Walking down the bustling streets of Peckham, post- emptying of the 18.42 overground service: reggae music still blaring from a tinny speaker on the corner of Holdron’s Arcade, small man rattling an old Morrison’s trolley full of goat carcasses along the pavement and loose weave flying around like a mythical species of air-snake in the winds of February’s never-ending storms, there is little that can take me by surprise. But in this rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in south east London, there is something that catches my attention.
Underneath a new development of luxury studio apartments situated just moments from the station on Peckham’s iconic Rye Lane, a large group of fashionable twenty-somethings sip prosecco and celebrate the opening of a new charity shop branch for national homelessness charity Crisis. Being the ninth shop to open its doors since 2016, Crisis have outlined their hopes for the newest addition to their growing chain to become a valuable community space, whilst “engaging with the Crisis mission”, which includes providing employment training to homeless people, whilst raising crucial funds to assist the charity’s vital work.
With the capital’s ceaseless desire for growth and profit and the associated rise in homelessness, it was not the opening of the shop that took me by surprise. What’s more with Peckham in recent years undergoing substantive regeneration and investment (read gentrification and social cleansing), the appearance of eight new studio apartments close to the station, again came as no surprise. The very thing that captured my attention is the stark irony of the shop’s placement, situated directly below the kind of development that has directly contributed to our acute homelessness problem, as London faces a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes.
As Kalmar’s signboards advertise the new luxury apartments to potential buyers, a young woman beds down for the night on a piece of cardboard just metres away. “This shop ends homelessness” reads the optimistic, yet largely inaccurate window signage of the new store, whose mission is both literally and metaphorically overlooked by the housing development above it.
The housing crisis we currently face is not just one of insufficient stock, but can be attributed to a vast range of causes including affordability, the disappearance of social housing and the reconfiguration of some of London’s prime properties into investment units rather than homes. Whilst recent times have seen housing move up the political agenda, a number of policies are just dabbling with or actually exacerbating the problem, particularly in an age where local councils have become increasingly reliant on obligatory planning contributions.
Today’s acute housing crisis is, in fact a systemic problem symbolic of our neoliberal urban planning system and the fundamental failure of successive governments to address the underlying issues. According to a report by Ian Mulheirn from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, even if we were to build 300,000 new homes in England each year, we could expect house prices to fall by just 10% over the course of 20 years. It is now thought that only radical policy changes will be able “overcome a legacy of decades of half-baked and ill-thought-out ad hoc initiatives”. In order to actually fulfil the ambitious hopes printed above the doorway of Peckham’s new Crisis branch, we cannot rely on charities alone to patch-up the symptoms of the neoliberal political and economic culture that became embedded sine the 1980s.
According to Duncan Bowie, who puts forwards a radical programme for reform we must move towards a new and progressive housing policy and begin by tackling its underlying causes. One of Bowie’s solutions involves socialising the private rented sector, where he argues that this effectively deregulated sector, at present, would benefit from an implementation of rent controls, a guaranteed minimum security of tenure and fixed service charges. Outlining the foundations for a new housing strategy, Bowie concludes how public subsidies will be essential in tackling the prevailing housing crisis and stresses how the tearing down of housing estates and the construction of often private, luxury developments on their grave should no longer be focused on maximum profit extraction, but should be based on the principle of a zero loss of affordable housing; and by that, he means housing that is genuinely affordable and not up to 80% of market rate, which is still far out of reach for the majority of Londoner’s on an average income.
More on Bowie’s ideas can be found in his book: Radical Solutions to the Housing Supply Crisis.
Georgi the Geographer 