How Architects for Social Housing Took On the Dangerous Neo-Liberal Contempt for Social Housing of Patrik Schumacher and Others at the Barbican
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On Saturday, while I was meeting up with other social housing campaigners at the Anarchist Bookfair in Tottenham (where there was a screening of the powerful documentary ‘Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle,’ housing activist and academic Lisa McKenzie and anti-fascist activist Martin Lux were discussing ‘Taking it to the Streets — the politics of Class Solidarity,’ and the Radical Housing Network was discussing ‘After Grenfell, the struggle for housing justice’), Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing was taking on some of those seeking to justify and celebrate the neo-liberal destruction of social housing at the Battle of Ideas in the Barbican Centre, described as “two days of high-level thought-provoking public debate.”
To be blunt, it is hard to think of a more important topic for those living in the UK right now than the parlous state of housing, and the class war and exploitation of the poor by the rich that is currently underway, and that, if it isn’t stopped, will destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the coming decade.
Those people live in social housing, on estates that are being torn down not because there is fundamentally anything wrong with them structurally, but because those responsible for them — councils and housing associations — starved of funding by central government, have chosen not to fight for their tenants, but to enter into deals with wealthy and rapacious international property developers, who knock down the estates, and replace them with hideously overpriced new apartment blocks and towers, largely for sale to foreign investors. Read the rest of this entry »
The Crime of Destroying Social Housing in London – and the Significance (Or Not) of Jeremy Corbyn’s Response
This is my 2900th article since I began writing here on a full-time basis in May 2007. If you like what I do, please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator.
A great crime is taking place in London — the destruction of social housing estates by councils, who, squeezed of cash by central government, and, for decades, prevented from spending money on social housing, have entered into deals with private developers, in which housing — primarily estates — that the councils claim they have no money to refurbish are demolished, and replaced by new developments that offer huge profits for the developers, but that provide no social housing, or a risibly small amount.
In recent years, the purely private developers have been joined by housing associations, the preferred choice of governments, since the time of Margaret Thatcher, for managing social housing. However, with their central funding completely cut by the Tories since 2010, they have also been obliged to embark upon more and more developments featuring a large component of private housing to subsidise their properties for rent.
A further complication is that, in one of the most cynically breathtaking acts of spin in modern British history, the social housing provided is generally what is officially termed “affordable,” but which, in reality, is not affordable at all for most Londoners. Boris Johnson, during his eight destructive years as London’s Mayor, set “affordable” rents at 80% of market rents, and in most of London — if not all — market rents are so out of control that those on the median income in London (the level at which 50% of workers earn more, and 50% earn less) are paying up to 70% of their wages on rent, when the acceptable model — in pre-Thatcher days — used to be that no one should pay more than a third of their income, just as, before the insane bubble that has more or less existed since New Labour took office in 1997, the acceptable cost of a house was no more than three and a half times a worker’s income. Read the rest of this entry »
Video: Architects for Social Housing’s Powerful Public Meeting, ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’, and Their Detailed Report
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On June 22, a week after the dreadful Grenfell Tower inferno in west London, which I wrote about here and here, Architects for Social Housing (ASH), an organisation set up two years ago to oppose the demolition of housing estates for profit, and for social cleansing, which, instead, can be refurbished, held an open meeting to examine what caused the Grenfell fire, and what lessons can and must be learned from it.
I attended that meeting, in the Residents Centre of Cotton Gardens Estate in Lambeth, which was attended by around a hundred people, including residents, housing campaigners, journalists, lawyers, academics, engineers and architects. It was an articulate and passionate event, and I’m delighted that an edited film of the meeting is now available on YouTube, made by the filmmaker Line Nikita Woolfe (with the assistance of Luc Beloix on camera and additional footage by Dan Davies), produced by her company Woolfe Vision.
The meeting was hosted by Geraldine Dening and Simon Elmer of ASH, and a prominent guest was the architect Kate Macintosh, who, at the age of 28, designed the acclaimed Dawson’s Heights estate in Dulwich. Her late husband, George Finch, designed Cotton Gardens, another acclaimed estate, and one whose structural integrity, it became apparent at the meeting, had not been compromised as Grenfell Tower’s had, with its chronically ill-advised refurbishment leading, in no uncertain terms, to the terrible and entirely preventable loss of life on June 14. Read the rest of this entry »
Who's still at Guantánamo?
