Homes in crisis

I live in Kent, and they are building a lot of houses around me. There doesn’t seem to be a corner of waste ground, narrow field or scrap of apparently barren land, that isn’t now flying the flags of property developers offering the lures of home comforts and luxury living - and 90% of it is pretty much useless.

Before I go on, let me state here that, without the somewhat premature death of both my parents, who were old enough to not even have been Boomers, I would not have the house I currently live in. I would have a house, because I had a small but lovely flat while my mother was still alive, but if she’d got over the cancer that took her far too soon, I doubt I’d be living here. If the death of your parents can ever be considered a privilege, then I am privileged.

I was definitely privileged growing up, as my father was an architect, and as such was able to buy a large plot of land with a terribly rundown and uninspiring cottage on it, safe in the knowledge that he could, in the fullness of time, turn it into a large, sprawling house with enough land to nearly meet my parent’s Good Life dream, even if it turned me into something of a social outcast at school, when everyone aspired to the five bedroom, double garage living of 80’s excess.

My Father came from a post war childhood, living in a London which was flattened and grey, but was re-building with the modernist optimism of the 1950’s, where everything aspirational was primary coloured and open plan, heavy on the Scandinavian. Unfortunately, the British never having had a great deal of aesthetic education, most of those ideals were rather watered down when faced with the need to provide cheap, affordable housing to a notoriously conservative public. High rise living was let down not by it’s ideals, but by the cheap-ass approach to its creation, where corner cutting and the use of cheap materials would eventually lead to the Grenfell Fire, which is what you get if you prioritize the view out of the tower blocks of rich bankers, over the safety of the poorer people they look down upon.

Another thing you got with the intense capitalism of 80’s Thatcherism, was the sale of much of the post war council housing stock, with the idea that home ownership would somehow make everyone middle class, and presumably Tory voters. Of all the evil chickens which have come home to roost, this is up there with the worst; it was barely 15 years later that we began to see what this really meant.

People bought council houses and then sold them as soon as they could, in order to make a quicky but quite hefty buck. They then left, breaking up communities which had once been full of multi-generational families. Most of the housing stock they sold did not go to families and young people at the start of their lives, because unsurprisingly, people who would have qualified for social, rented housing, were never in a position to buy, especially as people realised that they could make a lot more money renting housing out to them, but without the rent protections of social housing. This was when the buy-to-let market got going - people had to rent because they couldn’t afford to buy, those who could afford to buy bought more, the prices went up, but those who had more property could buy more to rent, and as it was a Landlords market, people had to pay what they asked. As an adjunct, the number of people unable to afford their rent, even when they were in full time employment went up, so the demands on the social security system went up, not least because there were no social houses to move people into.

Now the idea seems to be that if we build more houses, we will house more people, which at first glance make sense. Only of course it doesn’t, because we are not building houses - the private sector are being enabled to build more houses, and the private sector build houses to make money. They build four and five bedroom houses with double garages, because a five bedrooms doesn’t cost a lot more than a three bed when you’ve got the spade work done, because more expense comes from the literal ground-work of foundations and facilities. They may have to make a percentage if those house “affordable’, but affordable still rules out the vast majority of people unable to get a mortgage, even if it’s 25% less that the next person. However much you help them to buy, they are still only available to people able to buy, so all you’re doing is making the gap between homeowners and renters bigger.

Added to this, the houses are just so……dull. The dread conservative nature of a culture who only thinks in terms of squares boxes and driveways, means that we have locked in our idea of what a house is, to the most environmentally damaging and soulless expression of home. It means we don’t use all timber construction, which is a low carbon material that breathes and lives with the humans who live in it, it means we build on flood plains with out building houses that, for example, have nothing on the ground floor which can be damaged by water, unlike the homes of people far more in tune with their environment. We paint things white because white has become synonymous with modernism, with realising that the images so beloved of my father, of the housing created by the great modernist dreamer like Corbusier, were not white. The appeared to be white, because at the time they were photographed using black and white film, but were in fact a riot of pastel shades of the rainbow, rendered blank by the camera lense.

We have some of the brightest and best architects in the world educated here, and there are hundreds of people offering a different ideas of what a home can be, ones which take the weird spaces in towns and shops and make them warm and welcoming and flexible. They are building homes from straw, which almost need no heating they are so well insulated, they are building homes which take weeks not months to complete - but until we change what the boring, narrow minded money types will lend on, we’re not going to reap that vast environmental and social benefits this could bring.

15 minutes cities, bring it on! Who doesn’t want to feel that, with in an easy stroll they might find everything they need to have a good life, with the car just for weekend adventures - and yet this perfectly reasonable theory, in essence the village ideal we’re all mean to yearn for, was hi-jacked by conspiracy theorists and turned into a Soviet Style Gulang - because after all, you can get a lot more five bed, double garage homes built out in the country, and you need that double garage for all the driving you need to do just to buy some milk.

The only way to solve the housing crisis, is to take the building of new home out of the hands of the private sector, or, at the very least, make them give a percentage of what they build back to the people who’s green spaces they are building on. Yes, give the councils back the houses that Thatcherism took from them, which may seem unfair, but is it really as unfair as giving one generation the right to buy them, while screwing the rest of us over in the future?

I mean not me, of course - I have dead parents and so I’m ok - but perhaps it would be good to think that my children won’t have to hope my genetic inheritance is a lousy one, just t get their own place to live.

If you struggle to make your living space feel like the sanctuary you deserve, look for colour. Even if you rent, you can bring colour into your space with fabrics, pictures on the wall and soft-furnishings. This is such a trite thing to say, but it’s actually not easy to take the plunge when you’re so used to living in a white box, and if it really scares you, that’s fine, stick to white! But if you’ve ever been curious about how colour might change your space, start with yellow. I’m serious, get a bit of yellow into your room; it’s the happiest colour there is and it might just surprise you as to what it can do!