Social Housing: Wherever I lay my cash, that’s my home!
The current housing crisis in London is forcing many to share houses or flats in conditions in which most of us will not accept as proper standards or even healthy environments to live in. Those who are lucky to get more suitable accommodation face the challenge to find the money to pay for it; an example to describe this situation is two people sharing a living room turned into a double bedroom for £600 in Rotherhithe and we are sure this is not the most expensive one.
Southwark Council is the largest local authority social landlord in London. Those households provide shelter to both, people in benefits and people who are working, with many of them in low incomes, a point worth pointing out in the current media frenzy about benefits. Though the council manages most of these properties, there are other organisations which also hold the responsibility to do so. One of those organisations is Leathermarket JMB, which runs several estates and is managed by the people who live there.
Leathemarket JMB is Southwark’s largest resident-managed housing organisation, managing 1500 homes in Borough and Bermondsey between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. In a recent visit to one of its estates, we noticed this call for action regarding the intention of the government to sell empty council homes.
In its Housing and Planning Bill 2015, the government is proposing to sell all high value council homes when they become empty to fund discounts for housing association tenants exercising the Right to Buy. Being London Bridge a high value property area, this could mean that every time one of JMB properties becomes empty it would be sold on the open market.
In JMB’s own words
Obviously this would have a huge impact on local people in need of accommodation and the nature of the JMB as a resident run community organisation. Remember buyers are quite likely to be investors rather than residents.
There is no doubt this will have a negative impact in the amount of social housing available for people who otherwise cannot afford the open market. If there is any doubt of the the cost, the reader can see it by walking a few hundreds metres away from JMB towers in Weston street and look at the sign in a new development being built next to the Guy Street Park.
These live-in apartments are being sold for £1,495,000 to £1,725,000 according to the website. The kind of language used to advertise them is not different from so many other developments across London: eight tessellating apartments, designed by, crafted by and blah, blah, blah.
So it is not hard to see that the average worker in London will not be queuing up to buy one of these properties but they might find that options to access social housing in the area are vanishing as any empty social household will be put for sale rather than being used for the purpose they were built, social housing.
You can register your concern about the bill by signing JMB petition to the local MP Neil Coyle, which is held at the JMB office
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