The housing market in the UK has become a sector shrouded in false and deceptive terminology to disguise what it is really happening.
‘Affordability’ in government terminology does not reflect the position of the public, but instead a market that serves a few rich figures. Boris Johnson set the rate of ‘affordability’ in London at 80% of market rents – a figure that has nothing to do with median income, instead pegging itself to soaring prices that are locking more and more of the public out of the market.
When even the OECD acknowledge that housing prices in London are a third above any economic justification, and millions of us are becoming trapped in low pay, no pay and in work poverty for longer, this marker of ‘affordability’ is a cruel description.
This however, characterizes the deceptive way in which the government has unpicked many of us from access or even a debate about the housing we need. Insecurity is lathered on the public to the detriment of our collective health, whilst the government continues to dole out a steady roll of housing chit-chat that is ever more removed from the reality for the masses.
Financial language
This deception has been a success of the kind of compassionless, business reportage that has grown in the last few years. That the market becomes the top priority and ultimate decision caster, rather than people, in the ‘business’ of basic human needs has borne a news feed that no longer sees people, their evictions or homelessness. Profit motives garner a culture where cold hard decisions to turf out tenants is all part of the game. The effects on social cohesion, rights and communities are deemed unworthy of column inches.
As such, papers are still filled with pull-outs of new developments; the usual stark, glass towers housing luxury flats passing more eyes that can’t afford them than can.
Meanwhile, the hidden homeless grow, and the reign of landlord power sees misery and exploitation cast upon prospective tenants trying to navigate a market that rewards catching them out, with children in tow.
Growth
At the centre of this market lies it’s greatest perpetuated myth; growth. And the perception that it is good. We have been taught to chase growth, it is the marker by which the success of the country is measured. Is growth down? Slowing? Quicker? More than other countries?
However, growth within the housing market is increasing the crisis and we are seeing our government pursue something which is perpetuating risk, fragility and insecurity.
The government are in a desperate game of PR to maintain housing market price increases, adding to growth, and thus their perceived success before election. They also don’t want to lose the votes of their home owning public. Hence, their policies have been entirely focused on keeping house prices up and advancing the crisis and it’s risks.
In London, the housing market now relies on a steady stream of super-rich foreign investors to maintain growth, but ‘curtail their immigration, tamper with their non-dom status and prices at the top could crash.’All That Is Solid, P89, Danny Dorling
In order to maintain this growth, homes in the capital become affordable to only the super rich and London now has more billionaires than any other city.
So attuned to this new opportunity and culture of social cleansing, developers even happily advertise the fact that the poor or ‘riff raff’ can no longer afford to dwell in these areas.
Gentrification is a similarly cosy cover for a process that excludes many. Communities are thrown out, disbanded, evicted, built over and forced into isolation in areas they don’t know. This is happening all across London now, in places once thought of as cheap. Where poor communities built their own cultural spaces and vibrancy over years. These spaces are sold to the highest bidder with or without local consent. Talk of regeneration usually precedes this process, but neither are held in positive lights for many of the working class tenants it affects.
Jasmin Parsons, Resident of West Hendon Estate, Barnet, fighting plans for 600 social housing units to become 2000 luxury apartments
RM: What does regeneration mean to you?
Jasmin: Eviction. In a word.
RM: It’s not positive?
Jasmin: No its decimation, desecration, destruction, basically.
In many cases, these words often mean the eviction of the current community by any and all means necessary. Procedural Consultations are often only protocol, with responses ignored to plow ahead with original plans.
In Lea Green, developers planned to build huge extensions to supermarkets. Developers running the consultations dropped leaflets detailing the new plans and information on public meetings to houses that were outside the radius of 1-2 miles, so nearby residents (those who would have the highest concerns and would be most affected) would be kept in the dark until it was too late. In Brixton, police raids have targeted the black community in raids which race relations activist Lee Jasper describes as “both oppressive and disproportionate,” and “more to do with the ongoing rapid gentrification of Brixton than it has to do with tackling crime.” In West Hendon where Barratts Homes are planning to build luxury apartment blocks in place of 600+ social housing units, residents say councillors targeted their children, by attempting to get them to sign contracts in place of their parents, without their parents’ knowledge.
