By Abi O'Connor (@abioconnor_)

 

The Conservative party takeover of Liverpool City Council represents a perfect storm in which corporate powers are able to trial new forms of urban governance which are vacant of democratic representation and wholly unaccountable to the people of the city. The possibility of these even further mechanisms of privatisation reveals the potential for further capital extraction from urban localities, and the working class communities within them.

 

Whilst the current crisis faced in Liverpool has gained attention in recent months, the corporate takeover of the city has much deeper roots. It has long been ripe for specific forms of capital extraction, realised most acutely under austerity, through what geographer Neil Smith terms the ‘rent gap’^[1]. Put simply, the ‘rent gap’ theory refers to the difference between the actual rent paid for a piece of land and the potential value which could be collected if the land were put to ‘higher’ use, offering an economic explanation of gentrification.

 

So, in Liverpool, whilst house prices rose exponentially post-2008 financial crash, the city’s land and property values remained low, therein offering the highest possible rental yields outside of London. This saw private developers and landlords flock to the city to take advantage of the continuing crisis for residents. The so-called socialist utopia has become a playground for global conglomerates and private property tycoons to turn their first million (and later billion^[2]).

 

Despite establishing a first of its kind land commission in 2020, celebrated widely for its focus on community wealth building^[3], Liverpool remains a city defined by corporate landlordism which overwhelmingly legitimises and prioritises private financial gain. This developer-led model of regeneration has been favoured as a means of “saving” the city from economic stagnation. This argument relies on the myth of trickle-down economics and negates the politics of urban restructuring. This model ultimately exists to justify top-down market-led control of cities which have overwhelmingly experienced decline^[4].

 

Business leaders continually lambast the local authority for being hostile to incoming investors^[5], claiming the Labour administration are causing a mass corporate exodus and must do more to entice private business to Merseyside. Criticism of the City Council’s mismanagement is not unwarranted in many areas, but the extent to which proponents of a market-led recovery have the best interests of the city’s residents at heart should be critically assessed. For example, relentless focus on the desperation for inward investment at any cost has seen one of Britain’s most prolific property owners, Peel Holdings, gain an increasingly significant grasp on Liverpool’s assets. And that of the North West, and Britain, more broadly, including significant stake in Manchester, Newcastle and across Scotland^[6].

 

Image 1: ‘Peel in the Northern Powerhouse’: Map detailing Peel’s ownership as of 2016. [Update needed as land acquisition grown exponentially]

 

 

Peel’s ownership of Liverpool is emblematic of the power – and danger – of speculative land-grabs. And recent changes to the city’s governance risk placing more control in their hands.

 

The Port of Liverpool and the Freeport agenda

 

The Port of Liverpool is Britain’s leading transatlantic port handling 45% of trade from the US, and Peel cite their owner-led investment as pivotal to the Liverpool City Region securing one of eight English Freeport bids in 2021^[7]. Previously a Special Enterprise Zone, the area benefits from reduced regulations, tax concessions and infrastructure incentives designed to attract investment. Yet, as Peel owns both Liverpool and the Wirral’s coastlines, they disproportionately profit from these arrangements, with little tangible benefits for the city’s people.

Image 2: Map of Liverpool City Region Freeport, one of 8 “successful bidders in the English Freeports Competition”^[8]

 

The image below shows the, until recently, disused North Docks which promised to be part of their infamous ‘Liverpool Waters’ development programme, which has promised to bring “life back to Liverpool’s historic docklands”^[9]. Instead, this space is sublet as storage, fenced off from the city’s residents and surrounded by security.

 

Image 3: Peel owned land: now filled-in Trafalgar and Victoria North Docks, left part-derelict, part leased out for storage^[10]

 

 

Britain’s latest Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is an advocate for “full-fat freeports”^[11]. Her leadership will undoubtedly see an increased focus on new mechanisms with which to (re)distribute wealth upwards, something she unashamedly committed to during her campaign. Shanker Singham, one of Truss’ closest advisors and the so called ‘brains of Brexit’, and has for years advocated for geographic zones with “regulatory autonomy from their host governments” based on the principles of “property rights protections”, “competitive markets” and “open trading environments”^[12].

