So, apparently, if you release a report claiming that older people are contributing to the housing shortage by living in homes that are too big for them, some of those older people get quite annoyed. If you were inclined to be cynical, you might even wonder if controversy was exactly what the author – or at least whoever at the Intergenerational Foundation came up with the title – had in mind. Yes, if you write at great length about people having the temerity to keep on living in their homes after their kids leave and then decide to stick “Hoarding of Housing” at the top of it – with the nasty insinuation that people are doing it deliberately to shut their childrens’ generation out of the housing market – then you’re going to piss people off. It ain’t rocket science.

Having said that, though, it’s important not to overlook that the report’s basic point is a good one – housing is scarce, and older couples and single people holding onto homes which could fit a family when they could comfortably live somewhere smaller is clearly going to exacerbate this. And some of the responses are just downright stupid – Jan Etherington, writing for the Telegraph, gets extremely worked up at the very notion that maybe her and her husband don’t need a five-bedroom house all to themselves, launching an all out attack on wave after wave of straw men with her talk of “the property police”, “bullying” and (inevitably) “Big Brother”. The fact that nowhere in the report is anything suggested that’s anywhere near as draconian as Etherington seems to imagine (it suggests relief on stamp duty and new taxes on high-value properties to encourage people to downsize, and that’s about as far as it goes) is beside the point, of course.

In fact, most of the negative responses to the report have bordered on the frankly bizarre. Both Etherington and Homa Khaleeli at the Guardian make much of the fact that a lot of older people spend significant amounts of time looking after their grandkids, as if this is remotely relevant. If you’re a parent of young children I’m sure having your own parents look after your kids from time to time is very welcome, but it does precisely sod all to help you get on the property ladder. Almost as oddly, Khaleeli then goes on to say that the real problem is “the tone of the debate” – though, tellingly, without actually quoting either the report itself or any discussions of it to support this assertion. The (crass, ill-judged) title aside, the tone of the report itself seems pretty reasoned from a quick skim-through, in marked contrast to some of the stuff that’s been written in criticism of it, such as Etherington’s response or the Daily Mail’s usual level-headed objectivity. (It’s worth noting that the phrase “bedroom blocker” appears nowhere in the report, yet is in the headlines chosen by both the Mail and the Telegraph).

All things considered, the Intergenerational Foundation’s report should be welcomed. Looking at injustice through a generational lens can give a distorted picture at times – one that focuses too much on the middle classes at the expense of more deprived sections of society – but since (as the report points out) the vast majority of older people in the UK are owner-occupiers, this is one area where this approach can be useful. Yes, more houses (and especially more council houses) need to be built, and yes, it would probably help if the government wasn’t also slashing Housing Benefit at a time of mass unemployment, but semantic bickering about what the “real” problem is won’t help. As with so many issues, there are lots of causes, and lots of possible (partial) solutions. Persuading people not to live in houses they don’t need when there are people who could make better use of them clearly isn’t the only answer, but it’s definitely a good start.

Mathew Bell’s interview with Lord Tebbit, in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, predictably touched upon immigration. “When he steps off the train into London” the interview asks, “doesn’t he see an exciting and creative powerhouse, fuelled in part by the injection of foreign blood and money?”

No, he says, he worries that Londoners are being pushed out of their own city. But weren’t most Londoners once immigrants themselves?

And then the piece moves on. For some reason, this smart alec response from the interviewer gave me a jolt of discomfort. Yes Tebbit’s desire to blame immigrants is worse than wrongheaded. Yet in referring to the phenomenon of Londoners being pushed out of their own city , Tebbit is putting his finger upon an unfolding social tragedy that is every bit as real as it is painful. Right now half a generation of Londoners face a future of economic exile, of being uprooted from the city in which they grew up by stagnating earnings and sky-rocketing property prices.

The implication that this is a non-issue, simply a red-herring, because “hey we’re all immigrants really” – this just doesn’t cut it. Bell could have pointed out that the decimation social housing – carried out by Tebbit’s party – is a major factor driving Londoners out of London, as indeed is the growth of huge inequality. But instead he stuck to playing word games. After all, if we’re all immigrants really, who cares who gets to stay and who has to leave.

There is no overlooking the fact that for the last decade at least, its the right who have been making the weather over the question of immigration. And if this is all we have to offer i response then they will continue to do so. We cannot adequately defend mass immigration by simply telling people they need to relax about the status quo – because for many the status quo is not working.

There is no necessary reason why immigration must bring harm to any particular section of the population. But neither will it automatically work for the benefit of us all (immigrants included), regardless of the social and economic conditions in which it takes place. When housebuilding is kept in check by restrictive local planning, when no efforts are made to replace mass of social housing lost under previous governments, and when the scarce living space that exists is simply allocated to the highest bidder – then, under those circumstances, the immigration of hundreds of thousands into London may make it more difficult for the children of some of those already living here to afford to stay.

