Harvey describes neoliberalism as a theory of economic practices that proposes that human well- being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade (Harvey 2005). Similarly, according to Martinez and Garcia (2001), neo-liberalism is a set of politico- economic policies widespread from the 1970s that emphasised global market liberalism and free trade policies. It was a revival of classical liberalism advanced by such people as Adam Smith, which emphasised removal of controls to trade and manufacturing, abolition of government intervention in economic matters, individualism, free enterprise and open competition. Some of the key tenets of neoliberalism are therefore free markets, reduction in public expenditure, deregulation, privatisation of state assets and promotion of individualism, rather than collectivism or communism. In foreign policy it is translated into the opening up of new foreign markets. Neo-liberalism measures success through economic gain and favours economic efficiency over mitigating labour policies. It opposes socialism, protectionism and environmentalism (Martinez & Garcia, 2001).
According to Duménil and Lévy (2005), at the heart of today‘s housing crisis is the prioritisation of housing as real estate rather than as homes, and the prioritisation of housing‘s exchange value over its use value. With an estimated 60% of Britain‘s wealth in property, housing forms a large proportion of the country‘s wealth, and property speculation plays an important part in wealth redistribution. Deregulation, designed to set loose the forces of finance capital, has made mortgages available to a much wider range of people, but those who have benefited from the dramatic price rises that followed this increase of funds have been those who already owned property; the more they owned, the more they benefited. Their gains have been made at the expense of those excluded from the possibilities of the bonanza by their inability to buy a home in the first place, those whose lives are in harness to the need to repay ever more disproportionate mortgages and the increasing numbers who have lost everything in the battle to pay back their mortgage debt (Duménil and Lévy, 2005). According to Arku (2004), prior to the 1980s, the Ghanaian government strongly intervened in the housing sector; its intention was to provide citizens with public housing. As a result, there was investment in state-owned housing corporations. The state also intervened in the land market, with the objective of ensuring equitable and efficient allocation of land resources. However, the liberalisation of Ghana‘s economy in the early 1980s has changed the government‘s approach to the issue of housing. It has also changed the way housing is conceptualised. Among other things, the government aims to encourage the active participation of the formal private sector (both local and foreign) in the housing sector both in the delivery of completed units and production of building materials. The introduction of these reforms has led to the emergence of huge foreign private building firms in the country that are actively involved in the construction of houses. Although the
activities of these companies have increased the housing stock in the country, its larger adverse implications cannot be ruled out (Arku, 2004).
According to Kadi (2011), later than most other countries, respective Dutch governments changed their approach towards housing at the beginning of the 1990s in an attempt to give market principles greater purchase power. This change marked a clear break with a long-lasting tradition in Dutch housing regulation (van Kempen & Priemus, 2002). As part of the Dutch welfare state, in the post- World War II period numerous policies allowing for financial and regulatory intervention had been put in place that assigned governments a central role in these markets (Schutjens et al., 2002). The Dutch housing market at the beginning of the 1990s, with a large social housing sector and a substantial share of dwellings under rent regulation, reflected this redistributive policy orientation of the preceding decades. Government involvement in the market at that time was so far-reaching that some referred to it as a pseudo-market (van der Veer & Schuiling, 2005). At first sight the reorganisation of regulation over the past 20 years looks like a simple privatisation process where the state steps back and gives market forces more room in housing.
South Africa, like Ghana and the Netherlands, has a broadly neo-liberal political economy that impacts on housing policy in a specific way. This also affects the policy and attitudes towards self- help housing in the country. According to Kadi (2011), housing policies are embedded in broader regulatory structures. Therefore, changes in housing policies cannot be separated from broader regulatory restructuring processes. The shift towards a post-Fordist mode of regulation in the 1970s marked such a broader restructuring process (Jessop, 2002). In contrast to the Fordist period of the 1950s and 1960s that was characterised by extensive state influence culminating in the build-up and enlargement of the welfare state, the 1970s saw a shift towards the expansion of market principles. If the Fordist mode of regulation rested on scepticism towards the market, in the post-Fordist period this was reversed into scepticism towards government intervention. Rather than market failures, now government failures were emphasised (le Grand, 1991). The new political ideology revived liberal economic principles of the late nineteenth century that considered the triad of private property rights, free markets and individual responsibility as key to societal advancement (Harvey 2005). Markets were considered superior in allocating resources most efficiently and effectively, making the introduction and expansion of market principles in formerly decommodified spheres a primary political objective (Peck 2001; Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Peck & Tickell, 2002). The dominant way of theorising sees the regulatory change in housing since the 1970s as a process in which governments generally retreated in order to let market forces reign (van Vliet, 1990; Lundqvist, 1992). Measures such as the termination of supply-side subsidy programmes and the relaxation of rent regulation systems led to the conclusion that since the 1970s a shift of responsibility for housing from the state to
the market was a reality, and housing markets are increasingly privatised and deregulated (Kadi, 2011).
Upon closer inspection, however, the changes appear to be more complex. The state did not simply retreat from housing but, rather, over the course of the past 20 years, qualitatively changed its priorities for intervention. Whereas in the post-war era intervention was primarily based on redistributive logics, from the 1990s onwards, the focus was on actively promoting competition and growth in housing markets (Kadi, 2011). Harvey (2005) describes how neo- conservative authoritarianism and moral nationalism have emerged in response to the contradictions thrown up by neo-liberalism. Growing inequalities and the breakdown of older communities and forms of organised resistance have encouraged a growing black economy and destructive anti- social behaviour. Rather than address the structural conditions that have made this happen, the state and authorities at all levels have introduced a growing network of surveillance and control designed to hold it in check and, specifically, to prevent damage to elite interests. According to Arku (2004), other consequences of neoliberalism, rather than feedback into its development have the potential to threaten its stability. This is where government begins to develop new strategies of containment that may seem to sit less easily with neo-liberalism‘s ostensible ideology of freedom.