How do we deliver affordable housing to young people and not destroy our environment?

[oddoneout]

There is probably an unwritten study to be undertaken of what happened to the other five, six, seven or eight siblings in terms of housing in their adulthood. I find it hard not to believe that in many instances there wasn't a vast scaling down.

The boys would have often had jobs with accommodation provided(eg clergy), the girls would have married their way into alternative housing or stayed in the family home to look after parents or depending on the charity of the elder sibling who inherited. Large estates had houses or apartments for family members(eg Dower House), something that still exists today.

[Lat-Literal]

On 22 November, the Chancellor is likely to announce in his budget speech the freeing up of further Green Belt land for housing development. Many people, including me, consider that such a change will lead to the wrong sort of houses being built in the wrong sort of places. We have written to our MPs to request that it doesn't happen. The programme aired this week on Channel 4 on how to obtain a council home (the title was not unironic) focussed on the travails of a wide range of people in the distinctly urban parts of the London Borough of Hounslow and systemic attempts by local authority officials to distinguish need from greed. Life being complex, viewers may have differed on who was and who was not deserving, depending on their own outlook. One thing that was for certain was that none of the people featured will ever have much in the way of money themselves and broad influence/power.

Given the information that came to light, I think I might have overstated the improvements in housing since the 1950s and the 1960s. There is probably more overcrowding in existing accommodation than I realized. Certainly the line between having a roof over one's head and being homeless is very, very fine. That is not to concede to the view that the main problems are often to do with a shortage of housing per se. There is in my humble opinion a social dimension which is often at the heart of them. Whatever the case, it is very clear to me that everyone in the programme seeking accommodation had no interest whatsoever in being moved to a different area or suddenly being amidst open space. Their main requirements were fundamental and hence devoid of such luxurious nuances. All of this adds grist to the mill to earlier objections to senior Councillors anywhere - I am thinking here especially about one who is Labour but he might as well be a Conservative or anything else - who enjoy the clout of sticking concrete where it isn't wanted and justify the application of that ego via a misty eyed presentation of family. To argue for the replacing of green spaces with expensive four and five bedroom houses on the grounds that they are for families is at best a remote naivety about the limited circumstances and scope of most families financially and to depict the concept of family as in the image of their own as they choose to see it. At worst, it is cynical manipulation on the part of people who probably spend so much time in their power bases they are rarely seen by those nearest and dearest to them.

From a personal perspective, the timing of the Chancellor's statement couldn't be worse. The strange clearances at the top of the treeline here may well lead to such a change in character of this particular neighbourhood - and our views - that it becomes unrecognizable. My parents have enjoyed the area as it is since 1960 from two or three places as have I on an off since 1962. We have been lucky. The sadness I feel about the developments coincides with a ruefulness in that this is occurring as each is fading as am I in one way or another. I am not ceasing efforts to defend our patch at least as much as anyone else - I tend to bring these things to light to local groups and urge faster movement than would otherwise occur - but I know that what is happening is symbolic, hence it somehow has slightly less meaning. Meaning as in the sense that there is any ongoing belief in that any intervention can change it. It is a re-running of the 1970s when a poor, defenceless if hard working and robust old lady who just happened to be my grandmother had her home pulled down and was chucked in a tower block where the lifts didn't work. That then was Southwark. The Government was probably Tory. The local authority was probably Labour. They had more in common with each other than anyone who lived there - and they all so lurved Le Corbusier they believed his vision would be ideal for the area between the East Lane market and the Old Kent Road. Strong and wrong. This, I think, is nature. One cannot be Canute. At the risk of mixing metaphors it is only ever the vulnerable who can truly feel the jungle encroaching. They feel it so acutely there is barely anything else to feel. That is the position on Grenfell Tower. Increasingly it is also the position of lower middle class old people who recall a system they preferred and which served them well along with late middle aged first generation university students who were ultimately non-achievers. But, I guess, so what.

(Still, if you want to express views to your MP there is still plenty of time to do it)