No 27 Capitalism's Housing Crisis
Capitalism's Housing Crisis
Inadequate housing and the ability for thousands of workers to be able to rent or get mortgages for housing has been called a housing crisis. The crisis has been compounded by the quality of housing people are forced to live in. So why is there a housing crisis in one of the richest countries in the world? The housing crisis is not natural but is caused by capitalism.
In 2019 the National Housing Federation found that 8.4 million workers in England were living in "unaffordable, insecure or unsuitable homes". Furthermore, millions of workers were living in over-crowded, poorly designed and constructed and dangerous housing (GUARDIAN 23 September 2019). The housing crisis does not have to occur. There is more than enough land, builders, architects, engineers, factories by which to provide decent housing for everyone. Yet capitalism prevents the housing crisis from being resolved.
We are told that there is a shortage of 4m homes in the UK, where thousands are homeless that many young people are forced to live with parents and friends, that 1.2 million people are on council house waiting lists and that a million tenants are in deep poverty (GUARDIAN 30 April 2020). Yet when houses are built they have weak mortar, faulty drainage, dangerous electrics, incomplete party walls and unfinished fittings and in some cases the housing breaks fire safety rules (GUARDIAN 11 March 2017).
The housing crisis emanates from capitalism and its priorities of profit and capital accumulation. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of the means of production. Production takes place under capitalism only when there is a profit to be made. The housing crisis arises because the working class majority do not own the means of production. And it arises because workers are locked in the wages system where what they earn in wages cannot meet what they and their families need to live on. And this includes housing.
And housing under capitalism is not only bought for profit but it is speculative. Developers have amassed land banks with planning permission for housing but gamble on prices going up. They are not in the business to provide homes only to construct commodities for those who can afford them, usually at the luxury end of the housing market. Profit is all they care about. In a DAILY TELEGRAPH report we were told:
"The total number of plots in the top nine Housebulders' land banks has risen by 25pc in the past five years to around 838,000. That is despite a series of Government reviews and policies meant to increase the rate of building"
(Housebulders sitting on 800,000 land bank as housing crisis deepens, 19 April 2020).
The recent case of Richard Desmond shows only too well the priorities of housing development under capitalism. Desmond had only 24 hours to have his development in Tower Hamlets, East London approved before community charges were imposed which would have cost him over £40m. In trying to get the housing Minister, Robert Jenrick, to overturn the Planning Inspector's decision, Desmond remarked:
"We appreciate the speed as we don't want to give Marxists loads of doe (sic) for nothing.
It was not that the Council in Tower Hamlets were "Marxists" - they weren't, they were just reformist Labour Councillors. However it was Desmond's determination to prevent £40m from being used for housing workers in one of the poorest boroughs in the country. "Nothing" was the working class being described by Desmond. That was Desmond's view of our class. "Nothing". His only aim was to maximise his profits. Under capitalism it is profit before human need. Capitalists have no interest in directly meeting human need. Politically repellent and a fortune made in pornography, Desmond at least tells the truth about his interest and objective, albeit privately to a Minister of State.
The housing crisis will remain while capitalism remains. The only solution to the housing crisis is the establishment of socialism.
No Housing crisis for the rich
When it comes to the capitalist class there is no housing crisis. The housing crisis just affects the working class. The capitalist class can afford the best money can buy.
Post Coronavirus pandemic the rich are back into the housing market. A Russian energy industry billionaire bought a five-bedroom seven-storey townhouse overlooking St James's Park, two days after the government allowed the re-opening of the housing market. According to a spokesman from an independent luxury property buying agent:
"Buyers are wanting more space, a private garden and direct access to a park." They want grass and they have the money to pay for it" (GUARDIAN 6 June 2020).
And the rich do not just have one large detached house or even an extra cottage in Cornwall. They have property portfolios; an investment bank in which to store their unearned income. A house in London, others spread abroad at smart and secluded locations, maybe an island, and somewhere in the countryside with its grade 1 listed status, six bedrooms, tennis court and gym.
