“The housing market is based on an unfair system”

Brett Christophers, Professor of Human Geography

Brett Christophers is the management consultant who switched tracks and started criticizing capitalism in his academic research. He now researches housing market inequality at IBF.

How does our financial system affect how we shape our cities and the living environment there? And how does the economic system produce inequality? Brett Christophers, professor of human geography at IBF, investigates this in his research.

And he has his own practical experience. Between his master's and his doctoral thesis, he worked for a period as a management consultant in the London financial world, where he gained a genuine insight into how the financial world works. But helping rich clients become even richer was not really his thing.
– Instead, I started asking different kinds of questions about the financial system. So, not focusing on how to generate more profit, but on how the financial system affects households and specifically how it shapes the cities we live and work in, says Brett Christophers.He believes that capitalism claims to be a fair system – that is, based on the idea that everyone can achieve prosperity through hard work – but that it is instead a system that produces inequality. The idea is to show through capitalism's own arguments that they are not true.
– The best example of this is the housing market, where whether you succeed or not today is related to luck or that you have financial resources that others do not have – not that you have worked hard. It is fundamentally an unfair system.

Brett Christopher's focus is on cities because this is where housing inequality tends to be concentrated and amplified, and is expressed in extremes such as gentrification on the one hand and homelessness on the other.
– During the 20th century, the general trend in the Western world has been that home ownership has increased and is also something that has been strongly encouraged by all political forces from right to left. In countries like Sweden, the largest part of household wealth is in housing. But this is unevenly distributed across the population and these inequalities are only becoming more and more obvious, he says.
But is a home like any other good? Both yes and no, says Brett Christophers. It can de facto be bought and sold like other goods, but at the same time it is much more expensive than anything else you buy and the buying process also looks completely different because most people have to take out large loans, for example.
– We can live without a new mobile phone, but everyone needs a home and therefore it should not be treated like any other commodity, says Brett Christophers.

There are many similarities between the housing markets of European countries. The main similarity is that it has generally become difficult to afford a home, regardless of whether you buy or rent. What distinguishes Sweden from, for example, the USA and Brett Christopher's home country England, is Sweden's regulated rental market with rents that are negotiated according to a regulatory system and where you have to stand in line for a home. In the USA and England, rent is based on how much the tenant is willing to pay.
– Many of the countries that have a free rental market today used to have stricter systems that have since been removed, says Brett Christophers and continues:
– I believe that the state needs to be more involved. Today, the public sector owns fewer homes than before due to sell-offs and in the properties they still own, they do not have the same opportunities as before to charge lower rent than private landlords. That is a big part of the problem.

With his research, Brett Christophers does not only want to reach academia but perhaps primarily the general, curious public. He has published books that have been well-publicized outside the academic world, but writing for two different target groups at the same time is something of a challenge.
– Writing for a broader public is difficult because you have to be clear and not hide behind academic jargon, without oversimplifying. But that is the challenge I find most enjoyable.