If we are to resist calls for tighter and tighter controls, then we must do so by making a call for change. Only by offering an alternative vision for our city can we make clear that settled and immigrant communities are not competing in a zero-sum game. It is all well to talk about London being a “cultural and economic powerhouse”, but that is not its only function. For millions of us it is also home, and that is the function that, first and foremost, it must fulfill.

Today’s comprehensive spending review delivered long-predicted cuts to welfare and housing. Even poor old EMA, bless her, got the chop. But perhaps the deepest cuts have been to journalists’ vocabularies. Plenty of column inches over the coming months and years will be devoted to the government’s harshest measures. But if I hear one more journalist refer to the cuts as swingeing, I’m going to headbut my screen. And that would be an unmitigated tragedy because I’m quite looking forward to buying Fallout: New Vegas in a few days’ time.

Swingeing, it’s an interesting word that sounds a bit like a cross between swinging and wingeing, but in fact means punishing or severe. Other synonyms include stringent, heavy, drastic, oppressive, excessive, exorbitant. All good words.

There’s no doubting that swingeing is an accurate term to apply to the cuts. But when you’ve read it 500 times in 500 different publications, you begin to wonder if journalists lack imagination. And it’s not just journalists, bloggers are guilty of it too. I understand publications have strict style guides. The magazine I write for has an at times baffling style guide that seems determined to suck the life out of everything, but at least it has no time for cliches and that’s exactly what the term swingeing cuts is becoming.

Please, journalists, for the love of god, get a thesaurus!

Over the next three weeks I will be taking an in-depth look at the problems and some of the proposed solutions to what I sincerely believe is one of the most pressing yet under-discussed issues of today: namely, social housing policy.  As the title suggests, I do realise that not many people flick through the channels late at night or scan the top shelf in their local garage looking for the uncensored, full picture on this issue.  However, through the use of some witty double entendres and a promise of absolutely no accompanying photographs of Margaret Thatcher, I would like to think that we drag this debate from minor columns all the way up to at least page 3.  So here goes: Part I – The State of the Nation…

The State of the Nation

It is, of course, all Maggie’s fault.  She sold them off, didn’t she.  The introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’ under the Housing Act 1980 was a watershed event for councils all over the country. From the start local authorities had been able to sell off their houses, but not until the introduction of the RTB they were not forced to do so.  And whilst up until 1980 the production of new homes year on year had far exceeded the numbers sold, following the passing of this policy the period of growth halted and began a decline.  The number of houses managed by London’s councils shrunk from 840,000 in 1984 to just over 500,000 by the end of the century. Nationally 1 million houses were sold within 10 years.  But even more importantly than this – if at all possible – is the fact that the majority of dwellings that were sold were houses rather than flats. So ‘right to buy’ has now drastically reduced the supply of family houses, fatally altered the balance of council housing stock and left families squeezing into 2 bedroom flats all across the country.

But as much as I would like to blame Maggie for everything, that would sadly just be a copout.  Noting that in the eight years from 1979 the Thatcher Government built 415,814 council houses, why oh why do we put up with a ‘Labour’ government which in the eight years from 1997, according to the House of Commons Library, built just 4,278?

Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick – now Agriculture and Fisheries Minister but speaking as Under-Secretary of State for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2005 – makes the usual excuses, which are particularly sickening to hear from an MP responsible for one of the most overcrowded constituencies, in on of the most overcrowded boroughs in the country (Poplar and Canning Town in Tower Hamlets):

“As of 2005… social landlords built 177,000 and local authorities 1,365.  Our housing priority was the £19 billion backlog in social housing repairs and the 2 million homes that had fallen below the decency threshold. We have attacked that problem.  We are well on our way to making sure that, by 2010, 2 million homes will be up to the decency threshold.”

As of January this year, the number of people on the council housing waiting list topped 1.7 million.  Even the most tarted up council flats in the world cannot meet this need alone.

The underlying principle of council housing remains an indisputable fact: the private sector is incapable of providing adequate housing for all, and that state intervention is required to ensure there was good quality affordable housing for low-income households.  At a time when the need for interventionist policies within the economy have become even more pronounced, this is just another example of a government who seem wedded to a minimalist, apologetic approach towards free-marketers.  But beyond even the hard figures of those needing housing is an almost more important, infrequently told story about the social, economic, educational and health-related repercussions that emerge from a lack of adequate council housing.

Governments and politicians are always more than happy to band around the words “healthcare” and “education”, because these have an immediate and emotional relation to the words “children” and “illness”.  But, as a government review in 2004 concluded, the links between overcrowding and particular health conditions and educational underachievement is chronic.  In both children and adults, overcrowding can clearly been seen to contribute towards poor respiratory conditions, meningitis and helicobacter pylori which is a cause of stomach ulcers.  Parents who do not even have enough room in their homes to provide their children with a flat surface to do their homework on frequently see better housed children outperforming their own in the same schools.  And the stress of several having to share bedrooms – especially for pubescent young adults of different sexes – can lead to a breakdown in family relationships and to homelessness for older ‘children’.