Housing the rich has spawned an internet pastime: visiting the houses of multi-billionaires from the loneliness of a council house bedroom. Web sites are devoted for the poor to look at how the rich live; their gated houses, isolation from the rest of us, the display of unimaginable wealth and privilege. It is rightly derided as housing porn.
New Slums and Social Cleansing
For most buyers the commodities, which pass for working class housing, are shoddy and ill-built. A Shelter Report said "A lot of these houses are going to fall apart 30 years down the line. They are not built to last" (SHELTER March 2017). These houses are the slums of tomorrow.
The housing crisis will persist. For it does not matter how many cheap and utilitarian homes are constructed they will always be stamped "Working class housing: second best". Estate Agents talk about "getting onto the property ladder". The "property ladder" for the working class is not the same as it is for the capitalist class. It has one or two rungs, rotten, and leads nowhere.
Social housing budgets have been cut while Local Authorities, mostly Labour controlled councils, are forced to go into partnerships with private companies to rip up estates, displace families and construct new housing which local people cannot afford - social cleansing it is called. A detailed study of the impact on social cleansing in London has been recently given in a study "The social cleansing of London council estates: everyday experiences of 'accumulative dispossession'" by two sociologists, L. Lees and H. White. They write:
Social cleansing can be understood as a geographical project made up of processes, practices, and policies designed to remove council estate residents from space and place, what we call a 'new accumulative form of (state-led) gentrification' (JOURNAL OF HOUSING STUDIES, 11th October 2019)
Council tenants are being forced out of their homes due to estate renewal, welfare reforms, poverty, and the precariousness of low-income work in the gig economy and zero hour contracts. They search for homes; they search for grass. They search for something better.
Capitalism can only give the working class second best. It can only ever give them working class housing whether it is rented or mortgaged. Until there is socialist production directly meeting human need the housing the working class get will be mean and squalid and unfit for the purpose of human beings. Housing under capitalism will always be stained by class and class relations.
In search of Grass
Take, for example, Hull. In Hull, there are thousands of empty properties and thousands of workers unable to afford to live in them (HULL DAILY MAIL 11 March 2019). Many workers want housing but cannot afford to buy or rent. The wages they receive means that they cannot afford to buy a house. Capitalism cannot meet their needs. It never has done and it never will.
In the late 1960s, the poet Douglas Dunn wrote poems about Hull collected together in a book entitled TERRY STREET. The book by Douglas Dunn from which, TERRY STREET, is taken opens up a world that has not disappeared. Hull may have lost its tight streets and regular series of back-to-back cul-de-sacs running at right-angles into it but it has not lost the housing crisis which seems to follow the working class around from one generation to the next.
Terry Street is a short poem. But its imagery depicts the sadness of working class life which is denied grass, lawns, and spaces in which to relax and do nothing.
"On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus US Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister's goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass."
If Douglas Dunn gave Hull Terry Street, then John Cooper Clark gave Manchester Beasley Street "a sociologist's paradise":
From the boarding houses and the bedsits
Full of accidents and fleas
Someone gets it
Where the Missing Persons freeze
Wearing dead men's overcoats
You can't see their feet
A riff joint shuts - and opens up
Right down on Beasley Street
"BEASLEY STREET deals with poverty in 1980s inner-city Salford. It is a bleak view of desperate housing conditions.
Squalor, filth and rat infested housing:
Hot beneath the collar
An inspector calls
Where the perishing stink of squalor
Impregnates the walls
The rats have all got rickets
They spit through broken teeth
The name of the game is not cricket
Caught out on Beasley Street
Little has changed. Manchester still faces an affordable housing crisis, as families on housing benefit face a rise in poverty levels and being priced out of the city.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism their research suggests that the city is facing an affordable housing crisis partly due to a freeze in housing benefits.