 

These economic freedoms that Liverpool will supposedly experience as a Freeport are framed as creating new opportunities, but private companies becoming omnipotent entities is gravely concerning. Research shows decreased employment rights and poor working conditions go hand in hand with the deregulated economic zones^[13]. Unite union members at Peel’s Port of Liverpool are undertaking 2-weeks of industrial action over real-term pay cuts in September 2022^[14]. These struggles are not detached from issues of undemocratic urban governance.

 

The acceleration of this anti-democratic developer model is deeply problematic, and is indicative of the Conservative party's will to privatise our very existence, and dispossess everyone but a small elite of assets, rights and opportunities. Beyond Peel swallowing up Liverpool’s waterfront, Hong Kong’s most lucrative billionaire is now turning over millions as the landlord of Liverpool Council’s supposedly ‘worthless’ housing^[15], whilst swathes of land have been sold for minute nominal fees to self-made Scouse billionaire Elliot Lawless. Or, they are leased on long-term contracts by the Council, the rent on which goes unpaid^[16] – marking a distinct departure from the accountability expected of working class tenants.

 

Property Led ‘Regeneration’

 

Liverpool City Council’s penchant for offering financially lucrative deals to private developers is consistent with Manchester’s current form of urban governance. As research by Goulding, Leaver & Silver evidences, Manchester has been sold at pace (and low value) to Abu Dhabi’s elite^[17]. Like in Liverpool, these processes have occurred under Labour controlled local governments and at the expense of public ownership. This is a flavour of what is to come, as developer-led regeneration becomes the only form of change.

 

On top of this, and already vulnerable to state-led displacement, Liverpool’s communities face further precarity owing to the City Council’s embroilment with corruption. December 2020 saw Liverpool’s incumbent Mayor Joe Anderson arrested (and since released on bail), relating to underhand deals in land, property and regeneration.

 

The fallout of these revelations prompted the Caller Report, which cited an institutional culture of intimidation and inadequate management^[18]. This served as justification for Conservative appointed Commissioners being brought into Liverpool in May 2021 to have oversight of key council operations. Originally a temporary measure to oversee management of property, regeneration and highways departments, in August 2022 the Commissioners’ control was extended to all aspects of City Council financial and governance affairs^[19].

 

To bolster external control of Liverpool’s council, and combat further failures in this local political experiment, a strategic advisory panel has been formed which includes Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram and Sir Howard Berstein. Until 2017, Berstein was Manchester Council’s chief executive who oversaw the wholesale privatisation of the city via land and property purchasing. An individual who reproduced archaic tropes to oppose the building of social housing, declaring that creating “successful cities” is “really about how you attract people who have money”^[20]. If the Tory takeover of Liverpool’s City Council was not enough to convince us that this power-grab will ensure diminished rights to the city, Berstein’s appointment certainly does.

 

Liverpool’s already depleted democratic governance is a concern for all residents, who are now at the mercy of unelected individuals. Some of whom have vested interests which are antithetical to equality in the city. For example, one commissioner (paid almost £1,200 a day to establish best value for the public purse) failed to declare that she was a Director of Mulbury Homes Ltd^[21], a development company that has strong ties to Liverpool. In February 2022 they went into administration, making hundreds of workers redundant and again raising questions of the suitability of those holding power over land and housing.

 

Charter Cities

 

Creeping up in the shadows of the current chaos faced in Liverpool, a new articulation of anti-democratic corporate control is emerging: Charter Cities. A relatively new phenomenon to be considered in Britain, Charter Cities represent a fresh assault on our rights to urban space. One which is wholly compatible with the current model rolled out in Liverpool.

 

At their very core, Charter Cities enable a private entity to hold urban space in a stranglehold. They are privately owned and privately governed cities, accountable to no one but themselves, termed by scholars as a “private micro state”^[22]. Hailing from the United States, this form of governance is unsurprisingly backed by billionaire hedge fund managers who dream of a revanchist city^[23], absent of equality, defined by profit accumulation and exploitation by any feasible means. Simultaneously, they maintain the ability to erode all forms of social, economic and political security as they have the power to create new legal frameworks^[24].

 

Charter Cities are therefore predatory by nature, operating as a “neo-colonial, razor-wired port of convenience”^[25], which propagate state violence through modern slavery and institutionalised poverty^[26], as seen in Honduras^[27]. They exist to create even more inequitable landscapes across the globe and make visible how deeply entrenched neoliberalism is in our everyday lives.

