Join a National Day of Action on Housing
Housing is a basic need but millions of us are struggling to find a decent place to live at a price we can afford. Like everything else, the cost of rents and mortgages are shooting up, and the prospect of owning a home is ever further out of reach for working people whose wages are not keeping up with rising prices.
Our housing system is broken but our politicians keep coming up with the wrong fixes: More money for house builders to build housing that most people and our planet can’t afford. More incentives for banks to lend a few people more money so the same house builders can keep their prices high.
These policies are great for house builders who’s current profit margins range from 12% to 30%, but disastrous for the people forced to live in overpriced and insecure private rented housing whose numbers have more than doubled in the last 20 years to 4.6 million today.
Instead of funding council housing with reasonable rents, democratically elected landlords, and lifetime tenancies, the government is spending billions on ‘affordable housing’ which can be up to 85% of market rate. Many of these so-called affordable homes are built by Housing Associations such as Peabody who have been exposed for overcharging and dangerously poor housing conditions, and who are also now major private property developers in their own right. These government grants are also going to an increasing number of for-profit companies who are now Registered Providers of Affordable Homes, such as Simply Affordable Homes which was bought last year by the property giant Savills, who don’t even have to pretend they have ‘charitable’ motivations for cashing in on social housing grants.
The government housing agency, Homes England, owns thousands of hectares of public land and has a land assembly fund of over £1 billion to buy more, but instead of using it to provide council housing, it boasts about its success in “increasing the supply of public land [to private developers] and speeding up the rate that it can be built on”.
This is how public money and public land are being stolen to further enrich the property tycoons, when what we urgently need is more public and democratic control over land and housing so that it can be shared fairly to meet everyone’s needs.
Why should we leave housing to the private market when the result is hundreds of thousands of houses used as holiday homes, investment properties or just left empty?
Why should we encourage the destructive craze of demolishing social housing and replacing them with luxury apartments for the sake of ‘economic growth’ that only benefits a tiny few?
The solution to the housing crisis is the same as the solution to the climate crisis - we need to share housing fairly, we need to protect our green spaces and the natural world, and only build what we need, thoughtfully and sustainably.
Instead of public money promoting rampant overdevelopment and profiteering, we need public investment in providing secure, affordable, warm, dry homes that meet people’s needs and reduce our energy costs and the cost to our environment.
Across the UK people are challenging the madness and the unfairness of the housing market. At the forefront of this fight are residents on social housing estates trying to stop demolition of their homes and stop regeneration schemes that are destroying the environment and causing blatant social cleansing.
Activists from the Radical Housing Network, Refurbish Don’t Demolish and Housing Rebellion are calling on other housing campaigners to join with them for a national Day of Action in July to link up and amplify the message of these local housing campaigns.
Our unifying message is we want housing for need not greed.
Our demand is:
Refurbish Don’t Demolish!
We will have a planning meeting on zoom on May 10th at 7pm to finalise the arrangements for the day of action. There’s lots to discuss and we welcome everyone’s input about the demands, the speakers, the timing, the promotion and anything else we need to do to make this day a success!
Come along to the meeting or contact us in advance about how you would like to be involved…
Can your organisation support the day of action?
Can you support a protest in your local area as part of the day of action?
Can you provide a speaker for an online rally on the day of action?
Can you help with social media and other promotion work?
Can you help with filming or technical support for live-streaming the protests and the rally?
Contact or join the Housing Rebellion whatsapp chat to join the discussion