representing a housing crash

Here's an irony. Back in the comforting days of manic house price inflation, the media was awash with images of houses as places of warmth, cookery, family and garden furniture, with occasional nods to the fact that unearnt wealth was rocketting on the back of them. One could scarcely turn on the television, without witnessing Carole Smiley clambering up some oak-panelled shag-piled staircase, saying "ooooh, this is looovely. It feels so... hooomely! Woonderful for the kids as well! And how much are you hooping to get for it?". Like green-eyed grannies on the Antiques Roadshow pretending not to care about the heirloom they've already listed on eBay, in the age of surging exchange value, we kid ourselves that we're all about cutesy use value.

The reverse is now happening. Just as we enter an era in which houses will again become, as Corbusier said, machines for living, all we hear about is markets. If there were any honesty left in the world, now would be the time to talk interiors, furniture and bizarre objects, all "shaped to the comforts of the last to go". But since they're no longer connected to rising capital, we've lost interest in that stuff.

Following my excursis on the representation of financial mood, here is how the picture editors are dealing with the falling housing market. It goes in four stages.

Stage 1: remind people that houses are NOT individual places of comfort, family and unique history, but are actually mass produced objects of exchange. Do this by representing them in the most standardised fashion possible. This is typically done when news on the housing market is uncertain. See below.

 

Stage 2: draw attention to the fact that, as mass-produced exchangeable objects, these are all subject to market forces which place them all in a similar predicament. Do this by including some market signalling device, ideally a 'for sale' board. This is typically done when prices are falling. See below.

Stage 3: employ the signifiying capacity of the aforementioned 'for sale' board to convey information that is more specific and more unsettling than a mere market trend. Indicate that, within the widespread trend inculcated by the market, there are instances of misery and panic. This is typically done when repossessions are rising. See below.

  

Stage 4: abandon the signifying capacity of the 'for sale' board, rendering it a mere piece of timber. This is done to signify that forces are at work that are greater than anything that can be signalled in the market, and that the market itself is now being tossed around, in the same way as individual home owners are. It is not just markets that are at work, but larger forces that estate agents don't have a vocabulary to represent (i.e. capitalism). The 'for sale' boards are now just pawns in this larger process of creative destruction. This is typically done when precedents can't be found and panic breaks out. See below.

Comments

[Ben Sanders]

I think channel 4 are still a little off message with this new 'home' programme: http://www.channel4.com/4homes/on-tv/the-home-show/index.html
So now that minute 2-bed shit heap you brought in the back end of beyond, that was the golden goose, can now be transformed into a lovely home with that oak-panelled shag-piled staircase...

It also nice to see that Kirstie Allsop, of sickening Location, Location, Location fame, that fuelled the flames of this mess, is giving something back in the form of being head of the new 'Carbon Monoxide - Be Alarmed!' campaign. Her agent must be struggling to get gigs for the poor lass or perhaps not as she explains on the video: http://www.co-bealarmed.co.uk/ And why is she not fronting the Tory response to this housing crisis??!

[David Brake]

What I find extraordinary is that there is no sense in the media that the "crash" is actually helping to tackle some of the enduring problems that have been caused by the ludicrous over-pricing of housing. I remember the BBC reporting a survey from a year or so ago pointing out that most people wanted prices to fall.

Interestingly, in The Times they have little stats boxes on economic data alongside which they indicate which way "you want the numbers to go" - from what I remember "you want" the pound to go up and house prices to rise (even if you live in rented accommodation and work for an export industry)...

[Will Davies]

To be fair, the BBC did do a story a month ago or so, about prospective first-time buyers being pleased with developments. But microeconomic stories that buck macroeconomic trends do not generally receive much attention. People get laid off during times of economic growth, but that's not news (unless it's MG Rover). Surely the point of most economic news stories is to highlight something bigger, more abstract. Lehmann's going under resulted in several thousand job losses, which were reported; but the job losses were not the real story. Equally, the housing crash is helping to drag us into recession, so it symbolises something as well as is something.

All that being said, I agree that it's absurd to treat unaffordable homes as a good thing. Policy-makers will presumably share this view in future, but not for the reasons you outline.