Whilst the intervention into Liverpool’s governance and Freeports do not equate to Charter Cities, they have laid the groundwork for the rights of private capital to usurp those of the city more broadly. This, coupled with the knowledge that Charter Cities are a policy option being considered by large sections of the right, indicates that we should be deeply concerned about – and preparing to resist – these evolving forms of financialization.

 

The possibility of this model becoming a reality reveals the fictitious nature of democratic urban governance today. Intercepting these seismic shifts is time sensitive. Liverpool’s landscape of a failing public and private sector has ensured it is teed up as the ideal place to trial Charter City governance. This has occurred simultaneously to the persistent retrenchment of our rights to the city. Yet, we are currently failing to attend to this crisis with urgency. Collectively speaking, if we do not emphasise the implications of this issue and the ways in which new forms of urban financialisation are built on the foundation of existing struggles amongst workers and communities, then we risk sleepwalking into disaster. It is the responsibility of the left, broadly speaking, to robustly scrutinise these approaching shifts and develop mechanisms with which to confront them.

 

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[1] Neil Smith. ‘Gentrification & the Rent Gap’. AAG. (Sept 1987) pp. 462-465

[2] Tom Houghton. ‘Who is Elliot Lawless? The Scouser changing the face of Liverpool’. Liverpool Echo. (27 July 2019)

[3] Isaac Stanley. ‘Land Commission’. CLES: the national organisation for local economies. (6 July 2021).

[4] David Whyte. ‘The mythology of business’, Centre for Labour & Social Studies. (July 2015)

[5] Tony McDonough. ‘Liverpool has gone backwards’. Liverpool Business News. (19 July 2022)

[6] Peel Ports Group. ‘Our ports’. (2022)

[7] David Huck. ‘Port of Liverpool is gateway for region’s freeport success’. Peel Ports Group. (April 2022)

[8] Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities. ‘Freeports’. GOV.UK.  (October 2021)

[9] Liverpool Waters. ‘A Place to Invest’. Peel L&P. (2022)

[10] Abi O’Connor. Photograph taken of Peel owned north docks. (December 2019)

[11] Dominic McGrath. ‘Liz Truss promises ‘full-fat freeports’’. The Independent (25 July 2022)

[12] Shanker Singham. Interview on Enterprise Cities. SeaSteading. (20 March 2015)

[13] Ebenezer Nickson Neequaye, Dechun Huang, Nelson Amowine, Stella Fynn. ‘Empirical analysis of the economic impacts of free ports and their challenges to Ghana’. Journal of Social Sciences. 06 (04). pp 180-196 (2018)

[14] Unite the Union. ‘September Liverpool docks strikes to go ahead after ‘pay cut dressed up a rise’’. Unite Press Release. (Sept 2022)

[15] The Liverpool Post Weekly Briefing. ‘How did homes deemed ‘worthless’ by the council end up in the hands of a Hong Kong billionaire?’. The Post. (15 August 2022).

[16] Tom Duffy. ‘Fury after Lawless misses 30 months of rent payment worth £245k’. Liverpool Echo. (28 August 2022)

[17]Richard Goulding, Adam Leaver & Jonathan Silver. ‘Manchester Offshored: A Public Interest Report on the Manchester Life Partnership Between Manchester City Council and The Abu Dhabi United Group’. Goulding, Richard and Leaver, Adam and Silver, Jonathan, Manchester Offshored: A Public Interest Report on the Manchester Life Partnership Between Manchester City Council and The Abu Dhabi United Group (July 20, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4168229 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4168229

[18] Max Caller. ‘Liverpool City Council Best Value Inspection’. GOV.UK. (March 2021)

[19] Liam Thorp. ‘Government taking over all finance and governance powers at Liverpool Council’. Liverpool Echo. (19 August 2022)

[20] John Harris. ‘Sir Howard Bernstein on reinventing Manchester: ‘Remarkable things have been achieved’. The Guardian. (18 April 2017)

[21]Companies House. ‘Deborah Ann McLaughlin personal appointment’. GOV.UK. (2022)

[22]Lin Cao. ‘Charter Cities’. Symposium: Rights Protection in International Criminal Law and Beyond. (2019). 27 (3). pp717

[23] Gordon MacLeod. ‘From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a “Revanchist City”?On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance’. Antipode. (2002) 34(3) pp602-624

