. Within the urban core, the results reveal that qualified census tract LIHTC developments are more often serving extremely low and low-income families. The research outcomes also show that nonprofit developers are more likely to serve lower incomes and utilize certified property management agents for these properties. Given the unique needs of urban and suburban low-income neighborhoods and a national environment that portents a growing dependence upon the LIHTC, the findings suggest that both enhanced coordination between state, regional, and local interests and innovation in resource allocation policy are critical to erasing the neighborhood divide that marginalizes low-income people in low-income communities.

The challenges confronting the Nigerian construction industry which led to the adoption of supply chain management (SCM) practice were evaluated in this chapter. It was discovered that the Nigerian construction industry is confronted with fragmentation and poor information management. The stakeholders within the Nigerian construction industry proposed the adoption of SCM to overcome the fragmentation and other shenanigans facing the industry. This chapter revealed that construction supply chain (CSC) practices within the Nigerian construction industry focus on waste elimination by adopting the lean concept. The focus on the lean concept could be attributed to the numerous research related to lean or the enormous waste emanating from the Nigerian construction industry. Regardless of the emphasis on lean, the Nigerian CSC is still confronted with fragmentation and heavy waste generation. Thus, this chapter proposed the adoption of principles and technologies driven by the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is a paradigm shift for the management of CSC in the country. It was discovered in this chapter that Nigerian construction supply stakeholders had not embraced the technologies and principles of the 4IR. The failure to adopt the technologies driven by the 4IR is attributed to the absence of a CSC model that depicts the management of CSC in alignment with the 4IR. This chapter called for developing a SCM model for the Nigerian construction industry in tandem with the principles and technologies of the 4IR.

The precise relationships between neoliberalization, financialization, and rising risk are still being debated in the literature. This paper examines, and challenges, the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) developed by Hyman Minsky and his adherents. In this perspective, the level of financial risk builds over time as participants orient their behavior in relation to assessments of past levels of risk performance, leading them to overly optimistic valuation estimates and increasingly risky behavior with each subsequent cycle. However, there are problems with this approach, and many questions remain, including how participants modify their exposure to risk over time, how risk is scaled, and who benefits from changes in exposure to risk. This paper examines such questions and proposes an alternate perspective on financial instability and risk, in light of the history of risk management within Canada’s housing finance sector. The rise of financialization in Canada has been accompanied by shifts in the sectoral and scalar locus of risk within the housing sector, from the federal state, to lower levels of government, third-sector organizations, and finally, private households. In each case, the transfer of risk has occurred as participants in each stage sought to reduce their own risk exposure in light of realistic and even pessimistic (not optimistic) expectations deriving from past exposure, contradicting basic assumptions of Minsky’s FIH. This is the process that has driven the neoliberalization of housing finance in Canada, characterized by the socialization of lender risk while households increasingly take on the financial and social risks relating to shelter.

In 1975, private and social housing production in Chile started to become increasingly privatized, in parallel with capital switching into the secondary circuit due to severe deindustrialization of the country. Since then, housing demand has largely drawn on state housing subsidies aimed at middle- to low-income demand, but more recently, a growing financialized mortgage market has increased demand even further, enlarging the mortgage debt burden on Chilean households. Private housing producers achieve higher profits by increasing sales prices, whilst production costs are kept relatively stable by purchasing and developing the cheapest land available, both on the fringes and within the inner sectors of the main metropolitan areas, as a form of accumulation by dispossession in hitherto underexploited, non-commodified land. However, low purchase prices of land create housing unaffordability for numbers of original owner-residents who sell land to redevelopers but cannot then afford replacement accommodation given the soaring housing prices in the main metropolises. It is for this reason that some central areas become gentrified. Focusing on the case of high-rise redevelopment of inner-city areas in Santiago, Chile, this paper addresses the extent to which demand and private developers’ profits increase alongside the risks of a generalized growing level of household debt and the displacement of low-income communities from inner areas. The continuous expansion of the extremely privatized housing market of Santiago responds to the needs of capital expansion rather than to the people’s needs.

This chapter analyses the causes and effects of the financial crisis that commenced in 2008, and it examines the dramatic government rescues and reforms. The outcomes of this, the most severe collapse to befall the United States and the global economy for three-quarters of a century, are still unfolding. Banks, homeowners and industries stood to benefit from government intervention, particularly the huge infusion of taxpayer funds, but their future is uncertain. Instead of extending vital credit, banks simply kept the capital to cover other firm needs (including bonuses for executives). Industry in the prevailing slack economy was not actively seeking investment opportunities and credit expansion. The property and job markets languished behind securities market recovery. It all has been disheartening and scary – rage against those in charge fuelled gloom and cynicism. Immense private debt was a precursor, but public debt is the legacy we must resolve in the future.

The current crisis in the mortgage securitization industry highlights significant failures in our models of how markets work and our political will, organizational capability, and ideological desire to intervene in markets. This article shows that one of the main sources of failure has been the lack of a coherent understanding of how these markets came into existence, how tactics and strategies of the principal firms in these markets have evolved over time, and how we ended up with the economic collapse of the main firms. It seeks to provide some insight into these processes by compiling both historical and quantitative data on the emergence and spread of these tactics across the largest investment banks and their principal competitors from the mortgage origination industry. It ends by offering some policy proscriptions based on the analysis.