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| Has housing provocateur Patrik Schumacher ever lived in a studio? | Has housing provocateur Patrik Schumacher ever lived in a studio? |
| (about 1 month later) | |
| ‘Let’s discuss,” tweeted Patrik Schumacher, with a link to his new, exhaustive essay for the Adam Smith Institute called “Only Capitalism Can Solve the Housing Crisis”. Schumacher has form for controversial statements about housing. When he took over Zaha Hadid Architects in 2016, the architect gave a speech at the World Architecture festival in Berlin, in which he proposed privatising all public spaces and eliminating social housing, which turned him into a kind of bogeyman for activists who object to things like, say, multimillion-pound properties being bought by investors and remaining empty while the evidence of rising homelessness is plain for anyone walking the streets to see. | ‘Let’s discuss,” tweeted Patrik Schumacher, with a link to his new, exhaustive essay for the Adam Smith Institute called “Only Capitalism Can Solve the Housing Crisis”. Schumacher has form for controversial statements about housing. When he took over Zaha Hadid Architects in 2016, the architect gave a speech at the World Architecture festival in Berlin, in which he proposed privatising all public spaces and eliminating social housing, which turned him into a kind of bogeyman for activists who object to things like, say, multimillion-pound properties being bought by investors and remaining empty while the evidence of rising homelessness is plain for anyone walking the streets to see. |
| It seems as if he’s now embracing the role of provocateur. In the piece, Schumacher pokes at a few easy targets and pre-empts the response. He suggests that for busy young professionals, a city centre studio space, its size unregulated, is all that’s needed and then imagines a linguistically loaded backlash of complaints that young people are being “forced” to live in “rabbit hutches”. I have written before about the frustrations of feeling trapped in a private rental market where property is capital and not a home. I have no idea if Schumacher has ever lived in a studio, but it strikes me that few people who do or have done would really consider a living room, for example, to be an unnecessary luxury. The novelty of being able to microwave your dinner without getting out of bed soon wears thin. | It seems as if he’s now embracing the role of provocateur. In the piece, Schumacher pokes at a few easy targets and pre-empts the response. He suggests that for busy young professionals, a city centre studio space, its size unregulated, is all that’s needed and then imagines a linguistically loaded backlash of complaints that young people are being “forced” to live in “rabbit hutches”. I have written before about the frustrations of feeling trapped in a private rental market where property is capital and not a home. I have no idea if Schumacher has ever lived in a studio, but it strikes me that few people who do or have done would really consider a living room, for example, to be an unnecessary luxury. The novelty of being able to microwave your dinner without getting out of bed soon wears thin. |
| But what strikes me as a point more worthy of discussion is the hellish vision of an economically thriving city centre full of young professionals emerging from their pods only to work all of the time. “For many young professionals who are out and about networking 24/7, a small, clean, private hotel-room-sized central patch serves their needs perfectly well,” he writes. Elsewhere: “In a free market, workers would compete for locations. More productive workers that contribute more to the total social product will be able to out-compete less productive workers.” | But what strikes me as a point more worthy of discussion is the hellish vision of an economically thriving city centre full of young professionals emerging from their pods only to work all of the time. “For many young professionals who are out and about networking 24/7, a small, clean, private hotel-room-sized central patch serves their needs perfectly well,” he writes. Elsewhere: “In a free market, workers would compete for locations. More productive workers that contribute more to the total social product will be able to out-compete less productive workers.” |
| Perhaps it’s my “outmoded educated elites’ left-liberal consensus” talking – Schumacher is not averse to emotive language himself – but I wonder which jobs would count as economically viable. I’m sure the city-centre-bots are too busy in the boardroom to have children, so in this near future we won’t need teachers or carers, but if we need a nurse to patch us up when we slip on a spilled coffee while networking 24/7, will this “productivity” count towards being worthy of a home in the area, too? | Perhaps it’s my “outmoded educated elites’ left-liberal consensus” talking – Schumacher is not averse to emotive language himself – but I wonder which jobs would count as economically viable. I’m sure the city-centre-bots are too busy in the boardroom to have children, so in this near future we won’t need teachers or carers, but if we need a nurse to patch us up when we slip on a spilled coffee while networking 24/7, will this “productivity” count towards being worthy of a home in the area, too? |
| • Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist | • Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist |
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