To apply Dialectical Simplicity to the problem of housing is to begin with a simple but radical question:
What is housing for?
Is it an investment vehicle?
A speculative asset?
A profit-making enterprise?
Or is it—more fundamentally—a place to live, to love, to sleep and cook and grieve and recover and grow?
Dialectical Simplicity teaches us to strip away abstraction and ideology in search of the essential. When applied to housing, it insists that homes are not commodities but social goods. It demands a return to first principles: shelter as a right, not a product.
And yet, everywhere we look, this simplicity is denied. Instead, we find a system riddled with complexity: mortgage-backed securities, rent-to-own schemes, zoning laws designed to exclude, multi-layered subsidies that ultimately benefit landlords and developers more than tenants. Behind this complexity lies a truth: the housing crisis is not a mystery—it is a choice.
From Shelter to Speculation
The post-war period in many countries saw a commitment to mass public housing, cooperative building, and state-supported homeownership. Housing was treated as infrastructure—like water, electricity, or public transport. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, state housing once provided dignified, affordable homes for working-class families. In the UK, the council house was a mainstay of the welfare state. In the US, community-led mutual housing models flourished in pockets.
But from the 1980s onward, neoliberalism changed the game. Housing policy was financialised, privatised, and deregulated:
- Council houses were sold off without being replaced.
- Rent controls were removed or weakened.
- Planning and zoning systems privileged high-end development.
- Global capital flooded into urban real estate markets.
Today, housing markets are governed less by human need than by investor confidence. Austerity starves public housing; speculative developers chase the highest margin; tenants are left with insecurity, precarity, or overcrowding.
Dialectical Simplicity invites us to flip the script.
What if Housing Were Simple?
Housing is not simple because we have made it complex. But it could be simple. The dialectical method starts not with “how do we tweak the system?” but with a challenge to its logic.
Who benefits from housing as a speculative asset?
Who suffers from housing as a marketised good?
What would housing look like if it were designed by, with, and for the people who live in it?
From this point, we can reimagine housing as part of the commons.
The Commons as Foundation
To reclaim housing through Dialectical Simplicity is to understand the home as a shared good—a commons. Not private property. Not state bureaucracy. Not a commodity on the global investment market. A home.
How do we get there?
- Decommodify housing
- Remove land and homes from the speculative market.
- Establish Community Land Trusts (CLTs), where land is held in trust and homes are owned or rented affordably by residents.
- Expand public and cooperative housing, not as a safety net, but as the norm.
- Democratise housing
- Establish tenant unions and co-governance models that give renters collective power to negotiate rent, maintenance, and long-term planning.
- Include residents in the design process through participatory planning and co-design.
- Empower migrant and marginalised communities to shape their own housing futures.
- Decentralise housing
- Support small-scale, local housing solutions—from tiny homes and papakāinga to eco-cohousing and multi-generational dwellings.
- Let neighbourhoods adapt to local needs, rather than top-down zoning rules imposed by distant authorities.
- Despeculate housing
- Impose progressive taxes on vacant homes, second homes, and land banking.
- Limit short-term rentals that reduce the supply of long-term housing (e.g. AirBnB in urban centres).
- Ban or heavily restrict foreign speculative investment in residential property.
From Crisis to Community: Real-World Experiments
This isn’t theoretical. Across the world, experiments in simplified, community-first housing already exist.
- In Vienna, 60% of residents live in social housing, with rents capped at 25–30% of income. The housing is beautiful, central, and democratically governed.
- In Dudley Street, Boston, a Community Land Trust owns over 30 acres of land and has developed affordable housing through deep community control.
- In Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, the Whare Koa papakāinga project reclaims Māori land for multigenerational living, healing the traumas of colonisation and displacement.
- In Barcelona, the housing rights movement has reclaimed foreclosed properties and organised tenant assemblies that shape city policy.
These are not utopias. They are practical expressions of dialectical simplicity: reducing abstraction, restoring control, returning to care.
A Feminist and Anti-Colonial Lens
Any housing politics rooted in Dialectical Simplicity must also centre gender, race, and colonial history. Women, especially single mothers, are overrepresented in housing precarity. Indigenous people are disproportionately homeless or in substandard housing.
In New Zealand, Māori have been systematically dispossessed of land, leading to multi-generational housing insecurity. The Waitangi Tribunal and iwi-led housing projects provide models for restorative housing justice.
Feminist urbanists remind us that housing is not just about walls and roofs—it’s about time, safety, and interdependence. Secure housing reduces violence, supports caregiving, and enables political participation.
From Shelter to Belonging
Dialectical Simplicity does not fetishise minimalism or austerity. It does not ask people to accept “less.” Rather, it demands clarity: What is housing for?
It is for:
- A child’s sleep.
- A grandmother’s cooking.
- A teenager’s privacy.
- A lover’s laugh.
- A place to exhale after work.
- A place to belong.
If the housing system cannot guarantee these things, then it must be transformed.
What Can We Do? A Dialectical Housing Agenda
Here is a sample program, not exhaustive, but clear:
- Mass build of public and cooperative housing, designed with communities.
- Rent controls and security of tenure for all renters.
- Community Land Trusts in every city and town.
- Public registers of property ownership to expose and regulate speculation.
- Participatory planning processes where local people design their future.
- Support for self-build and papakāinga housing models.
- Solidarity with housing justice movements—especially tenant unions and homeless organisers.
None of this is technically difficult. What it requires is a moral clarity about the purpose of housing. And the courage to act accordingly.
Conclusion: Housing as Freedom
Dialectical Simplicity reminds us that freedom begins at home. Without housing, there is no security, no dignity, no capacity to participate in democracy or community.
And yet, we continue to treat homes as assets, rather than places of being.
Let us return to simplicity—not the simplicity of denial, but of clarity. Housing is not a mystery. It is a system. We built it. We can build another.
Further Reading and References:
- Davis, J. (2010). The Community Land Trust Reader
- Madden, D. & Marcuse, P. (2016). In Defense of Housing
- European Commission (2021). The State of Housing in the EU
- Rauhihi, K. (2023). Papakāinga: Reclaiming Our Ways of Living, Te Ahi Kaa Journal
- Vienna City Council. (2020). The Housing Model of Vienna