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institution more money than the house is worth on the market. Owners cannot get out of ownership and move without taking a substantial loss. At the height of the boom, housing prices were so high that many could not get access to use values without assuming a debt that would ultimately prove unpayable. After the crash, the financial drain of being stuck with a certain bundle of use values has had remarkably direeffects. The reckless pursuit of exchange value destroyed, in short, the capacity for many to acquire and afterwards sustain their access to housing use values.
    Similar problems have occurred in rental markets. In New York City, where some 60 per cent of the population are renters, many large rental complexes were bought out at the height of the boom by private equity funds looking to make a killing by raising rents (even in the face of strong regulatory laws). The funds deliberately ran down the current use values to justify their plans for reinvestment, but then themselves went bankrupt in the financial crash, leaving tenants with deteriorated use values and higher rents living in foreclosed properties whose ownership obligations were often unclear (who you call to fix a non-functioning furnace in a housing complex in foreclosure is not at all obvious). Nearly 10 per cent of the rental housing stock has suffered from these sorts of problems. The ruthless pursuit of maximising exchange values has diminished access to housing use values for a large segment of the population. And to top it all, of course, the housing market crash triggered a global crisis from which it has proved very difficult to recover.
    Housing provision under capitalism has moved, we can conclude, from a situation in which the pursuit of use values dominated to one where exchange values moved to the fore. In a weird reversal, the use value of housing increasingly became, first, a means of saving and, second, an instrument of speculation for consumers as well as producers, financiers and all the others (real estate brokers, loan officers, lawyers, insurance agents etc.) who stood to gain from boom conditions in housing markets. The provision of adequate housing use values (in the conventional consumption sense) for the mass of the population has increasingly been held hostage to these ever-deepening exchange value considerations. The consequences for the provision of adequate and affordable housing for an increasing segment of the population have been disastrous.
    In the background to all this has been the shifting terrain of public opinion and public policy on the proper role of the state in the provision of adequate use values and basic needs to populations. Sincethe 1970s, a ‘neoliberal consensus’ has emerged (or been imposed) in which the state withdraws from obligations for public provision in fields as diverse as housing, health care, education, transportation and public utilities (water, energy, even infrastructures). It does so in the interests of opening up these arenas to private capital accumulation and exchange value considerations. Everything that happened in the housing field has been affected by these shifts. Why this shift to privatisation occurred is a particular question we are not at this point concerned to answer. All that I think it is important to record at this point is that shifts of this sort have occurred such that state involvement in housing provision (with its particular implication for how the use value–exchange value contradiction has been managed) has been radically transformed throughout much (though not all) of the capitalist world over the last forty years.
    Obviously, I have chosen this case of the use value and exchange value of housing because it is a perfect example of how a simple difference, between the use value and the exchange value of a commodity in the market, can evolve into an opposition and an antagonism before becoming so heightened into an absolute contradiction as to produce a crisis not only