Housing – or, more specifically, achieving broader equality of access to housing – is a wicked problem. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why, and also to show how the anatomy of the housing crisis shares many, if not all, of the core characteristics of such a problem. The housing stresses briefly introduced in the last chapter are generally thought to have complicated underlying causes: there are big structural reasons why housing is currently at the centre of a far-reaching social and economic crisis, and there are also numerous local paths that have brought England and other parts of the UK to this predicament. An attempt to plot those local paths is made in Chapter 4. The inherent complexity of the housing system, and the multitude of ways in which critical pathways cross and interact to produce particular housing outcomes, have given the crisis its intractable quality. Politicians have occasionally flagged some of that complexity, including former Chancellor George Osborne, in his much-quoted 2014 Mansion House Speech:

But complex problems do not necessarily defy resolution. Rather, there is some hope that clever people will dedicate themselves to unravelling those problems and solve them in the end. Social problems, however, embedded deeply within the cultural and political lives of different societies, often have a level of complexity that makes them more than merely difficult to decode.