# Demsas vs Madden and Marcuse: is the housing crisis about supply or about power?

> Jerusalem Demsas's On the Housing Crisis argues that local politics, captured by the few who oppose development, creates the shortage that drives prices up. David Madden and Peter Marcuse's In Defense of Housing argues that housing has been turned into a commodity and that the crisis is built into that system. Both are right about something: Spain needs many more homes and secure tenure for the people living in them. The radical-centre synthesis moves the decision on how much to build to a level where future residents count, and pairs that supply with permanent, non-speculative housing.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/demsas-vs-madden-marcuse-housing-supply-or-power
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-26
- Topic: Housing
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Demsas argues that decentralised land-use power lets a few local opponents block the homes everyone else needs, and wants key levers moved to a higher level of government.
- Madden and Marcuse argue that housing has been turned into a commodity and that crisis is the normal condition for poor and working-class tenants.
- Their remedy is to decommodify housing: secure tenancies, public housing and limits on speculation, whatever the tenure.
- Spain has both problems at once: too few homes in the cities people move to, and tenants with little security.
- The synthesis builds a lot, decides growth at metropolitan or regional scale, and keeps part of what is built permanently outside the speculative market.

Two short books, published eight years apart, sum up the argument that splits housing debates in Europe as much as in the United States. Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer at *The Atlantic*, collected her reporting in *On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy* (Atlantic Editions, 2024). Sociologist David Madden and urban planner Peter Marcuse wrote *In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis* (Verso, 2016), published in Spain by Capitán Swing as *En defensa de la vivienda*. Read together, they explain why Spain's housing debate goes round in circles, and they also show the way out of it.

This week our programme takes the housing problems raised by [Democracia 21](/en/articles/democracia-21-miriam-gonzalez-proposals-radical-centre) in its launch speech, and one of them is precisely the fight between tenants and landlords. These two books are that fight at its most intelligent.

## Demsas: the shortage is made locally

Demsas's case starts from a simple observation. Her publisher, Zando, presents the book as an account of how local politics has fuelled a national emergency: local governments side with the small number of people who oppose development, at great cost to everyone else. In an interview with *The Urbanist* when the book came out, she described the problem as power spread across tens of thousands of local officials, each able to say no. The people who turn up to object are the people who already live there. The people who would live in the new homes have no vote in that neighbourhood yet.

She is careful about why residents object. When people talk about property values, she told *The Urbanist*, they are using a catch-all term for what the good life looks like, and much of the opposition comes from a vague sense that change might make things worse. She doesn't dismiss that feeling. She just refuses to let it set the housing supply for a whole region. Her remedy, in her own words, is to move the levers of power from the local to the state level, and to make building more homes a core demand that voters put to the people they elect.

For a Spanish reader this sounds familiar. Our [piece on Spain's housing shortage](/en/articles/housing-in-spain-the-solution-is-to-build) followed Jorge Galindo's numbers on how few homes the country now completes. Land classification, general urban plans and building licences sit mainly with town halls and regional governments, and each layer can stop a project.

## Madden and Marcuse: the crisis is how the system works

Madden and Marcuse begin somewhere else. Verso's page for the book sets out the claim: homes are being turned into commodities, inequality in cities is getting sharper, and profit has come to matter more than social need. They argue that minor policy changes won't solve the crisis, because it has deep political and economic roots.

In an excerpt published by Verso they go further. The very idea of a housing crisis, they write, is politically loaded, because for working-class and poor communities crisis is the normal state of affairs. The system is producing the result it was designed to produce, distributing housing as a commodity that enriches a few. Gerald Koessl's review in *People, Place and Policy* explains their key concept, residential alienation: housing lived as something precarious, a place you might lose, instead of a home. Their answer, as Koessl summarises it, is to decommodify housing and focus on secure options for people whatever the form of tenure.

Madden toured Spain in 2019 and met tenants’ union activists and the PAH, the movement that grew out of mortgage evictions. He told *El Salto* that governments had actively promoted the commodification of housing and called for partial decommodification in the form of public housing. The book landed in a country that had lived through a property bubble, a crash and a wave of evictions, so it found readers here.

## Where each one is right

Demsas is right that there is a shortage, and that it is made by rules and by who gets to use them. A city that adds jobs and residents for a decade while blocking homes will see prices and rents rise, whoever owns the flats. Madden and Marcuse are right that a home is also a power relationship. A tenant on a short contract in a tight market has very little bargaining power, and supply that arrives in ten years doesn't help her this winter. They are also right that a home bought as a pension plan gives its owner a reason to want prices to keep rising, which feeds the same local vetoes Demsas describes.

Each book also has a blind spot. Madden and Marcuse are dismissive of efficiency reforms, and decommodified housing still has to be built, on land that someone has to zone and service. Demsas has less to say about the people who are already renting while the new supply arrives.

## The radical-centre synthesis

From the left we take the idea that housing is a home before it is an asset, and that a large stock of homes kept outside the speculative market gives tenants real security. From the market-liberal tradition we take the idea that scarcity is a product of rules, and that letting builders build where people want to live is how prices come down. The idea that fits neither camp is Demsas's question about scale, pushed further: decide how much a city grows at the level where future residents count, the metropolitan area or the region, and leave the local level to decide how well it grows, its streets, its design, its services.

Put together, the position is this. A region sets binding housing targets for its metropolitan area and zones and services the land to meet them. Town halls keep a real say over design and public space, with deadlines. A significant share of the new homes is built by non-profit and public developers and stays permanently affordable, so the extra supply also extends decommodified housing, which is exactly what Madden and Marcuse ask for. Tenants get stable, predictable rules in the meantime. Each tradition gets what it fears losing, and the other side's tool makes it possible. That combination is what this week's articles will test, problem by problem.

## FAQ

### What is Jerusalem Demsas's On the Housing Crisis about?

It is a short anthology of her reporting for The Atlantic, published by Atlantic Editions in 2024. It argues that local governments side with the small number of people who oppose new homes, and that this creates the shortage behind high prices and homelessness.

### What do Madden and Marcuse mean by residential alienation?

The experience of housing as precarious and out of your control, a place you may lose at any moment, instead of a home. In their account it follows from treating housing first as a commodity.

### Does building more homes lower rents?

Supply advocates such as Demsas say yes, over time, where shortage is the cause. Madden and Marcuse say supply alone leaves the distribution of housing and power untouched. The radical-centre position takes both seriously: build more, and protect the people who live there now.

## Sources

- [On the Housing Crisis](https://www.zandoprojects.com/books/on-the-housing-crisis), Zando / Atlantic Editions (2024)
- [Jerusalem Demsas on How Housing Became a Crisis](https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/09/04/jerusalem-demsas-on-how-housing-became-a-crisis/), The Urbanist (2024)
- [In Defense of Housing](https://www.versobooks.com/products/191-in-defense-of-housing), Verso (2016)
- [Whose crisis? For the oppressed, housing is always in crisis](https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2962-whose-crisis-for-the-oppressed-housing-is-always-in-crisis), Verso (David Madden and Peter Marcuse) (2016)
- [Book review: In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis](https://ppp-online.org/view-all-volumes/book-review-in-defense-of-housing-the-politics-of-crisis/), People, Place and Policy (Gerald Koessl) (2017)
- [David Madden: «La desigualdad es lo que define el modelo urbano actual»](https://www.elsaltodiario.com/vivienda/david-madden-libro-defensa-vivienda), El Salto (2019)