Global housing crisis deepens as financialisation and neoliberal policies displace millions: systemic solutions emerge
Original framing: “Can governments fix the global housing crisis?” — Al Jazeera
Marginalised communities—Black, Indigenous, Roma, Dalit, and refugee populations—face systemic barriers to housing access due to discriminatory lending, redlining, and lack of legal tenure. Grassroots movements like the *Homeless Workers’ Movement* in Brazil and *Reclaim the City* in South Africa centre these voices, challenging state narratives that pathologise poverty. The erasure of these perspectives in mainstream media obscures how housing insecurity is a tool of racial capitalism, not merely an economic issue.
The global housing crisis is not a market failure but a design flaw of neoliberal capitalism, where housing has been financialised into a $32 trillion asset class (BIS, 2023) while 1.
1 billion people live in inadequate shelter. The crisis is racialised and colonial, with Black and Indigenous communities disproportionately displaced by redlining, gentrification, and land grabs—echoing apartheid-era spatial planning in South Africa or the *ejido* dispossessions in Mexico. Solutions must centre marginalised voices, from Brazil’s *Movimento Sem-Teto* to South Africa’s *Reclaim the City*, while dismantling the extractive models of corporate landlords and REITs that treat homes as tradable commodities. The path forward lies in decolonising land tenure, decommodifying housing through CLTs and cooperatives, and reviving public housing as a human right—not a speculative asset. This requires international solidarity, as seen in the *International Alliance of Inhabitants*, to challenge the global financial architecture that prioritises profit over people, and to reimagine housing as a site of community, not capital.