“Lies, damned lies and racism…”

…to misquote Mark Twain. But as the housing pandemic continues, even beyond a point that we’ve become accustomed to and incidentally, with a prospective Labour government offering no answers, it’s essential to challenge a lie that is in danger of taking hold in collective consciousness. “There aren’t enough homes because there are too many people”.

It’s a seductive proposition. The population is increasing and new homes aren’t keeping pace, ergo, if there are fewer people, there will be more available homes. I’ve recently had the experience of marking undergraduate papers about causes of the housing crisis and about a quarter of them attributed population growth and immigration as the main factors. Interestingly, this is not something I’ve ever taught and I’d guess that about half of those making the argument are themselves immigrants. I’m pleased they’re thinking for themselves, but worried how this crude argument is being internalised, particularly because it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), there were 24,782,800 households in England and Wales on Census Day 2021. On the same date, according to the ONS, there were 26,394,777 dwellings in England and Wales. So, the number of homes exceeded the number of households by 1,611,977.  

Anyone wanting to attribute the housing crisis to population or immigration needs to look elsewhere.

As Professor Danny Dorling has been arguing for years, the housing problem is primarily one of distribution, not supply. Also drawing on 2021 Census data, the ONS points out there were 1.6 million empty homes in England and Wales. There could be a variety of reasons for this, but the ONS estimates 12% of empty homes are second homes.  The BBC reports that the number of short-let holiday homes has risen by 40% in the last three years.

As most of my students have grasped, almost every element of UK housing policy for the last 40 years has encouraged the use of housing as a form of financial speculation and it has created a complex web of vested and conflicted interests that is very difficult to unpick. Instead of addressing these issues, it is much easier to look at population growth and immigration, precisely the scapegoating strategy of the current government, its Labour shadow and the Farragists

There’s nothing new about this phenomenon. I’m reading a lot about the Jewish left in early 20^th Century New York City at the moment. From building a genuinely radical, at times revolutionary, alternative to the brutality of emergent industrial capitalism, by the 1920s, some leading trade unionists and socialists were retrenching towards a “no more immigration” policy. In part, they were responding to the pressure from members and constituents living in over-crowded, over-priced, privately-rented slum housing, seeing more people arriving on the same boats they had got off themselves only a few years earlier. (By the way, most of these people would be classified as “illegal” today, arriving as they usually did without legal documents and with the assistance of “traffickers”.)

The full folly of this pandering to reactionary, divisive sentiment was brutally exposed soon afterwards, when an enfeebled left tried to respond to the rise of fascism. We’re not there yet. But allowing false arguments about housing shortage to circulate freely is a vital weapon of mass distraction in the hands of the profiteers and racists.

A view from the bridge

Greenwich Millenium Village Revisited

Ten years ago, I finished a PhD. It didn’t make me a better person, or mean as much to me as being part of the team that won the Essex Plate in 1987, but it was a good feeling. I rarely look at those two bound volumes of 100,000 words, but I did last week, after I’d revisited Greenwich Millenium Village (GMV).

GMV was one of my case studies for exploring the loaded and much-abused concept of “mixed use” development. My research compared the developers’, planners’ and politicians’ hype around places like GMV, with the reality.

Nowhere was that hype greater than GMV. Imbued with New Labour rhetoric and closely linked (by about half a mile) to the peculiar landmark that is the “O2 Arean”, but was “The Millenium Dome”, GMV was hailed as the blueprint for the future, an exemplar of environmentally sustainable, socially cohesive, economically thriving, urban development.

Even a decade ago, it was clear GMV wasn’t like it said in the brochure. Nothing unusual about that, but the place had been painted in such rhapsodies of green that the contrast was jarring. There was a Combined Heat and Power Plant that had never worked properly, the so-called “tenure blind” blocks clearly identified those occupied by private owners and housing association tenants, the local shops were struggling, there were few facilities for children and young people and the animated public realm anticipated in the planning documents was rarely apparent. I particularly remember interviewing a GMV resident who used a wheelchair complaining about how unwelcoming and impractical it was and that he preferred to do his shopping at the Sainsbury’s superstore down the road. The blocks designed by Ralph Erskine became the public face of GMV, but his humanistic philosophy appeared honoured in the breach.

Erskine blocks, GMV

There is an urban policy cliché that “regeneration takes a generation” and of course, big, new, ambitious developments like GMV take time to build and develop as places with a community identity, if they ever do. Revisiting last week, I found few signs for optimism these things will happen at GMV. On the contrary, the contradictions and false-promises that I observed a decade ago seem to have multiplied.

