FRFI is pleased to publish this guest article by Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing, a working collective committed to building active resistance to the Housing and Planning Bill and the demolition of social housing.
Sink estates
Since its regeneration following the 1985 riots, the Broadwater Farm housing estate in north London has had one of the lowest crime rates of any urban area in the world. In an independent 2003 survey of all the estate’s residents, only 2% considered the area unsafe, the lowest number for any area in London. The estate also has the lowest rent arrears in Haringey. With £33m investment, a neighbourhood office, children’s nursery and health centre have been built; social projects, sports clubs and youth programmes have been funded; concierges introduced; murals painted; communal gardens planted; transport links improved; shops and amenities made accessible; a more representative Tenants and Residents Association elected, and an estate isolated out on a flood plain of the River Moselle has been turned around and integrated into the Tottenham community. And yet 30 years later, David Cameron described Broadwater Farm this month as one of the causes of the 2011 riots in Tottenham, and home, apparently, to ‘criminals’, ‘troubled families’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’.
This alone shows how out of touch the Conservative government is with the working class communities they are intent on destroying. Rioting is caused by poverty, deliberately run-down housing, social exclusion, and – as was the case with both the 1985 and 2011 riots – aggressive and racist policing. It is not caused by architecture, Brutalist, high-rise or otherwise. But it also shows how long the mud flung by commentators who have never walked, let alone lived, on a council estate sticks to the homes and lives of the people they house. Tar one estate, and in the minds of the public you’ve tarred them all.
This is, of course, precisely the purpose of David Cameron’s recent statement, which lays the ground for his plans to demolish a hundred of what he calls ‘the worst sink estates’ in the UK. Broadwater Farm tops the list purely on its proximity to the Tottenham riots. But what the Prime Minister failed to mention is its other proximity, which is to the huge swathe of regeneration projects being pushed through by Haringey’s Labour council, which last month granted planning permission on what – once Tottenham Hotspur FC relocates – will be a 585-apartment, 35-storey, £600m development with zero affordable housing. The adjacent Northumberland Park estate and its 1,400 council homes are to be demolished to make way for the new stadium. As are the 300 homes of the Love Lane estate, which unfortunately for the residents stands between the new ground and the train station.
Cameron has only promised to demolish – ‘Blitz’ is the typically bombastic word he used – some of the hundred estates; others, he said, might need investment. But the ridiculously low sum of £140m he has promised for the task wouldn’t even pay for the bulldozers, let alone rehouse the existing council tenants. Representative of the Prime Minister’s slurs against their residents, Broadwater Farm is also indicative of their fate. Like most so-called ‘regeneration’ schemes, the option to refurbish the estate has been found ‘financially unviable’, and in its place a programme of demolition and redevelopment has only stalled, for the moment, on the obligation to re-house the 90% of its 3,800 residents who live in secure tenancies. This, and not some causal relation between post-war housing estates and crime, is the real context of the Prime Minister’s statement.
Starter Homes
The model for the government’s programme of house building is outlined in Part 1, Chapter 1 of the Housing and Planning Bill, under the definition of what they call ‘Starter Homes’. As part of the government’s ‘national crusade to transform generation rent into generation buy’, the Bill introduces a new duty to build Starter Homes, which will be available to first-time buyers under the age of 40 for at least 20% off market value. This legislation supplants the existing Section 106 provision for building homes for social rent at around 50% of market rate.
However, since Starter Homes are to be sold at £450,000 in Greater London and £250,000 across the rest of England, they will remain far beyond the reach of the vast majority of people. According to the homeless charity Shelter, Starter Homes are in fact unaffordable across 98% of the country for people on low incomes, and across 58% of the country for those on middle incomes.
Moreover, like most of the Housing and Planning Bill, the truth about Starter Homes is even worse than how they are being presented to the public. As section 2 of the legislation on Starter Homes explicitly states, the Secretary of State may amend both the definition of ‘first-time buyer’ and the price cap, with different price limits for different areas within and outside of London.
A look at the building figures over the past year strongly suggests that £450,000 in London, and £250,000 across the rest of England, is the least, not the most, that Starter Homes will cost. In 2014-15, over 66,000 ‘affordable’ homes – that is, homes sold or rented at up to 80% of market rate – were built in England; fewer than 10,000 of these were for social rent, the lowest since records began in 1991-92. In London the figures are even worse. Property developers sold 5,300 two-bedroom homes costing between £650,000 and £1m in the past year, but only 2,000 for around £300,000. And this was when there was still an obligation under Section 106 to build so-called ‘affordable’ housing. That’s gone now. As for the condition of being a first-time buyer, as paragraph 7 shows this too doesn’t exist. It’s put there purely to deceive the public.