"The snapshot data shows that just 1.6 % of two-bedroom private rental households in the city are affordable to people on housing benefit. The benefit would have to increase by £188 each month to make the bottom 30% of the two-bed properties affordable" (THE NORTHERN QUOTA 4 October 2019).
More and more families are being made homeless and forced to live in temporary accommodation or hotels. Joining them are the homeless and asylum seekers. In 2018, more than 4,300 homeless assessments were carried out in the city, the third highest number outside of London.
Despite the gentrification of sectors of Manchester and the demolition of 1960s estates the poor and the desperate still live in inadequate housing - "a sociologist's paradise".
Denied Grass: The Poverty of Lock-Down
The inhabitants from Terry Street were on their way to the High Rise Flats being constructed with no grass and no lawns to mow. Houses like Terry Street were demolished to make way for the Utopian promise of high rise living.
Between 1945 and 1975, the UK built 440,000 high-rise flats for the working class to live-in. They were meant to be housing utopias. Two decades later they had become vertical slums. Many have been demolished. Those that have been refurbished are having their dangerous cladding removed to prevent another Grenfell Tower fire tragedy. According to the BBC (June 12 2020), about 2,000 buildings in England are still potentially at risk nearly three years after the Grenfell tower fire. Capitalism's utopias kill.
The Coronavirus also highlighted the housing crisis and the poverty of the working class. The disease exposed vulnerable sections of the working class, many of whom were immigrants and asylum seekers, experiencing housing deprivation in over-crowded housing or having to live in poorly maintained estates. The social mix of Grenfell Tower gave a snap shot of housing provision for, those on low pay or who were unemployed. Black and minority ethnic groups are more likely to experience overcrowding than white working class backgrounds. However poor housing is not a race issue but a class issue. Poor housing is caused by capitalism and the private ownership by the capitalist class of the means of production and distribution.
Three hundred and seventy thousand (20 per cent of all households) in London experience overcrowding. Black and minority ethnic groups in London are two to three times more likely to be overcrowded than White British households (Better housing Briefing, Race equality Foundation, 2011). Little has changed since the report was published. A report by the Kings Fund tentatively showed that workers from Bame (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) backgrounds were more likely at threat from covid-19 due to being concentrated in poorer areas, in overcrowded houses and inter-generational households (Ethnic Minority Deaths and Covid-19. 30 April 2020). Reforms cannot end the housing crisis. The government libraries are full of reforms enacted to end the housing crisis. The reforms failed but the housing crisis persists from one generation of workers to the next.
Terry Street, as a metaphor, could be a poem for our times: a search for grass. A poem of poverty for tens of thousands of workers with young children who were forced during the Covid-19 lock-down to remain in high rise flats with no access to gardens or parks; the elderly shut in care homes stalked by an unseen virus, the immigrants living in run-down buildings or converted garages at the bottom of someone’s garden.
Here is a snap shot from LEEDS LIVE (26 March 2020) of a family in a Leeds Estate under lock-down:
"Tracy Stubley will have to remain in her two-bedroom apartment at Burnsall Grange, Armley, with her husband, niece and four-year-old grandniece for the next two weeks.
She said: "We've been isolated today because my little niece has a temperature. It's going to be a nightmare now.
"We'll be getting on each other's nerves by the end of the 14 days, I can tell you that.
"It would be so bad if we had a garden for the little'un. I just don't know what we're going to do."
Lock-down for these workers becomes a secular hell. A housing crisis mashed with a pandemic. Where poverty and ethnicity means death: a cruel way to live and die in a social system that doesn't care.
Why put up with the housing crisis? Why be prepared to accept second best. Why not have access to the best housing society can produce. For this to occur, capitalism has to be abolished. Workers have to establish the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
And socialism will not come about through inertia. Socialism requires the democratic and active [participation of a socialist majority. Without socialists socialism is impossible and the problems, like poor and inadequate housing, will continue to blight our class.