The original image of GMV as an “urban village” is now completely overwhelmed by huge new housing developments all around it, gobbling up light and open space, while restricting views of the river Thames, which could be one of GMV’s best qualities. The promise of environmental sustainability is fatally undermined by the increasing domination of roads, Big Box retail like Ikea and the massive digging project for the ecologically and air-quality damaging Silvertown Tunnel. The GMV shops still look a bit sorry for themselves, although there’s one good café, as there was ten years ago. The paradoxically named “Oval Square”, GMV’s main public space, still appears desolate and uninteresting.

To the extent that there is the kind of urban vitality GMV was meant to bring, it appears to have been sucked into the weird work around the O2, part of which has been rebranded “The Design District”. I’m not a designer, but it’s hard to avoid the thought that students are given a daily example of how not to do it. As with the rest of the Greenwich Peninsula, it’s a hotchpotch of buildings that seem to have been thrown down randomly, like a child scattering Lego bricks.

Unsurprisingly, one of the glass edifices has been appropriated as an art gallery, but when you enter, the first thing you find is a sales office for some of the 10,000 homes due to cover the Peninsula and an invitation to become a “Peninsulist”, the thin end of a bullshit wedge that, like its sponsors, is running amok around GMV.

I often wish I’d collated an exhibition of the kind of imagery deployed by property developers to sell their wares. The soft-focus, “lifestyle” photos and slogans are ubiquitous, but have concentrated vulgarity here. They depict GMV and the Greenwich Peninsula as a 21st century Shangri-la, with affluent couples sipping wine on their balcony, gazing out at a future that doesn’t include the Silvertown Tunnel and its pollution, or hundreds of identikit apartments, blocking the sky, even though they have been “design inspired by nature” and obscuring the river which should be “doing something good for you inside”.

Back at the Art Gallery/Sales Office, there’s a multi-coloured, Perspex model of Greenwich Peninsula. From a distance and a quick glance, it looks a bit like a desert island, with palm trees (which are actually place labels for all the new development sites). As ever with these mega-projects, important issues are erased from history, for example, the fact that all the land was once publicly owned and – because it was contaminated – made ready for the private profiteers by huge amounts of public money. There is no recognition of the thousands of people in the London Borough of Greenwich homeless or in housing need, to whom the Peninsula is a mocking insult. If this is the future, it doesn’t work.

“Council housing: It’s not for us.”

I heard this in my local coffee bar this morning. It was an exchange between two people in their twenties, one of whom I know lives in the type of sub-standard private renting many of her generation are now condemned to. They were looking at a near-completion block of what our council is referring to as new council housing. If that sounds a bit sceptical, it’s only because there are some questions about this type of development, particularly whether the rents are in line with those of existing council homes. But in general, it’s great to see Tower Hamlets and other councils, finally seeing the point of the unique form of housing in their name, that they have spent far too long undermining and disowning.

There are still huge steps to take before we recover the ground lost by 40 years of neoliberal housing policy. Most of them concern finance and how we make the case that direct investment in new and existing council housing is a better investment than the myriad privatisation devices that have been tried and – on the whole – failed. But alongside the “hard” economics and politics, there’s some ideological damage to repair, before council housing is restored to its rightful place.

I’ve heard variations on the “it’s not for us” sentiment several times in recent years. I remember one person, who was homeless, saying in a meeting “my mum was brought up in council housing, but I’ve been lucky”. On another occasion, I heard someone say “I’ve been in and out of council housing all my life”, as though referring to prison. The saddest thing about this is that, in both cases, they were people in their twenties, like those I heard this morning.

Somehow, those of us who believe in publicly-owned, not-for-profit, rented housing, need to find a way to convince the younger generation that council housing can enhance their lives in the way it did previous generations. Referring to a sepia-tinted past doesn’t go far, although when I tell my students that a third of the UK population were council tenants in 1979, it still blows their minds. But we need to connect an idea that flourished in the 20^th century with the concerns of the 21^st.

An obvious and immediate way of doing that is making the intrinsic link between housing and the “cost of living crisis”. It’s a truth, that has only slowly dawned on me, that we have arrived at a state where housing causes poverty. For millions, rapidly rising rents (in all sectors), poor insulation, benefit cuts, transience, rip-off fees and service charges all contribute to making the cost of living, effectively, the cost of housing. It was not ever thus. When the UK had a robust alternative to the rapacious market (and actually, even before then) housing as a proportion of household income consumed about half what it does now.  

