Stay at Home: how do we entrench the wins on housing?
Overnight, all our worlds became very small. Our homes are suddenly everything – our offices, our schools, our gyms, our pubs, our spaces for creativity.
This means the great inequalities in our housing market are being felt so much more acutely. For some, there’s a garden or a spare room for a bit of peace and quiet or an office space to work from home.
But if you’re a family of five in a one bed flat without any outside space, weeks of lockdown are making you feel trapped, suffocated. Working from home isn’t so easy when your shared house doesn’t have a living room and your workspace is your bed.
Government advice about isolating in a different room from your family is often simply not possible. The cruelty of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ is now clear: it specifically denies people in social housing the right to space.
In all our neighbourhoods there will be carers, nurses and hospital porters who are risking their lives to care for us and then returning to homes that are too small, damp or even dangerous.
We know too that there are thousands of people trapped in truly awful circumstances: if you are a family spending lockdown in temporary accommodation you are likely to be in a hotel or a B&B, confined to one room, sharing a bathroom or a kitchen with strangers.
And, of course, there are so many people for whom home is not a sanctuary. 14 women and two children were killed at home in the first three weeks of lockdown. Domestic violence helplines are reporting huge increases in people seeking help.
We do not have the available properties to move all these families into when lockdown ends, yet surely we all feel more powerfully than ever that we owe them a decent, safe home to call their own.
Coronavirus has also revealed the precariousness of renting in the private rented sector. Yes, there have been wonderful landlords reassuring their tenants that they will keep their homes come what may. But there are thousands of renters who are terrified that they will be evicted as lockdown eases. That you are at the whim of your landlord’s compassion was best summed up by the tweet from the paramedic who reported his landlord was evicting him as he ‘couldn’t risk’ the virus coming in to ‘his’ property.
Too many people housed in the private rented sector are paying unaffordable rents that are causing huge personal stress. We have seen the government temporarily increase benefit levels for those in the private rented sector, an acknowledgement of how far behind real rent levels benefit rates were. Making this change permanent would be a real help, but what so many households renting privately need is social housing.
Homes fit for our (new) heroes
The spotlight coronavirus has shone on the housing crisis is pretty bleak. So what possible grounds can we have for optimism? And what is our strategy for achieving change?
Firstly, communication is key. The whole nation has suddenly felt what the housing crisis means – for better or worse. We have to appeal directly to all those who have found such comfort in their home during this time to support the building of new homes.
There are many loud voices who oppose development at nearly every turn, especially the development of social housing. Now is the time to speak out and drown these voices out. This means signing petitions and joining campaigns. It means supporting housing developments locally. It means those of us working in housing working even harder with new councillors, who are often the ones to approve or turn down planning applications, to feel confident in making the case for building. It means talking to people with all the emotion we associate with home, rather than through the technical jargon of housing policy.
We have to build public support to ensure that building new social housing is seen as central to our economic and social recovery.
The last major housebuilding effort this country saw was after the Second World War (following a similar but smaller one as part of the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ drive after the First World War). Times of shared danger and common endeavour have historically been the spur to build high quality new homes in this country and that must be recaptured as part of our post-coronavirus settlement.
Immediately, Housing Associations and local authorities should be able to acquire land as quickly and cheaply as possible. Likewise, they should be able to buy new homes that can’t sell on the open market at vastly reduced rates and let them to people who need them most. This should be followed by significant government investment to kick start building – providing new, affordable homes and thousands of jobs. There is a real opportunity to think differently about how we build with digital modelling and various kinds of factory-build complementing traditional housebuilding.
Homes fit for heroes of the coronavirus crisis and those who have been most impacted by it. Homes which are affordable, built to the highest environmental standards, with outside space.
We have to make sure the volume housebuilders understand their responsibilities in a mass home building programme. Too often new homes are found to be of poor quality, and some of the smallest in Europe. It’s easy to reject development if this is what we are building. We have to be creating homes and places we would all be proud to live in.
We have to show too that building new homes isn’t just about our own front doors, it’s about creating and investing in communities.
Places for people
For many, being cut off from friends and family means our relationships in the places we live have transformed. Street WhatsApp groups provide support and kindness. Socially-distanced evening drinks are starting with more and more of us having a glass of something on our doorsteps and shouting across the road to others, seeing friendly faces, having some company.
Local mutual aid groups are organising and providing shopping, nappies, pharmacy deliveries to neighbours. And, of course, the Thursday evening ritual of clapping to show our appreciation for those on the frontline of the crisis. The power of these few minutes is amazing: not just to show our thanks but to do so together. We look forward to it each week.
As we have been changing individually there has been much change for organisations too.
PlaceShapers’ members exist to build social and affordable homes. But they have always been proud to be much more than a landlord, working with and serving their residents and wider communities.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the last month. Helplines and online support have been bolstered to help those worried about their finances. Residents are being reassured that they won’t lose their homes if they can’t pay their rent due to loss of income during coronavirus. Everywhere I look, social landlords’ repairs staff – who can’t currently carry out anything other than essential property repairs – are being repurposed as food delivery drivers. In some places staff are helping reopen hospitals. Thousands of phone-calls are being made each week to older residents or isolated people to ensure they have the support they need. Millions of pounds are being invested in community hardship funds, with schemes delivered in partnership with local authorities and other partners.
The response of individuals and organisations has created a new strength in our communities, one which many feared had been lost. Now is the moment for us all to rethink how we relate to and support the people with whom we share a street or estate, but not necessarily a common life until now. New initiatives and partnerships will be needed more than ever in the years to come. The social recovery we can build together is every bit as important as the economic one, as Ashwin Kumar’s essay touches on.
The power of common endeavour
The final thing we must do is to continually remind ourselves, and government, of what is possible. For now, we can point to this time in history when we, as a nation, ended rough sleeping.
Following a huge, valiant partnership effort, more than 5,000 rough sleepers were moved off the streets in 72 hours. Support is being provided to them from staff working across housing associations, charities and voluntary groups. What’s more, the government’s coronavirus legislation effectively made rough sleeping illegal. It may not have been for the altruistic reasons campaigners champion but the end point is that we do not have thousands of people sleeping rough on our streets tonight.
Of course, the real work begins now. What happens when hotels want their rooms back, to let to paying guests? Then we have a choice: do we let people who have a chance to turn their lives around go back to the streets or do we come together to try and ensure they are supported to have a permanent home? This is the time to do all we can ensure it’s the latter.
The housing story of the last few weeks makes it irrefutable that with funding and political will we can achieve amazing things. What’s true for housing can be true for other issues too. We have to keep shouting about the power of this spirit of common endeavour.
Of course, we could be sitting here in a year’s time with the housing crisis even more severe, more people sleeping rough, more people threatened with eviction. We’re not naive, we know what’s at stake if we don’t win anything on housing.
But if we can continue to rethink how we work together in our communities to support each other; if housing providers can show that these communities are the foundation for our social recovery and new social housing is the foundation to our economic one; if we can keep showing the government what we have changed together; and if we can keep bringing together with us all those people who felt such gratitude in the sanctuary of their home during this most challenging of times: then, we might just be able to ensure our post-coronavirus country is one that provides decent, safe homes for everyone.