Systemic issues of social housing in London: mapping interrelated challenges faced by Housing Associations

The provision of good quality social housing is crucial to address disparities in cities. However, the supply of social homes in London is threatened by numerous political, economic, environmental, and social pressures. Interacting, these pressures generate a complexity hard to navigate, leading to interventions that reinforce rather than alleviate existing issues. This paper seeks to provide a holistic picture of the interconnected challenges faced by the English social housing sector, with the aim of supporting reflection on systemic strategies to address them. We used system dynamics to develop causal loop diagrams (CLDs) displaying the interrelations between critical issues in the sector extracted from the literature. The resulting six CLDs were explored and enriched over a series of participatory activities involving four London-based housing associations and the authors of the selected publications. The CLDs display the dynamics triggered by decades of political instability and the strategies devised in response. In doing so, they make explicit the logics behind controversial approaches such as social mixing or demolition, and how these emerge from partial understandings of the system and the prioritisation of different goals (e.g., viability, housing targets, speculation). These representations support reflections around leverage points in the system of housing provision.