Beyond the hard cash questions, there are the more amorphous “quality of life” arguments we need to re-make for council housing. Despite the decades of denigration and under-investment, many current and former council tenants already know how a truly affordable rent and a secure tenancy can transform lives. I’m sometimes reminded of a line from US public housing: “The only people who like it are the people who live there”. But more tangibly, I think of my stepdaughter, living as a council tenant in the home she was raised in, now a single parent and a highly qualified nurse, working in the local community she’s always lived in. As well as a few other things, council housing makes all that possible.  

Standing on UCU picket lines recently, I’ve heard numerous people – some of them on higher wages than a nurse – saying that living in the community they work in is a financial non-starter, with all the wasteful commuting and social detachment that impossibility entails. When Aneurin Bevan envisaged council housing as the means towards “the living tapestry of a mixed community” where “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and farm labourer all lived in the same street” he wasn’t waxing rhetorical. Today, we might add: “The teacher, the fire fighter, the ambulance driver, the rail worker not spending hours of time, hundreds of pounds and tonnes of carbon getting to and from work”.  

Council housing doesn’t have to be for everyone, but it should be there for everyone.

New Council Housing: Corner of Roman Road and Globe Road, E2

Engels and The Housing Question

Re-reading, reflecting on and then writing about Engels’ pamphlet, written 150 years ago, it’s as though he’s speaking from the grave. Link to my article for Tribune below. (By the way, my copy used to be owned by Paul Foot, so I had additional inspiration.)

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/07/the-housing-question-friedrich-engels-renting-tenants?fbclid=IwAR1wzUrg0ReL9p9XfUB59nL5nnh98-iJF2FCmXhy53A84-s90bHslXYqCCw

Moses Supposes

Last week, we went to see Straight Line Crazy, a play by David Hare at the Bridge Theatre near Tower Bridge, with that famous actor, Ralph Fiennes. He and the rest of the cast were great and the script was snappy and sassy. So if you just fancy a good night at the theatre, you might like it (it’s on ‘til 18^th June). But I had other reasons for being there.

The play’s about Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York City who, over almost half a century in a multitude of public positions, made an indelible impact on the city’s landscape. (Intriguingly, his time in office almost exactly coincides with that of J Edgar Hoover at the FBI!) Moses directed the construction of numerous infrastructure projects, including public parks, swimming pools, bridges and most notably, roads. He was also responsible for tens of thousands of homes for working class New Yorkers, including many of those owned by the city’s public housing authority (NYCHA) and Co-Op City in the Bronx, the biggest development of its kind (clue in the title) in the world.

I add his record on housing by way of balancing the prevailing view of Moses. I asked an NYC urban planner friend of mine about him last summer and his immediate take was “Bad Guy. A racist”. There is plenty of evidence to corroborate this opinion, much of it contained in Robert Caro’s mamouth biography, The Power Broker. Probably the best-known example is Moses’ decision to build bridges that were too low to admit buses, thus preventing poor people without cars, many of whom would be non-white, from easily getting to the public beaches he developed on Long Island.

The play touches on these issues, but tends towards portraying Moses as someone who started out as an idealist motivated by a genuine desire to improve people’s lives, who became an autocrat with a God-complex, a description that can, arguably, be applied to the whole discipline of urban planning.  

Moses’ nemesis was Jane Jacobs, a formidable campaigner who lived in Greenwich Village and had her own strong theories about what cities should be like. Jacobs despised the gigantism of Moses’ projects, particularly when they threatened the type of place she lived in. But it would be unfair to dismiss Jane Jacobs as a NIMBY. She helped build a successful community campaign to oppose Moses’ plans for another huge road that would have slashed through the middle of lower Manhattan and so preserved some of the city’s most cherished spaces, like Washington Square Park. But as the play touched on, those areas have since been radically changed by a different threat: the toxic mix of money and the speculative housing market known as “gentrification”.

I feel very ambivalent about both Jacobs and Moses. Her writing suggests a self-righteous dogmatist with a snobbish streak. His actions suggest the same! But I do find something to admire in both – her for fighting the corporate-backed development juggernaut, him for breaking through the inertia of big bureaucracies. Moses is responsible for some of the things many people (including me) love and loathe about New York City. As you stroll through wonderful Riverside Park, it’s not quite possible to ignore the growling Henry Hudson Parkway that runs alongside it. Having lived there for six months, I’ve seen the enduring damage done to the borough by Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway (which there are now tentative plans to “green”). Jacobs argued for a people-centred, not car-dominated city and ultimately, I’d stand with her and time has proved her right.  

