Engels wrote The Housing Question as journalism, in the heat of a quarrel. It began as three series of articles for the Leipzig Volksstaat across 1872 and 1873, prompted by a Proudhonist doctor, A. Muelberger, who proposed to cure the housing shortage of the new German industrial towns by turning the tenant into an owner - converting rent into the instalments of a purchase, so that every worker might in time possess his own cottage.
The book's strength is that it refuses to treat housing misery as a housing problem. To the reformers the shortage was a scandal to be abated by philanthropy and by-laws; Engels shows it to be a product - the necessary by-product of the headlong rush of capital and population into the industrial town.
The famous pages on what he christened "Haussmann" have lost none of their edge. After the prefect who drove Napoleon III's boulevards through working-class Paris, Engels meant by the word "the practice, which has now become general, of making breaches in the working-class quarters of our big cities", and he saw exactly what such improvement accomplishes. The slums, he wrote, "are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere" - the same necessity that bred them in one place breeds them in the next. It is a description of every urban renewal scheme and every wave of gentrification since.
Just as sharp is his demolition of the home-owning cure: that a mortgaged worker is a worker who cannot move, cannot strike, and has been handed the landlord's interest in the value of his own chain. In an age of housing wealth and housing debt, the argument has aged into relevance rather than out of it.
Engels revised the articles for the separate book edition of 1887, and it is that text this volume reproduces.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
