by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
According to the latest data, the number of vacant US homes touched 18.7 million in the second quarter of 2009, and we can but wonder how many are empty at the beginning of 2010.
While this is indeed a very daunting figure, it is more fun to put it in context. If we would assume four people per household, then the United States has currently enough surplus housing to put the entire population of the United Kingdom, that is to say Britain, with room to spare for Israel.
As some households are more than four while others are less this is just a play on numbers, but it shows how much housing stock there is that is not being used while, at the same time, there are millions of homeless men, women and children across the USA.
The same, in a way, would more than likely, also be a case in Britain as there too many homes stand unused and legislation has been suggested even that would have empty unused housing stock being taken over by the local authorities after the homes be empty for a number of months. While this, in my view, is a great idea it does not go down well with the owners of such properties nor with some libertarian advocacy groups. Both scream “state interference”.
Many years ago I encountered a housing estate in Hackey (East London) that was probably built around the 1930; solid brick four-storey apartment blocks, that stood empty with maybe two thousand apartments on it.
This estate was later torn down and replaced by a few hundred homes in a village style. All this while London had several tens of thousands of homeless people in need of a place and a rood over their head.
While the new estate looks rather nice it can, however, only accommodate a small part of what the old estate could and properly refurbished the old estate would, in my opinion, been much better than the new estate, even though there are gardens with some of the new houses.
In those days, however, the do-gooders had decided that blocks of flats (apartments), of whatever age, needed to be replaced with low density housing and claimsm were made that no one wanted to live in those places.
True, some people did not want to live there because of the fact that the places were not being maintained by the councils who owned the housing stock then but, with the right kind of refurbishment and a concierge service, for instance, and caretakers, those places could have become desirable places, in the same way as did the tower blocks on the Isle of Dogs.
It is true that many of those estates and tower blocks were crime ridden and -infested but that could have been sorted out by a variety of means. The political will was never there for that though. All we would have needed to do is take a lesson from a few European neighbors of us where people cue up to live in some of those estates like those that were torn down in Britain.
The Robin Hood Estate in Poplar (East London) is another such case in question. While the place has its problems, and many of them, many of the residents do not and did not want to leave and proper refurbishment of that estate could also have given great homes to people in need. But that could not possibly be done; the land there is far too valuable, seeing it is in the London Docklands, to be used for housing the poor nowadays.
In the old days the Isle of Dogs was a dumping ground, literally, for all those that the councils saw as misfits, and no one else wanted to live there. Then it suddenly became fashionable and the local people, the poorer ones, got pushed out by Yuppies for who it was fashionable to live high up in tower blocks. How times change.
Now those estates have been sold to developers too make them in to London pads for the super-rich or the buildings have been torn down for new ones, and the poor people who originally lived there have been driven out; out so far from the center of the city now onto new estates, if they are lucky enough to have a home, where there are no prospects of jobs and because they are not well trained they also cannot get into jobs where they can afford the travel into the city every day. A vicious circle that cannot be squared unless serious steps be taken but for that there is no political will.
The poor lose out, yet again, as per usual.
© 2010
<>