More Thatcherism Won’t Fix Housing

Tribune magazine asked me to write something about the Right to Buy, which a desperate Prime Minister may try to revive. The article is here.

Below is a photo of my nan and grandad’s council house in Dagenham, where they lived for over 50 years. They didn’t exercise the Right to Buy. It wasn’t so much a matter of political principle. They just couldn’t see the point of buying something they’d already paid decades of rent for and knew they could live in for the rest of their days, which they did, They were also committed to the idea of returning the home to the council when they didn’t need it any more, for someone else who did (and I gather the home is still in public ownership).

Ethical Property (and flying pigs)

I’d been planning to write something about this, then realised I wasn’t alone. On Monday, BBC Radio 4 broadcast “Pretty Vacant”, a play by Hugh Costello about the tangled web around property investment at a time of acute housing need. It’s worth a listen. The link’s here, (available for 28 days).

The play clanged a lot of bells for me. Back in the mid 90s and noughties, I worked with and for a self-styled ethical property company. It was a strange, quite disturbing experience that included some of the themes explored in “Pretty Vacant”, like off-shore investment companies, possible money laundering and probable criminality, combined with what I thought at the time, was a genuine attempt to bend the property industry away from its worst habits.

I look back at it with mixed feelings. In the context of chronically failing national policy, we managed to work the system enough to generate about 100 homes for homeless people that probably wouldn’t have existed otherwise. We encountered deep suspicion about our motives from the public sector, ironic, considering how blindly addicted it has since become to working with the private sector. But I recall the lack of understanding of how the property industry works whenever I see Public-Private Partnership (PPP) schemes that end up with the public getting screwed. Back then, big housing associations could just about still claim to be “social” landlords. The ones we worked with were more culturally aligned with the Town Hall than The City. That’s reversed since. There’s a deeper, philosophical layer to all this, that “Pretty Vacant” explores, but I often argue housing shouldn’t be reduced to a personal morality play because, as with my experience of ethical property, it can’t be separated from the global hegemony of the commodified home.

Still, the myth of Ethical Property endures and is enabled by the dishonesty of housing policy language. As with PPP, there seems to be goldfish-like memory of what happens when you try to mix the motives of profit-driven businesses with meeting housing need. Each new attempt to do so seems to think it will be the one to override the essential truth that the private property market only exists to make money. Whatever people’s personal motivations may be, the property industry has no interest in meeting housing need. On the contrary, it profits from perpetuating it.

Ethical Property, Bethnal Green (with space above for flying pigs).

Moving On

Hello, if you follow this blog, I’m very grateful. For several reasons, I’ve launched a new blog, “The View from K92”. Here’s the link. It would be great to see you there.

Housing and Racism

I wrote this for Verso, since when, Shelter has produced more research showing the disproportionate threat of the gathering post-pandemic eviction storm on black and minority ethnic communities – and I’ve come to live for six months in the country where the toxic link between housing and racism is particularly virulent.

If you want an easy-to-digest take on ethnic housing segregation in the US, try “Suburbicon”. George Clooney, the director, won’t mind me saying the film’s a bit of a mess. But it’s also quite funny and does capture some of the racist hostility faced by African-Americans when they tried to breach the walls of housing segregation built by the US government.

I like New York in June

After several false starts – and barring last-minute hiccups – on Monday I’ll be flying to New York City. Back in the early COIVD days, I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend six months researching the impact of a particular regeneration project on housing in The Bronx, an issue I learned a bit about in 2015.

But the original research brief is now, I think, redundant. The multiple shocks of the last 15 months mean I’ll now be trying to assess how The Bronx is emerging from the era of pandemic, Trump and #BlackLivesMatter.

I’ll be living in the borough and spending as much time as possible with the CASA campaign organisation. I shouldn’t pre-judge, but I expect the key issue facing the area will be keeping people in their homes. The eviction ban in the US is due to expire at the end of the month and as in the UK, there’s very little to prevent a dramatic rise in homelessness.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what to expect. But I’ll be trying to record and share my experiences in a dedicated blog site Bronx Tales. It would be great if you can join me there.