We accepted homelessness while the rich left houses empty. No more | Opinion
“Where does he keep his toothbrush, Mummy?†I always remember my eldest child’s first reaction, when a toddler, to seeing a young man sleeping in a doorway. This was King’s Cross in north London in the mid-80s. Overnight, it seemed that homelessness had become visible. Young people whose benefits had been cut, and who could no longer live independently of their parents, were on the streets. Until then, I had not seen beggars on the streets of London. I had seen them when I was hitching around Europe. The beggars of Lisbon shocked me: Portugal was in a terrible state then, with empty shops and desperately poor people.
I had made London my home, so I had to do that thing that everyone does: turn a blind eye to the lost, addicted, abused, ill people everywhere, who cannot be given money in case they spend it on “the wrong thingsâ€. We harden ourselves.
To live in a city is to turn a blind eye â€" although, increasingly, I have seen rough sleepers in small seaside towns, so everyone is learning the skill of pretending the homeless are invisible. One of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet colleagues, George Young, observed in the 80s: “The homeless are what you step over when you come out of the opera.†Now the homeless are what you step over on pretty much any night out in central London. Other kinds of homeless people live on the edges of the city in tents, subways, sheds, or 20 to a room. These are the “hidden homelessâ€. Sofa-surfing sounds like a lifestyle choice, but many live in B&Bs, hostels or in severely overcrowded conditions and remain unseen. Nowadays, you can be seen and not heard â€" or, more commonly, unseen and totally unheard.
But we saw the fire at Grenfell Tower. This hellish incinerator of hope can’t be unseen. There is no escaping it, and no discussion of the housing crisis will be the same again. Even if they clad this tower in platinum, Grenfell and what it means should never be rendered invisible.
This is why the fuss about the empty properties in the London borough in which Grenfell is situated matter. The ghost mansions had also become invisible to us, somehow. Is it OK to buy a huge property and know it will increase in value without the hassle of renting it? The Labour party, the Liberal Democrats and London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, have all condemned the fact that there are 1,652 vacant properties in Kensington and Chelsea while, seven weeks after the fire, Grenfell tenants have still not been rehoused. These vacant homes are owned by businessmen, oligarchs and “foreign royaltyâ€. Dmytro Firtash, a Ukranian oligarch fighting an attempt to extradite him to the US, bought the former Brompton Road tube station building in 2014 and it has been empty ever since.
This practice is known as land-banking. In the country as a whole, 200,000 homes are empty, including many bought as speculative investment. There are also far too many empty council houses, boarded up and in decline. Ever since Thatcher’s policy of selling off council homes, people have been encouraged to see their property not as a home but as an investment, a pension, a means by which to purchase another, buy-to-let property. The hegemony of property ownership remains sacred, a human right.
A generation who are locked out of that are rightly angry and they are joining the dots. The regeneration of the Heygate estate in south-east London, for instance, in which people were offered way below market prices for properties that were being demolished, has not produced the promised “affordable homesâ€. Out young people. Out key workers. Housing may well be the site of intergenerational conflict but, in reality, baby boomers and millennials are related.
I no longer know if it is tenable for my children to live in the city in which they grew up. I do not look on this with baby-boomer complacency. It breaks my heart. I don’t come from inherited wealth, I have squatted, lived in housing association properties and council flats â€" all of which now seem a thing of the past.
Before Grenfell, an acceptance of the inevitable and hidden inequality that we choose to live with was everywhere. Post-Grenfell, how can it be? All has been made frighteningly clear. The normalisation of homelessness, of accepting that England is an underâ€"developed country with shanty towns, that it’s permissible to own “buy to leave†properties, means so much has gone unchallenged.
Out of the corner of my eye, again in King’s Cross, I see a woman gurning and convulsing, her bones sewn together by pain, and I recognise her from my gentrified neighbourhood. She was in a hostel then. I wish I had not seen her. I wish I had never seen Grenfell. We carry on though, don’t we? We carry on even with the threat of terrorism â€" but this other terror, of deliberate inequality, is just as horrifying, surely? Homeless people alongside vast empty homes. Is this any kind of way to live?
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