Housing addresses the basic need for human shelter and facilitates the essential human requirement for a home. In recent times, housing has also been promoted by global financial institutions as the contemporary repository of household wealth and equity.1 Yet, this approach to housing has created the greatest global financial crisis for generations. The Economist has pointed out that the house price boom that preceded the 2008 financial crisis was remarkable for its scope and scale.2 However, house prices have begun to rise again in the US, but continued to fall in the peripheral countries of the Eurozone in spring 2013.3 Indeed, across the world, there is a mixed picture, with house prices falling (the largest annual drop of nine per cent in Spain) and rising in equal numbers. In spring 2013, The Economist house-price indicators data showed that since 2007, house prices had fallen by 49 per cent in Ireland, 24 per cent in Spain, 21 per cent in the US, 14 per cent in the Netherlands and Japan, and 11 per cent in Italy and the UK.4 However, in that period, house prices had increased by 86 per cent in Hong Kong, 24 per cent in Austria and Singapore, 21 per cent in Switzerland, 20 per cent in Canada, 17 per cent in China, 12 per cent in South Africa and 10 per cent in Australia