This is another book about ‘the housing crisis’: housing in many parts of the UK has become expensive to rent and nearly impossible to buy for households on low, average and even good incomes. This has a range of consequences which are discussed later on. In this preface, I want to do three things. First, explain the book's title and focus; second, outline the basic argument; and third, say something about how the book is structured and why.

Besides taking inspiration from Ray Pahl's Whose City? (1975) and its crisp analysis of residential property classes, the title of this book – Whose Housing Crisis? – is a provocation, which alludes to a crisis broadly shared, and from which no one can ultimately escape, rather than a predicament affecting only those on society's economic fringe. There is a popular notion that bad housing and inequitable housing outcomes affect only a narrow section of society. But this is not so. The housing stresses faced in England and some other parts of the UK today evidence an unsustainable divide between property classes and an endemic reliance on housing wealth to drive the national economy. The housing crisis is pervasive; it affects everyone sooner or later, either directly in terms of personal housing circumstances or indirectly as growth built on value extraction from fixed assets stalls – and economies fail. While the economy's increased reliance on housing wealth is examined in Chapter 3, the book's titular question is most directly addressed in Chapter 5.

That chapter does not list, in any detail, the groups most or least affected by housing inequalities. There is no focus on winners or losers or on places enduring the greatest stress: market ‘hotspots’, gentrifying urban neighbourhoods or ‘left-behind places’. Rather, I argue – at a structural level – that the housing crisis is hardwired into economic processes; that reliance on an unequal distribution of wealth (between rentiers and renters, and between those who create and control debt and those who endure it) to drive economies presents deep socioeconomic risks; and that the housing crisis therefore belongs to everyone dependent on this economy for their future wellbeing.