Against the Odds.
Shelter has today released their report, Against the Odds, in which they claim one in seven every children in Britain to be homeless, trapped in temporary accommodation, or living bad housing. Furthermore the organisation rightly points out that children in sub-standard properties are statistically at heightened risk of developing respiratory problems such as asthma, bronchitis, and breathing difficulties than their peers.
All of this is well and good but their viewpoint appears to be a narrow one. It focuses solely on the housing itself and sees the ’solution’ to the ‘problem’ of a shortage of adequate housing as to produce more properties - 20,000 per annum, in fact.
If the commodity were water, we would instantly look to externalities that are contributing to the problem: over consumption, climate change, etc. We do not look to producing more water.
It worries me that this report is being so widely promoted given the above shortfalls. It appears to look only at the house, rather than the home. This whole subject circles around the issue of poverty - a multifaceted and complex construct.
The report hints at the problems that families in temporary or ‘bad’ housing might exhibit, but does not seem to go any further into examining why such problems are present and more importantly how they themselves can be effectively ameliorated.
The main, if not only, issue raised is that of the housing market and how many parents in the lower socio-economic groupings can find difficulty in getting themselves onto the property ladder in a sustainable manner. This is especially the case with lone-parent families who frequently have to support children on half the income of couples.
Against the Odds states that property values are inflated untenably with not enough being done to reduce the rate of price increases or enhance the provision of affordable housing projects. However, it doesn’t assess why these families (in any given area, or in general) are in these lower groupings: poor education, lack of access to social resources, poor literacy, and so on.
Were we to focus on these underlying issues in conjunction to housing policy reform I believe the problems the report highlights could be dealt with far quicker than following their proposal of merely building more houses.
More information and a direct link to the report itself can be found over at The Guardian. It should be noted that their article holds a (perhaps unfair) focus on the negative housing situations present in Haringey - the most deprived council in London.
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4 Responses to “Against the Odds.”
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While you have to tackle this on many fronts (support, education etc) housing has to surely come up pretty high on the list I would thing. It is a huge financial asset and if we lower prices (building more) or make it easier to get on the ladder (tax credits) then i think you go a long way to putting some stabilty behind a family.
That family values. We should escort these people to church :D
MY main issue is that such a thing cannot happen indefinitely; there’s only a limited amount of space in which to build, with a limited use [currently] of brown field sites. Earth is an overpopulated planet* and we need to make conscious efforts to reduce our number of siblings so that those we do have will live better quality lives.
Conversely, I do agree that increasing/renovating housing is one option - but it’s certainly not the only one.
* Some state otherwise on the grounds that there’s a lot of unused land, even in Britain. However, I stress that the carrying capacity of the environment and our infrastructure is coming close to the point of irreparable damage.
Well I totally agree. We need to build on brown sites and redesign housing to basically cram as many people as comfortably into small places as we can.
I also agree that we need to lessen the birth rate. The only problem is that a lot of the world is Islamic and they tend to have large families and even worse - the small gains made by Europe in the past 100 years in regards to secular progress and thinking are under threat by a new wave christians in the rich world who are acting like the worse sort of reactionary sob’s i’ve ever seen. But the important point is this, and I quote the great CK: “Earth is an overpopulated planet”.
Regardless of what measures we put in place to protect the earth i do not believe mankind will ever achieve sustainabilty within the next two hundred years or so - which by then will be too late anyway.
So if this planet is a gonner. What else is one to do?
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Don’t for a second suggest space, young lad.