[24] Cao pp717

[25] Ibid. p734

[26] Rahul Sagar. ‘Are Charter Cities Legitimate’. The Journal of Political Philosophy. (2016) 24 (4) pp509-529

[27] Arthur Phillips. ‘Charter Cities in Honduras?’ OpenDemocracy. (7 January 2014)

 

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Abi O’Connor is a final-year doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on the extraction of economic capital from devalued land and housing markets, and explores how territorial stigmatisation impacts these processes. Through the course of her fieldwork, the messiness of Liverpool’s urban political economy became increasingly apparent, with issues including the politics of authenticity, class and corruption becoming central to the city’s story. Twitter: @abioconnor_

 

 

 

By Lily GB (@lilygbrown)

 

“Thrones are crashing everywhere, and the men of property are secretly trembling” (p. 27)

 

 

The ‘manmade’ environment is a colloquialism so embedded in everyday dialogue that we rarely pause to dissect the meaning behind it. While it often refers to ‘human’ made constructs, it is also reflective of the gendered nature of our environment. Our urban structures have historically been constructed by men, for men; throughout history, the female experience of space has been more of an afterthought.

 

However, the tides started to shift in the 1980s with the ascent of the second-wave feminism. While the movement has been well-traced, discussed, and even contested for its exclusive tendencies; less discussed is the feminist militancy that materialised in the fields of architecture and the urban environment. That is where Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment, a work first published by the female collective Matrix in 1984, comes in.

 

The book has recently been republished by Verso with a new and updated foreword, a sign that the issues it addresses continue to bare significance. An offshoot of the 1970s New Architecture Movement (NAM), the Matrix Feminist Design Cooperative was first formed in 1981, offering a socialist feminist approach to architecture and the built environment. Worker cooperatives hold a strong tradition in the sydnicalist history of the British Left, and Matrix were able to fill a void that existed at the crossroads of patriarchy, architecture, and non-hierarchical cooperative practice.

 

As Katie Lloyd Thomas and Karen Burns inform us, Matrix evolved amid a hotbed a of local activism. In London alone, ‘a 1975 survey estimated that 20,000 squatters were living in council housing’ (p.x). Whilst the housing crisis is so often traced back to the 1980s and the advent of Thatcherism, many people across the UK were facing barriers in and to housing pre-1979, particularly single women and single mothers. In understanding this context, the establishment of Matrix and the publication of Making Space appear both timely and necessary.

 

Despite the book’s subtitle (Women and the Manmade Environment), it is largely comprised of an examination of the female experience of housing rather than the built environment more generally. Each chapter is taken up by a respective female scholar and/or practitioner, straddling a variety of disciplines from housing to urban design to healthcare provision and reform; many of the authors were also associated with Matrix. They impart their perspective on a variety of different subjects and experiences, offering the reader part history, part social theory and part memoir.

 

The Opening

 

The introduction immediately transports us to the present, asking us to ‘consider [our] surroundings’. The ‘home’, so often celebrated as a sphere of freedom and individuality, is a complicated space. Whilst for many it is a domain of retreat and refuge, for others it marks yet another space whereby (unpaid) work is to be performed. This has historically been the case for women, who play an outsized role in the social reproduction of capitalism. Whilst men were historically granted the physical border between the workplace and the home, women have not been afforded the same sentiment of separation. Conversely, however, the home is also a space where women often access higher levels of autonomy. As the book notes, the ‘home’ is a contradiction.

 

The introduction also tells us that we are not simply about to embark on an account of gender relations, but one of how they intersect with the wider structures of the capitalist economy: “we do not believe that the buildings around us are part of a conspiracy to oppress women. They have developed from other priorities, notably the profit motive” (p.9). The book goes on to unveil the inseparable influences of patriarchy and capitalism on the livelihoods of women and their experiences of the built environment, situating female oppression within political economic structures.

 

Readers of the work will not be surprised to learn that architecture and its related fields have traditionally been dominated by upper class white men. This immediately produces problems. Housing (at least it used to) forms one of several pillars of welfare provision; and for this to be dictated and determined by a select, detached few will inevitably carry consequences.

 

As Jane Darke notes in chapter 2, female and/or working-class architects have traditionally been forced to adopt the conscience of middle-class men (p.11). This has implications for the provision of housing and the built environment; housing designed by men has consistently failed to account for the experience of marginalised groups. Not much has changed in contemporary fields of housing and planning; planning consultancies tend to be comprised of university-educated individuals, and largely men.

