It would take a large tome rather than a blog to do justice to this subject. I am just going to touch on a tiny part of it.
Firstly, of course in the UK, we are much luckier than swathes of the world. My daughter and I see a small part of the global challenge from opposite ends of the earth; she is in Chile working for Habitat for Humanity www.nuestroshijosvuelvenacasa.cl , a global housing charity, and I sit on the Board of the housing association and charity, Peabody, in London.
The challenge they are addressing in Chile is housing disabled children who are so ill that they need their own space. Here she is with Simoney, who has just had a bone marrow transplant
In London, the population has been growing for many years, and now to keep up with the expected million more people in the next decade or so, we would need to build 50,000 homes per year instead of the 20,000 we are actually building.
That mismatch between demand and supply creates the tension of who gets housed in the housing that is available. What happens in practice is that the well off can afford housing, and some people in need on the local authority housing lists get access to social housing. Leaving the “squeezed middle” – the waiters, the office cleaners, the PAs, the bank clerks, the web designers, the actors, the academics all struggling to find housing.
There are no easy answers. Government needs to sell off unused land and property for housing development – but typically local residents never want more housing next door to them.
One of the more interesting developments at Peabody, is that the new east/west rail link, Crossrail, provides the opportunity to regenerate Thamesmead. This is an area which has suffered from being a backwater (downstream from the O2), badly connected to the rest of London. Crossrail will have a station at Abbey Wood, making the area more attractive to live in and increasing land values, thus providing the opportunity to invest in the whole area. It all takes a long time, but over a 20 year period I hope the combination of physical intervention and community investment will make a difference, and Thamesmead will be a place people actively want to live in rather than an area many ignore.
The heading of this thread tells the world all there is to know about the attitude of our consecutive governments and the tolerance of this nation to their mismanagement.
Each and every individual has a ‘human right’ to expect housing. And calling it a difficult issue, as if it is okay that some of the population are and remain homeless, is horrendous. On top of decades of neglect on this issue, you import millions of people knowing they will have nowhere to live unless it is given to them, as the majority of them are in dire need. You do this without making any reasonable effort to ensure they and us, will have a place to lay their heads. What kind of people are our government made up of?
Now, the brilliant plan by stooge IDS, is to force those who live in social housing, our very poorest, out of their present homes because they have an extra room or should we call it cupboard, and to openly hand their little haven over to those imported here, who happen to have more dependents, real or faux, who are seen as ‘more’ needy than those they plan to evict. In some cases councils are now willing to make the existing poor homeless in order to house those coming through our borders.
What does government intend to do about the extra rooms of those living in palaces and stately homes? Put up their council tax in order to pay for the devastation they are piling on the most vulnerable?
Lets look at a couple shall we?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBpGUc6B8jk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j29_fas76to
And by contrast. Those who are being ousted from their council houses in order to house others equally as in need.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQPNZJ2eYP4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIXSUQIZQHQ
Why are the British so willing to accept homelessness and eviction as a condition of life expectancy in this modern world. And this is accepted when government send tax payers Aid to those in other parts of the world? Why are our own poor and disadvantaged so despised by those who decide where ‘our’ money will be spent? Why is a person living in a tent in the desert of another country more ‘deserving’ than our own poor who need homes to live in? Are those abroad less on the scrounge because they live on another part of the planet? And don’t play the poor here don’t want to work game, as those in tents elsewhere similar to our own people, cannot find work and are therefore equal as beggars. There is no work right here for any, home grown or imported. Our industry and jobs have been outsourced to places where they receive as little as a pound a day. So their wage costs less than the meager minimum here. Which of course is why we have such a large immigrant influx. They are brought in as it is felt they are willing to live 20 to a room, akin to the poverty forced on our Victorian poor of the past. So, business want people willing to work for a bowl of rice a day because they can then afford the palaces above.
No country has a right to expect any people to come and settle without that country being in a position to house those they want to come here. And that does not mean forcing the indigenous into tents in order to accommodate those felt are a better bet.
The scandal that is taking place presently right here in the UK with the low paid, sick and disabled is not receiving anything like the exposure it should. Newspapers don’t want to inform the world of our disgrace. Officials prefer to tour the world with Hollywood celebrities highlighting the conditions of war when we have a war going on right here in our midst.
Food banks, homelessness, lack of health care, putting to death the elderly or the sick by neglect and mismanagement, is overlooked as we sing the song of look what happens in other countries. Our society is on its knees living in enforced austerity in order to give more to those who already have more than a hundred lifetimes of abundant wealth.