In a carefully stage-managed amendment to the Bill, Zac Goldsmith, as part of the government’s campaign to get him elected as the next London Mayor, recently announced that for every council home lost under the new legislation forcing local authorities to sell off ‘high value’ properties, he would build two new ‘affordable’ homes. Where and how councils will afford to build them, and where their current residents will end up living, he didn’t say. But he followed up with the caveat that it would be ‘really difficult’ to build like-for-like replacements in Kensington and Chelsea or Westminster, or, for that matter, in Camden – as though bricks and mortar suddenly cost more when they cross borough boundaries.
We’d like to remind the hereditary millionaire that although the sale price of a property is determined by the profit margins of the land owner and developer and the commodity market on which it is sold, the material and labour required to build it remain the same. Despite his sound-bite promise of building ‘2-for-1’, it’s quite clear from section 7 of amendment 112, which extends the definition of affordable homes to include Starter Homes, that no homes will be built for anything like £450,000 in Kensington and Chelsea, where properties currently average over £1,900,000, or anywhere else in Central London.
Since the average price of a home in Greater London is currently approaching £600,000, and nearly a million pounds in Central London, there is little incentive for developers to build Starter Homes for less. Investors, however, will still qualify for the 20% discount paid for by the state. But unlike affordable homes, which retain their discount in perpetuity, Starter Homes can be sold at the full market rate five years from the date of their purchase. And their re-sale will accrue not only that subsidy, which is lost from the public purse forever, but also the profit from the increase in house prices – prices which the Housing and Planning Bill, by overseeing the demolition of London’s social housing stock, is designed to drive up.
Under the pretence of moving existing renters onto the property market, the Bill will in effect offer public subsidies for private investors and builders. The government has promised nearly £2.3bn of public money to build 200,000 of these Starter Homes by 2020. This is an additional incentive to further speculate in the London property market. Property wealth in Britain has increased by almost £400bn in the past two years, and now constitutes an economy in itself. Over the same period, the richest 10% of UK households have seen a 21% increase in their wealth from doing little more than watching their properties collectively generate more cash than entire countries.
It is this enormously inflated and lucrative property market, and not a sudden desire to help renters own their own homes, that is driving the government’s housing policy. The only thing standing between them, their financial backers, and the greatest jumble sale in London’s housing history, are the people and communities that live on the land they need to build on – communities like the residents of Broadwater Farm.
Blitzkrieg
Because the government uses a form of Newspeak to promote its housing policy, I’ve been forced to place many of its terms in inverted commas: ‘affordable’ homes that no-one but the rich can buy; ‘starter’ homes that won’t be lived in by their buyers; ‘first-time buyers’ who will be property speculators; ‘high value’ council homes that includes a third of the social housing stock, and anything over £400,000 in London; ‘high income’ families who will be forced to pay market rates on a minimum wage; ‘regeneration’ schemes that will demolish the estates they are meant to save; ‘public’ land that is owned by private investment vehicles; ‘sink’ estates that have been deliberately starved of funds. A housing ‘crisis’ that has been created by the same people who will benefit from the legislation passed to solve it.
The government is lying to us. There’s no surprise in that; but the homes of hundreds of thousands of people will be demolished or forcibly sold on the back of those lies, and the lives of millions of others made significantly harder by the knock-on effects. An unregulated private rental market and increased property speculation will affect renters and would-be house buyers alike. The ratio between house prices and personal disposable income in London is currently at an all-time high, surpassing levels before the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007, and on schedule to form a bubble of overpriced housing by 2017. Over the next quarter of a century rents are predicted to rise at twice the rate of incomes, and renters will be twice as likely to live in poverty. 1.9 million households are already on housing waiting lists in Britain. 61,000 are living in temporary accommodation. 45,800 London households are currently homeless. And rough sleeping in London has more than doubled over the past five years. The Housing and Planning Bill will only make these figures worse. Yet earlier this month David Cameron told Parliament: ‘People get too hung up on these definitions. The definition of affordable housing is a house that someone can afford to buy or rent.’
So let me end by using words to say what they mean. The Housing and Planning Bill is not designed to address the so-called housing ‘crisis’. On the contrary, it has been designed to exploit that crisis for the political and financial gain of the Conservative Party and its backers. The history of Broadwater Farm shows that we should be investing in England’s council estates and the communities that live there, not demolishing their homes and replacing them with investment opportunities few families, let alone those currently on the estates, will be able to afford. But as the Prime Minister’s threat to ‘Blitz’ these estates makes clear, the legislation the Bill proposes, which will soon be law, is a programme not of house building but of social cleansing.
Simon Elmer, ASH
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Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 249 February/March 2016
