Treat houses as assets rather than homes and this is what happens

by Guest Fri Feb 12, 2016 4:38 pm

As incomes wobble and rents soar, it is no wonder that record numbers of tenants are being evicted. And it is only going to get worse

How was your day yesterday? You probably got a bit bored at work – Thursdays generally do that to people. And it was a bit cold out in the morning, so maybe that annoyed you too. Still, the stats suggest that, yesterday, something like 170 people in England and Wales were forcibly evicted from their rented homes by bailiffs. So mustn’t grumble, eh?

This delightful fact comes from the Ministry of Justice, which has been keeping tabs on such things for 15 years now. The figures show that, in 2015, the number of households evicted by county court-appointed bailiffs hit 42,728 (most households, of course, contain more than one person). That number is not only the highest it’s ever been, it’s climbed by more than 53% in just five years, an even greater insecurity for Britain’s hard-working families.

The situation, as with so many things, is at its worst in London, where 16 boroughs – half of the city – were included in the 20 local authorities where repossessions were highest. That’s not altogether surprising: with the average London rent now standing at more than £1,500 a month, perhaps the bigger shock is quite how many Londoners haven’t been evicted from their homes yet.

We should be clear about what this figure means. This is not the total number of people forced to leave their homes – because they couldn’t pay their rent, because they weren’t looking after the place, because their landlord just didn’t fancy them living there any more. This is just the tip of a very big iceberg.

There is a formal legal process for evicting tenants, in which the arrival of a court-appointed bailiff is very much the last resort. Other tenants will have left their homes of their own accord following a notice from their landlord (step one) or the courts (step two). The rise in the number of people who’ve only left once burly men arrive to physically turf them out suggests a rise in the number of people who have nowhere else to go.

Given that, perhaps the most worrying of the barrage of figures released yesterday is this one: at least 19,000 of the households evicted by bailiffs – not far off half – were evicted from social housing. They’ll now find themselves at the mercy of a private rental sector that is more expensive, less regulated and less secure than the home they’ve just been thrown out of. It’s not altogether clear that this will add to the sum of human happiness.

There are several reasons why evictions should be rising so precipitously. Wages are stubbornly refusing to rise, despite the convincing way in which George Osborne has learned to repeat the phrase “long-term economic plan”. Throw in swingeing welfare cuts, and many household incomes have actually fallen.

But while incomes are wobbling, rents have continued to soar. Britain’s population is growing rapidly, its housing stock isn’t, and for most of the last 15 years buy-to-let landlords have been squeezing first-time buyers out of the market. The result is that more and more renters are chasing the same pool of homes. And when more people want something, its price will inevitably rise.

There’s something more philosophical at the root of the housing crisis, too, I think. It’s this: over the last 30 years we’ve come to see housing not as a form of infrastructure or public service, but as an asset. Even as the government has taken baby steps towards getting more homes built, most of its policies – housing benefit caps, the replacement of social rents with “affordable” rents, the frankly hilarious reclassification of £450,000 starter homes as “affordable housing” – have been built on the assumption that you only have a right to a home if you can pay for it. This assumption has remained unshaken, no matter how ludicrous housing costs have become. And that’s a problem. Those eviction figures are a reminder that a growing pool of people can’t afford a home. But you don’t stop needing a roof over your head just because you can’t afford one.

The government has made it clear it doesn’t think the state is in the business of providing people with homes. As should be blindingly obvious by now, the market isn’t going to do it either. And demand for housing keeps growing. You think those eviction figures are frightening now? You wait. Just you wait.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/houses-assets-homes-housing-tenants-evicted

by Syl Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:26 pm

It's a sad thought that in this day and age in a wealthy country so many people are living on the streets and using food banks in order to eat.
I read an article today about the people who are holding down jobs who are homeless. They sleep wherever they can, railway carriages, parks, homeless shelters (if they are lucky) then wash and dress wherever they can and go to work.