In Southwark, the Heygate estate was sold cheaply by the council to contractors Lendlease. The council footed the bill for evictions and re-housing while Lendlease failed to meet the minimum affordable housing quota of 35%, instead giving the council a paltry amount to build elsewhere. They claimed social housing tenants couldn’t share the building with private tenants without building a second lobby and shaft because “not doing so would have significant implications on the values of the private residential properties.” These ‘poor doors’ have become more common since.
When a basic human need is commodified and wealth determines access, regardless of moral implications, the results are a battering of the rights of the poor, who’s lives become expendable to the bottom line.
Social cleansing takes place not only of the people but of the culture that made the place attractive and probably so sought after in the first place. In a few years it is over; a short changed transaction for what has often taken years for communities to create. The influx of money, capitalising on the culture, is often the reason for it’s death. Attempts by new rich tenants to shut down local venues such as the Ministry of Sound in Elephant & Castle, London, have become all too common.
“I have seen the future – and the future is Paris and Geneva.
The future is a clean, dull city populated by clean, dull rich people and clean, dull old people. The future is joyless Michelin starred restaurants and shops selling £3,000 chandeliers.
So, what does this have to do with Paris and Geneva? The answer is that both are places where the rich have socially cleansed the centres. Inner Paris is a fairytale for wealthy people in their fifties (and outer Paris looks like Stalingrad with ethnic strife) while Geneva has dispensed with the poor altogether. As a result, both cities are safe, pretty and rather boring places to live – and soon London will be too.
Why? Because the financiers who can afford inner London neighbourhoods are not cool. Visit Canary Wharf at on any weekday lunchtime and watch the braying, pink-shirted bankers disporting themselves. Not cool. Peruse the shops at Canary Wharf. From Gap to Tiffany’s, they’re all chains stores and you could be anywhere wealthy, safe and dull in the world. Rich people like making money and spending it on dull, expensive things. That’s what they do – and they’re very good it. But being a high-end cog in the machine is not cool.”
‘Cool London is dead, and the rich kids are to blame’, Alex Proud
The Telegraph
Spike Lee at a Q&A in 2014, gave an insight into the often unheard views of the communities being invaded by ‘gentrification’:
“Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!
“Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.”
Spike Lee’s Gentrification Rant – transcript: ‘Fort Greene Park is like Westminster Dog Show.’
Social divide
The nature of the housing market in the UK also deepens the divide of the lives of rich and poor. Their communities are separated in the current market. Where the rich go, the poor are forced to leave, and the rich increasingly pay to be separated from the poor. This creates fear of the other, limiting understanding and social cohesion as the groups become ever more removed from one another in an environment of increasing inequality.
“Overall I think gentrification is a tool that solidifies the stratification of classes. There are people who live in an area that becomes 100% people like them. Three big tools have been used in a lot of areas first, you build a big police station, secondly you tear out all the basketball courts and lastly if there’s a local public school that poor people attend, you tear down the school.”
While the housing market bends over backwards to serve up the status symbol dwellings of the rich, the needs of the poor are ever more neglected. Social housing tenants have their rights trampled on in times of gentrification or are left out of society when they are forgotten in Britain’s sink estates, leading them to become disenfranchised and unable to participate in society. Policy Exchange called on politicians of all parties to vow to turn around Britain’s most deprived social housing estates if they won power in 2015, branding the estates a ‘time-bomb of social decay’ where ‘decades of neglect and ghettoisation have led to acute, entrenched social problems that cost billions to the public purse: gang warfare, knife crime, domestic violence, illiteracy, unemployment and child neglect.
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Language surrounding the market has been emptied of it’s purpose and built to fit the interests of the minority it really serves, and we are left with a calm bureaucratic charade to cover the social cleansing, isolation, eviction and turmoil being cast upon the losing majority of the market.
A home is a basic human necessity. As such, this quiet unpicking of access is having devastating effects on people’s ability to get on in society.
‘’Behind the housing statistics, there are missing numbers, and behind the missing numbers, and the bricks, mortar, plaster, wallpaper, beds and bedding, there are stories about how people fit into society – or not. Our homes are the slots we fit into in space. Our families the slots we fit into in time. Making housing harder to come by makes being part of society, even being part of a family, all the harder to achieve.’
All That Is Solid, P.29, Danny Dorling