 

The impact of ‘representation’ remains a contentious debate. As Dawn Foster illuminates in her antidote to ‘lean in’ culture, Lean Out, more female CEOs certainly is not the answer; such a theory applies to architecture and planning. However, Making Space does not simply demand greater representation, rather it maintains a that a robust feminist movement is ‘indispensable’ to incite any genuine change (p.25).

 

The book, particularly in Chapter 3, is historically informative, tracing the establishment of the Women’s Housing Subcommittee 1918. Guided by a similar ethos to the Women’s Labour League, both helped pioneer the way for a women’s voice in public services and work, maintaining that women should be at the forefront of housing provision and design. They set out to expose the conditions of working-class women’s lives, visiting estates across the country and producing their findings in 1918. Unsurprisingly, their findings didn’t tempt a genuine change in policymaking, but it did set the tone for future feminist thought in architectural practice.

 

Despite the importance of the Committee’s work, McFarlane articulates frustration in the fact that whilst the changes proposed would improve the conditions of women in the home – particularly through enhanced physical design – the suggestions reinforced women’s role as domestic servants and confined them to their oppressive livelihoods as housewives propping up the structures of social reproduction.

 

Communalism – A Panacea?

 

Chapter X, Roberts’ ‘Private Kitchens, Public Cooking’ also provides a cogent critique of the home and the female existence within it. Advertising between the 1920s-1950s saw ‘pictures abound of women/wives serving meals to their brightly expectant families’ (p.106). Picture Madmen’s Betty Draper serving up a freshly baked pie in an outfit that could neither be defined as either an apron or a dress.

 

But the reality of the private (home) kitchen in not always a domestic idyll. As Roberts notes, whilst cooking itself might be a pleasurable activity, all that comes with it is hard and often demoralising work. Here we come to the alternative idea of ‘community feeding’. Forming a part of the war effort, Community Feeding (renamed ‘British Restaurants’ for Churchill’s fear that community feeding was an odious suggestion, indicative of ‘communism and the workhouse’ – p.109) adopted a utilitarian approach to domestic chores: ‘simple meals and simple prices’. They essentially acted as community cafes, usually containing women serving hot meals to local residents and families.

 

Although the state-supported British Restaurants later declined and might not be defined as a ‘revolutionary endeavour’ in women’s liberation, the experiment ‘combined an approach to issues of poverty and malnutrition with an implicit challenge to women’s unpaid labour in the home’ (p.118). Since, community cooking and housing has struggled to find a place within the British psyche. Alongside the home and the family, cooking has been traditionally regarded as a private activity to be performed by women.

 

However, these experiments in communalism – also evident in the cooperative housing movements and collective rent strikes of the twentieth century – are vital in for any leftist feminist movement, producing a vision of genuine liberation. We can read the book therefore as an educative tool in community organising, situating the female struggle within it. As welfare provision continues to disintegrate and the cost-of-living crises mount, alternative forms of local community activism, predicated on solidarity, will be more expedient than ever.

 

Public Space

 

Moving beyond housing, chapter 4 offers an insight into Matrix’s perspectives on public space. In recent years, the gendered nature of public space has become the subject of a great deal of public debate. This debate has centred around the matters of safety and harassment. How our built environment, housing provision and cuts to domestic violence services continue to harm women has been taken up by inspiring movements such as Sisters Uncut.

 

Matrix’s chapter on public space takes on a slightly different topic. Whilst safety and sexual harassment within public space are considered, the book also examines how planning practice – particularly New Town planning of the mid-twentieth century – constrained the female experience of public space.

 

New Towns and the ‘neighbourhood units’ contained within them were pitched as spaces convenient for women and their new families (with schools, shops, and public facilities in a short walking distance); however, the reality was a little different. Whilst there might’ve been a ‘benevolence’ (p.40) in reducing travel times, women were confronted with an absence of choice in their day-to-day lives. These new public spaces were built with gendered visions of society in mind; one which confined women to their domestic duties and reduced their mobility, particularly difficult for those unable to afford a car.

