Scotland’s Housing Crisis is a Crisis of Complacency

Until we rebuild public imagination and civic confidence, no amount of policy will fix our housing problem.

By Frazer Macdonald Hay

Scotland’s housing emergency is usually framed as a failure of funding, planning or political will. But the deeper crisis is cultural.

In my new article for The Scotland on Sunday, I argue that we have drifted into a passive relationship with our built environment. We complain about rents and planning decisions, but rarely engage with the processes shaping them.

Even strong frameworks like NPF4 can’t succeed without a public able, and willing, to participate.

The solution? A civic awakening that makes “place” part of everyday conversation. Housing isn’t just a policy issue; it’s a democratic one.......

When I was a child in Cumbernauld, I remember tiring my grandmother with endless questions about why buildings looked the way they did.“Be grateful for what you have,” she’d sigh, echoing the stoic mindset of her generation. For her, politics, architecture and planning were subjects for others, the educated, the powerful, the elites. Ordinary people didn’t concern themselves with how places were made; they simply lived in them.

That conditioning still lingers across Scotland today. Most people still see housing, design and placemaking as matters for professionals and politicians, not for themselves. Yet this belief, that “place” is someone else’s responsibility, is part of what has landed us in our current housing crisis.

Scotland’s housing emergency is not only a crisis of affordability, availability, or planning efficiency. It is also a crisis of imagination, a civic failure in which the public has become spectators rather than participants. We have become a nation of commentators rather than co-authors of our environment.

Record numbers of families live in temporary accommodation. Rents continue to spiral. Developers, councils and communities often face each other across lines of mistrust. And despite the government’s promises, from the Housing (Scotland) Bill to the Housing Emergency Action Plan, the root problem remains: we have lost the shared language, curiosity, and confidence to talk about place.

When I later lived with my wife and her family in the Netherlands, I discovered a different kind of public culture. There, conversations about local architecture, politics and neighbourhood design happened around the dinner table. Everyone had an opinion, and everyone’s opinion mattered. People questioned decisions, proposed alternatives, and demanded better from planners and politicians. They understood that placemaking is not just about buildings, but about belonging.

In Scotland, by contrast, public discourse on housing is too often reduced to complaints, petitions and social media outbursts. Rarely do we see curiosity, dialogue or learning. We have not cultivated a public vocabulary for discussing the built environment. Nor have we built the civic confidence to ask why things are as they are, and how they might be otherwise.

To its credit, the Scottish Government has tried to change this through frameworks like the National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4), which looks ahead to 2045. It is an ambitious document, full of sound principles such as placemaking, local living, and the 20-minute neighbourhood. It promotes collaboration between agencies, prioritises brownfield land over greenfield sprawl, and calls for design that is inclusive, sustainable, and community-led.

The six “qualities of successful places” at the heart of NPF4, safe, welcoming, healthy, fair, well-connected, and environmentally responsible, are precisely the kind of guiding ideas we should aspire to.

Yet documents like NPF4, for all their vision, remain curiously disconnected from everyday life. They circulate largely within echo chambers of policy writers, planners, and consultants. The language is well-meaning but abstract, the tone administrative rather than emotional. Most of the public will never read it, let alone feel that it speaks to them. Without a cultural shift, a civic awakening, even the best policies will remain inert.

Because planning is not just a technical exercise; it is a democratic one. It depends on public imagination, curiosity, and participation. And that cannot be legislated into being.

Scotland needs to rebuild its civic culture around place. We must make architecture and planning part of everyday conversation, something people feel entitled to discuss and influence. That means rethinking education, encouraging schools to explore the built environment as part of how we understand community and citizenship. It means giving people the tools and confidence to question development decisions and to see themselves as co-authors of their surroundings, not passive end-users of them.

It also means challenging the cultural habits that keep us small: the old fatalism that says “just be grateful for what you have,” or the class anxiety that tells us design is for the educated few. These habits are not harmless; they’re corrosive. They stop us from recognising our valid agency and the shared responsibility that comes with it.

If we are to solve the housing crisis, we need more than investment and legislation. We need participation, literacy, and belief. We need a collective effort to make “place” part of how we talk about who we are, not just where we live.

The housing crisis, in other words, is not just a failure of government, but of us all. And the first step toward fixing it is to imagine, once again, that our opinions about our built environment matter, because they do.

Frazer Macdonald Hay is an architectural and peacebuilding consultant based in Scotland. He is the founder of Uniform November, a practice exploring the intersection of architecture, memory and civic identity.