How bad is the London housing crisis? Very, very bad. It’s not some la-di-da first world problem of privileged southerners moaning about living in Zone 3 of the London underground, or that they can’t afford, as Mummy and Daddy did when newlyweds, to live in Chelsea or Islington. It’s not about the streets where Paddington Bear might have lived getting sold to oligarchs and sheikhs and then left half-empty. It is about mothers sharing single-room flats with their children in satellite towns, unable to afford the train fares to see their relatives, go to work or make hospital appointments. It is about victims of people-trafficking getting moved from one illegal garden shed to another.
It is also a matter of professionals in their 30s getting shuttled from one inadequate flat to another, driven by price-hiking landlords, and the misery and mental health problems that come with an insecure home. And, if nothing else moves you, it is about the economic damage to a city that contributes handsomely to the nation’s tax revenue, when businesses and essential services can’t get the staff they need because they can’t afford a home.
You possibly know a lot of this already. But as attempts to address the crisis are still inadequate – indeed, some government policies are making it worse – and as it shows little sign of improving in the near future, the facts of this human catastrophe can’t be stated too much or too strongly. The first achievement of Anna Minton’s book Big Capital is to do just that.
She states the basic case clearly and demonstrates it by talking to the dislocated and struggling people most affected. She sets out the factors – not regrettable side-effects of the inevitable workings of the free market, nor sad-but-necessary consequences of London’s runaway success – but deliberate decisions by government going back to the 1980s. She anatomises the devices that enable developers to wriggle out of their obligations to assist with affordable housing and the pressures applied on local authorities to maximise returns on their property at all costs, even when it is not in the best interests of their electorate to do so.
She tells the story – again not new, but worth repeating – of the squeezing of social housing from Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policies onwards, with consequent ballooning of spending on housing benefit, to be followed by punitive measures to address a problem made by government, but paid for by people least able to do so. She points out how wasteful and unproductive it is to pass public money to private landlords. She describes some of the grotesque products of the situation created by successive government policies, such as the rise of parasitic consultancies that boast of their ability to enrich their clients by gaming the system.
London’s current problems are the results not only of idiocy and greed but, sometimes, of responses to what were genuine problems. No one should be so nostalgic for the pre-Thatcher era as to forget the oppressions that came when local authorities were the biggest landlords in the city. Not all developers are avaricious monsters. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be furious at the knuckleheaded policy wonks and ministers who, apparently armed with a GCSE in Thatcherism, believe – despite abundant evidence to the contrary – that such concepts as the wisdom of the market and the trickle down of wealth will invariably find the answers.
Minton’s book is not perfect. Some of her explanations are sketchy and hard to follow and some of her examples are already well exposed elsewhere. She has a tendency to blanket condemnations and prejudgment that, although often deserved, weaken her credibility. In her world, every possible action of the development business is suspect. It is implied, without evidence, that it is always a bad thing when council estates are demolished and rebuilt. In fact, there are examples to the contrary: it’s a question of how it’s done, how many genuinely accessible homes are created, and whether or not existing residents are sent into exile. She overlooks instances where some kind of action has been taken to address the problems she talks about, such as changes in stamp duty and restrictions on renting through Airbnb.
The book would be stronger if she had talked more to the people she sees as enemies, and heard their side of the argument. She should also have talked more to people who are happy to have moved from an old estate to a well-appointed new flat – they exist – and she should acknowledge the valiant and often successful efforts of boroughs such as Brent, Enfield and Camden to build new developments that serve their populations.
It would also help her conclusion if she had been more open to those aspects that are not terrible, as she excludes people, institutions and actions that might contribute. She rightly gives examples of alternative ways to build homes and neighbourhoods, such as community land trusts, whereby profits are returned to benefit local communities and rents reflect local levels of income. She talks about the virtues of co-housing, self-build and the civilised forms of public housing found in European cities like Vienna. But she doesn’t manage to pull these suggestions together into a credible plan of action.
Then again, no one else has managed this difficult task, and in its fundamental instincts Big Capital is right. The current state of London housing is an affront to civilisation. It is going to require creative and determined public action, not blind faith in the market, to change it.
• Big Capital by Anna Minton is published by Penguin (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
