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Re-Inventing The Wheel Of Housing

Martin Slavin responds to ‘Third Way To The Games’, Hannah Arbeid’s commendation of the role of the voluntary sector.

I had just returned from parking my car near a local garage, prior to dropping in the key. While retrieving my bike from the back of the car I watched a low key drama play out further down the street. Four guys, one in a dark blue gaberdine coat, standing attentively about in front of a terraced house. Out of the house, from time to time, two rather undernourished looking blackguys are bearing personal posessions to a growing pile of bags and furniture in the front garden of the house next door.

It looked like they were being evicted, and with nowhere else to put their stuff it was out on the street. As I watched I saw another guy in painter’s overalls stop and speak briefly to the gaberdined Bailiff. He then carried on down the street towards me.

As he passed I asked him “ Are they being evicted?” “Yes,” he said, “they’re squatters. It’s a Housing Association property. But it’s the Housing Association’s fault. They have left that house empty for ages. What do they expect? With the numbers of homeless round here, someone is going to squat it eventually.

”I do up houses myself and sell them,” he continued, “and I live in this street. I have been watching the whole thing develop. The problem is that Housing Associations are now getting too big and some of them are amalgamating and getting very big. They are more interested in the lucrative process of buying up medium to large sites and building three to five storey blocks of flats which they can manage. They are getting too big to bother with individual houses here and there. So they neglect to deal with them in good time when they are empty.”

“Isn’t that what Council Housing departments used to do back in their day” I said. “Looks to me like Housing Associations are re-inventing the wheel of Council Housing. Only this time it is as privatised corporations with public subsidies.”

“That’s right” he said. “Only this time,” I continued, “They wish to get a good return on invested capital, so they build or let hardly any three bedroom homes. The result of which, in a collapsed Council House building sector, is record overcrowding rates in the two bedroomed properties of Registered Social Landlords.”

You see I hate people pissing on my head and calling it rain. If the public institution isn’t working, fix it. You don’t have to starve it into submission first before destroying it. Then it’s asset stripped. Then the remains are profitably flogged off cheap. Then it’s recreated under another name like ‘City Academy’, or ‘Stagecoach’, or ‘EDF’, or ‘Network Rail’ or ‘Uncle Tom Cobblers’. Which then absorbs vastly greater amounts of ‘leveraged’ taxpayers’ money to help make it ‘profitable’ while the owners and shareholders get richer and richer. Unless of course they make a complete cock-up of it and the whole damn circus starts over.

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