And yet, currently any unoccupied room at night – such as a sitting room – is classified as a bedroom under the current legal definitions of overcrowding.  The term ‘affordable’ remains applicable to any house available below the market rate, with no further legal definition in place.

Finally, we need greater commitment and government intervention in order to ensure the future sustainability of the sector.  Low cost housing built by provide developers is destined to meet only the lowest and most strictly enforced of targets for CO2 emmissions.  Yet, as Dr Brenda Boardman, a senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute argues, reducing emissions from energy use in people’s homes is “absolutely crucial” if the government was going to achieve the soon-to-be legally binding target.  “It is crucial because it is large. Depending on what year’s measurements you use, it accounts for about 25-27% of all the UK’s carbon emissions.”

The full extent of both the immediate and secondary problems caused by nearly 30 years of under-funding in our nation’s social housing policy could fill pages and pages of testimony.  There are, however, some interesting ideas emerging outside of Westminster as to how we can move beyond this seemingly public/private dichotomy, revitalising a genuine council housing sector but compensating and promoting low-cost homeownership at the same time.  Next week: is council housing a right?  Is home ownership ultimately a desirable end for all people?  And what lessons can we learn from ‘right to buy’.  Sexy.

It was quietly announced last week that the Minister for Culture, Andy Burnham MP, is to uphold English Heritage’s initial recommendation that the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, East London, should not be listed.

Robin Hood Gardens means little to those who don’t live there and is, alas, held in even less regard by those who do.  As a community organiser in East London, my first week on the job took me back to the corner of Poplar High Street and Robin Hood Lane, where the estate now stands, in an attempt to solicit and then organise residents’ concerns over its coming foreclosure.  “Them fuckin’ pricks who built it wanna try n live hear mate,” I remember one man saying to me.  Another gentleman, a Somali man of very little English, simply gave me a thumbs down.

I remember being aghast at that the time that the architectural magazine Building Design was launching a campaign to save such a monstrosity.  As a gap year student trying to reconcile my youth, my politics and my libido in Havana, I too had had the dubious pleasure of once living in a great Stalinist concrete slab.  I remember sitting there one evening, 30°C of glorious sunshine, a vi ew golden tobacco fields below, and thinking… what a pile of shit.  What kind of ideology builds this?   The answer: a noble one.

Completed in 1972, Robin Hood Gardens was supposed to be to the crown jewel in the East End’s post-war reconstruction.  Lacking both the necessary resources and the cultural assurance to justify the use of its traditional forms, British architecture had embarked upon a sociological crusade following the New Towns Act of 1946 – a mood paralleled across the formation of welfare state, with similar acts elsewhere such the Education Act of 1944.  Britain was not only to be rebuilt – it was to be reconceived.  And along with the nearby Balfron Tower and Carradale House, both of which had just been completed, architects Alison and Peter Smithson sought to build Britain’s answer to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille.  Honest, functional, rational: its ‘streets in the sky’ where to engineer in Britain a materialist realisation of the Russian constructivists abstract and then betrayed dreams. 

Forty-five years later and Robin Hood Gardens has failed.  Please debate any of the above, but it has failed.  For all the principled thought and design, it is simply not fit for purpose.  And although Tory spending cuts, right-to-buy and ALMOs are no doubt partially to blame, you cannot dare venture, as the Smithson’s contemporary Erno Goldfinger once did, “I built skyscrapers for people to live in there and now they messed them up- disgusting.”

I started by saying ‘took me back’ to the corner of Poplar High Street and Robin Hood Lane – truth be told, I think I had only been there once before.  It was to survey what is now just a hollowed out mess adjacent to the municipal car park.  There, amongst some grit and a rather sorry attempt at a tree, still stands the visible the remnants of what was once ‘The White Hart’ pub.  It was here that my father and his family lived between 1964-1967- one of four or five pubs owned at one time or another by my Grandad Sid and my Great Uncle Ern around the East India Docks.  It was demolished to make way for the new estate.

And so, it is with a heavy heart and a certain reluctance that I will soon welcome the end of part of the East End’s, and my family’s, post-war history.  Over the past few years, I have come to love and hate Robin Hood Gardens in equal measure.  What is undoubtedly so alluring about these buildings is that they attempt to conceive of world which we have not yet built, and then look to transport us there.  They are truly rationalist and revolutionary – built in the belief that social architects can turn over a clean page, start afresh, and then conceive of and construct something better out of the ruins of what went before.  But unfortunately, like much preplanned revolutionary wholesale change before it, it could not continue to inflict its will upon a people forever.  Houses, like socialism, must be built from the bottom up.