As Tom Durning says: “We think we have it bad?”
All over London, so-called sheds with beds have been cropping up like toadstools, presented to planning authorities as family home extensions but then surreptitiously rented out to strangers. Many of these are poky warrens let out to the desperate, part of the growing number of Londoners who have lost hope of gaining social housing and are forced to make do with whatever they can get. The government has vowed to tear down these new shanties, with UK housing minister Grant Shapps and some press cameras even joining in a raid on one. It is unlikely that they would be such a problem, however, if the government hadn’t cut funding for social housing by 50 percent, pushing poor renters into the private sector….
In a trend common across London boroughs, Newham built a grand total of zero affordable homes this year and has even considered dumping welfare claimants in cheaper northern English towns. It’s no wonder backyard speculators have found a niche in this dire situation. When the authorities would rather whisk the unwanted poor out of the capital, they at least make a precarious form of city life feasible.
Private affordable housing solutions like sheds with beds should not always be looked on negatively. First of all, these are private individuals making decisions about what is best for them. People are coming to the UK and coming to London because they think that it will make them better off. That housing is expensive in London is no secret, yet people still come. Obviously some people are mistaken or don’t have much of a choice, but most obviously think it is a worthwhile trade-off.
I have been influenced in this view by Kowloon Walled City. Obviously this place looked like a dystopian nightmare at its apogee in the 70’s and early 80’s. Yet people still came there and made a life there and apparently in many respects quite a normal life. This makes me think that there is value in just getting out of the way and letting people get on with their lives. HK itself could also stand in for the same idea. The whole area around and including Kowloon Walled City was a refugee camp after WWII, yet those people bettered themselves first by building a shantytown that from pictures looks like a low-rise equivalent of Kowloon Walled City and then by moving out to more modern apartments.
Obviously substandard housing isn’t very nice, but instituting minimum standards can just have the effect of raising the price of housing and rendering it unaffordable.
Social housing as the solution to housing affordability also has its problems. Many social housing schemes have not worked out well and have become slums. Social housing that is provided without some expectation of an end date can also become a welfare trap. People will live in it for generations.