This article is a preview from the Summer 2018 edition of New Humanist
affordable (from Middle English “aforth”: to put forth, contribute, advance; carry out, accomplish)
Whether consciously or not, the people who produce reports on housing, and likewise the people who produce the housing itself, have subtly shifted the vocabulary used to describe it. Growing up in outer London in the 1950s, the only terms I knew for public housing were “council houses”, “housing” or “estates”. The post-war provision of millions of homes was a massive achievement, but ways were found to undermine it. This was a double move: the one talking up the housing as desirable, involving selling off the housing stock, the other talking it down as inadequate and wrecked or as a nursery of crime.
To cover the move whereby housing associations would provide homes for people on low incomes, a new term – “social housing” – took over. The word “social” at least conveys some hint of the public good, but then weaselling into the picture came the word “affordable”. The term arrived in the UK, from the US, around 2010; and though it began by including some kind of public subsidy, the looseness of the term can include a property that is simply cheap-to-buy housing – though in London this might be more than £200,000. Not so affordable.
The word “afford” is a mongrel: the initial “a” comes from Latin “ad”, the “ford” from Old English. The verb “forthian”, meaning to manage to do something, was recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 675 where a man is described as not managing to travel to Rome. It takes until the mid-15th century for the word to mean to have the financial means to do something, and by the mid-16th century people were writing of such things as parents being able to afford bestowing benefits on their children. (Or not, presumably.)
The “-able” suffix got attached in the mid-17th century, but “affordable” to specifically describe something that a person had sufficient readies to pay for is first used at the beginning of the 19th century, when it comes attached to the word “rent”. Clearly, we’ve been thinking about what kind of dwelling we can afford for a long time.
