Birmingham FRFI supporters took to the streets in March to speak out against the housing crisis. This was part of our work fighting capitalism’s destruction of working-class housing and its continued denial of the supposed human right to shelter. Our aim was to build awareness of and resistance to this inhumane barbarism that is especially bad throughout the West Midlands.
With high numbers of estimated homeless deaths, a stock of council housing that is rapidly being sold off and a number of empty homes that exceeds the national average, the situation is getting dire. Yet there are 4,500 long-term empty homes in Birmingham; enough to house all the city’s homeless people.
Birmingham’s Labour council poses little opposition to the sell off of social housing. It is as unwilling as Conservative councils to directly confront the housing market in order to replenish social housing stock. Instead they focus on luxury developments and leave those most affected by cuts on the streets or in poor quality housing with little to no support, a fate which disproportionately affects Somali and Bangladeshi communities in Brum; exposing the systemic racism in housing.
As long as housing is privately owned and as long as land is hoarded as a store of wealth, this problem will only get worse. The council is aware of this and sides with private developers. And so we must build community-led, working-class resistance.
We demand:
- Make all Birmingham‘s empty homes available to the homeless.
- Build more social housing. End the selling off of existing council houses.
- Roll back austerity cuts to homelessness services.
- Remove all anti-homeless architecture from Birmingham’s streets.
