by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
While Britain, and not just Britain, obviously, has masses of homeless people, it has, at the same time, thousands upon thousands of empty homes and other properties that could be used as homes. All those empties could house all the homeless with room to spare in great comfort.
Buildings are left empty by councils in the same way as by private owners and property speculators. Both, in the end, want to do something with those empty building in that, more often that not, they want to tear them down and develop the land or develop the buildings if they do not want to tear them down.
More often than not those buildings, however, stand empty for years while, meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of people are without homes proper. How can this be allowed to happen?
Many years ago I personally saw the scandal with my own eyes in Hackney, East London (UK), where the council had closed a large housing estate of apartments with view to redevelopment. There must have been a few thousand empty dwellings in those pre-World War II brick-built blocks of flats; all of them empty for years already when we encountered them. At the very same time Hackney had thousands of homeless.
About ten years after closing the estate it was finally redeveloped into an area of so-called low-density housing with but a few hundred dwellings – little council houses instead of apartments with little gardens and squares and all that. It all looks very nice but only houses a fraction of what the old estate could, which could have been refurbished, and left many people out in the cold, literally.
The same or similar is happening to other areas to of the British capital and other cities and towns.
The Ocean Estate in Stepney, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, is another one of those examples. Apartments there have been emptied and are still being emptied as the council has the aim to redevelop the place but so far little if anything has been done. Lack of finances. Meanwhile homes stand empty; destroyed in fact, so that also squatters cannot take up residence there, and hundreds of families in that borough alone are officially homeless.
The government of that borough and of the country have had great redevelopment plans for years as regards to those places that they have shut down. The only problem is that ideas are find but when there is no money to tear down and build new would it not be better to refurbish the existing stock and make them nice.
It was done with places on the Ilse of Dogs. No one wanted to live in Kelson House, for instance, when it was GLC and later LBTH, but now everyone wants an apartment in the place since it has been revamped. The same can be done for most, if not indeed all, such council homes. But, it would appear as if central government funds demolish and rebuild rather that refurbishment. What a waste of time, effort and money.
All those homes earmarked for that kind of development and redevelopment no longer are even on the register of empty homes and that may also be the reason why they are being destroyed before, in years to come, eventually, they get torn down to build new.
Nice move to do this for this way no one officially knows how much empties there really are and how many are held, in fact, by the councils. All the while the councils are now to be given the powers to “confiscate” dwellings that have been empty for more than six months or so in order to bring them back into use as homes. That does not include those of their stock, however, that are “written off”, officially, and are, supposedly earmarked for destructing and building new. This just does not make sense nor compute.
It was said recently that the United States, a country without tens of thousands of homeless families, even families with small children, living rough, has enough empty homes to house all of Britain with enough space left for all of Israel.
While it may not as bad, even with the properties that “do not count officially”, we have more than enough empty homes to house all our homeless people several times over in comfort.
Why are all those homes empty?
The G-ds only know.
Greed is certainly the main reason, of that we can be sure, by way of property and rent speculation, but why the local authorities are doing it beats me. It does not make sense seeing how they, the local authorities, have to house the homeless families in temporary accommodation, often Bed & Breakfast “Hotels”; costly for the councils and bad for the families concerned. But still the practice continues.
Only we, the people, can get them to change if me make a stand on that matter and do not remain inert. You have a vote, all of you; use it.
© 2010
