The UK has an estimated 610,000 unoccupied homes, with the increase in holiday and second homes in London taking up a large brunt of this figure. A third of the houses on London’s nicknamed “Billionaires Road” lie completely empty, some becoming slowly derelict, empty for a quarter of a century or more.
Boris Johnson has missed his target to build 55,000 more affordable homes in the capital by 2015. He recently scrapped a major affordable housing project in London, presumably for a nice pay off from the off-shore property developers who’ve taken over the planning. More architects, more contractors, more luxury apartment buildings, knocking down listed buildings and replacing ugly state of the art penthouse suites that will lie untouched 360 days a year. How many times have you walked past a development project that promises luxury apartments?
The fact is, the country doesn’t need any more luxury apartments, it needs beds for the 2,500 people that sleep rough every night. In terms of supply and demand, it doesn’t take an economist to notice that the numbers here are seriously skewed. We could house our homeless 244 times over, but we don’t. Why? Greed, lack of compassion and the ever churning wheels of capitalism are all viable reasons. Companies such as Camelot housing are now making a profit off privatising squatting, which is the sort of oxymoronic sentence that would make ol’ Maggie smile from the grave. You can pay a cut of the obscene rental prices in London, in return for babysitting properties for lazy landlords. Prepare yourself for a life of electric heaters, microwave meals and the threat of being thrown out at any minute with little to no warning as you’re not an official renter, so lack renters rights. It’s as if not paying a premium meant you meant less to the state. Weird that.
It is understandable, with all this being said, that people are generally pretty pissed off that companies and government alike are investing in a range of ‘anti-homeless’ methods, such as spikes and pay as you go benches, so god forbid the homeless could lie down under some cover, or on an elevated service. It’s as though the homeless are seen as threats, but how can they bite the hand that feeds them if the hand isn’t feeding them anything at all? It is extremely unsettling to see public spending going on prevention of homeless people rather than cure, as though blocking them from inhabiting these public spaces will drive them underground like river people. Just think about how much good could have been done if they put the cash from installing inhumane torture devices reminiscent of iron maidens onto the rich street corners of our country into homelessness charities? From our governments perspective, it’s clear why this would be a favourable endeavour – if you can’t see the problem, the problem doesn’t exist, and why spend cash on what you can’t see. Spend it on some more luxury apartments to line our spiked streets. Why would they ever see the problem when they take up the other 2/3 of Billionaires Row?
The sheer irony of Manchester’s Selfridges being the latest corporation to join in on the discrimination of the homeless is palpable. A symbol of capitalism spending their obscene turnover on preventing the access of the very people who are victims of capitalism is so Orwellian it seems to be a parody of itself. The ineffective system of spend, spend, spend, left the country in a recession that saw homelessness increase rapidly, with homelessness in the under 25’s rising 57% since the recession began. The corporate guzzling bastards over at Selfridges installing these spikes sums everything that is wrong with Britain today, as the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Talk about kicking a man when he is down.
We see some hope with humanity, when direct action groups pour concrete over the spikes and provide wooden planks for those sleeping rough, but in doing that they risk being arrested for vandalism. The only real vandals, of course, are the people who instructed these ‘methods’ to go ahead in the first place. It’s sad to see compassion be met by police action, but it’s hard to be surprised when you live under a bell jar.
There are solutions. We could introduce a rent cap, to stop a rat infested 1 bedroom flat in Peckham costing 90% of a waitresses paycheque. To deter private landlords from buying up properties to rent at ostentatious premiums would be the first step in the right direction. In the last 3 years the cost of a room has increased £300 a week in some of our most gentrified areas. We could introduce a mandatory London living wage to help reduce the problem in the capital, as minimum wage has been proven, economically, to not be feasible for the survival of the average Londoner. What will surprise no one though, is that if the government goes the way it looks like its going in the May 2015 election, these things will not happen. The problem will worsen. The spikes will start outside parliament and high end shopping centres and crawl into all public places from parks to libraries. Rents will rise and rise and living conditions will get worse and worse. Another council estate will get torn down for some fucking luxury apartments.
punching 