 

 

Conclusions

 

Making Space is both a timely and necessary read. Many of the issues it deliberates can still be applied today; some have even intensified. Whilst the feminist movement has consistently fought for a fairer deal in housing and the built environment, the struggles are still very much alive. Women fleeing domestic abuse continue to face challenges in accessing service support or state-funded housing; austerity has profoundly impacted women and mothers; trans women are excluded from housing provision and access to basic services; and migrant women continue to be detained and abused in centres such as Yarl’s Wood.

 

Whilst the book might be lacking in explicit solutions to these crises, it does not claim to contain all the answers. Rather, in the introduction we are told: “we are not prescribing a solution, we are describing a problem.” It does, however, provide food for thought, particularly on communalism and local organising.

 

This leaves us with the question of ‘where next?’. As the book suggests, just as in the 1980s, a robust collective movement is required to truly challenge the ingrained systems of private property and patriarchy, and to demand justice through reclaiming now privatized public spaces.

 

As Harvey illuminates in his 2008 Right to the City, the spatial forms of our cities increasingly consist of ‘fortified fragments, gated communities and privatised public spaces kept under surveillance’. Anna Minton, in Ground Control, explores these urban processes in the context of the UK, whereby post-industrial cities have been commanded by undemocratic governing structures such as Urban Development Corporations, Enterprise Zones and, more recently, Business Improvement Districts (BID).

 

Ostensibly predicated on notions of ‘safety’ and ‘respect’, these public-private partnership processes have gone no way in enhancing the welfare of women. Rather, they see to it that the built environment is entirely dictated by the profit motive.

 

In challenging this, we can look to the tenant movements cropping up across all corners of the globe and resisting the tides of gentrification, dispossession, and displacement. At a more local scale, urban struggles led by the likes of Sisters Uncut are, through direct action, demanding justice at the intersections of domestic abuse services, welfare cuts and housing provision – placing genuine liberation at the heart of their demands.

 

Lily GB is studying Housing and Community Planning at the University of Liverpool. She is a regular contributor to GMHA, and author of recent pamphlet 'The Housing Crisis is a Land Crisis'.

 

Making Space is available to buy from Verso Books.

 

Cover Image: Anne Thorne with son, photographed by Liz Millen, Archway, London. Taken from the cover of Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment by Matrix

 

By Nick Bano (@nickbano)

 

In 1649 the radical Christian group the Diggers made a public declaration explaining that, in their view, landlords are thieves:

 

“Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill”.

 

150 years later the early free market economist Jean-Baptise Say also said that landlordism “has its origin in robbery”, and Adam Smith was similarly scathing about the economic basis of landlordism.

 

In 2022, though, a student tenant who accused her landlord of theft was successfully sued for libel and slander.

 

There’s obviously a big difference between saying landlordism in general is akin to theft and saying that a particular landlord has behaved dishonestly. But it’s worth recognising that there’s a long tradition of criticising the behaviour and economic foundations of landlordism as a trade; of equating it with stealing regardless of the fact that rent-seeking is lawful. 

 

This article looks at the case (Rafique v ACORN [2022] EWHC 414, QB), and what housing activists should learn from it.

 

Background 

 

As far as I know, Rafique is the second time that a private landlord has brought High Court proceedings against ACORN housing activists in England & Wales. 

 

The first, last summer, was Gitto Estates v Persons Unknown [2021] EWHC 1997 (QB), and it was a spectacular damp squib.  The landlord went in hard, making all sorts of allegations about an ACORN demonstration at an estate agents’ office.  However, unfortunately for the landlord, the judge found ‘a clear body of evidence that suggests that protests have been conducted in a lawful manner’.

 

In Gitto Estates the landlord also failed to produce evidence to show that some of the more serious allegations had happened at all.  While the court did grant an injunction, it really only banned ACORN members from doing things that would have been unlawful anyway.  The landlord may well have gone away thinking that the whole thing had been a waste of everyone’s time and money.

 

Rafique v ACORN, though, is a troubling development.  As well as seeking an anti-harassment injunction, the landlord founded her claim on the notoriously oppressive system of English defamation law.  Libel and slander.  We know that billionaire landlord John Christodoulou has threatened to sue campaigning tenants for defamation before, and I’ve been approached by a number of renters’ groups when other landlords have fired off threatening letters, but this is the first actual defamation claim against tenants that I’m aware of (at least since the 1950s).

 

What happened here

 

Zobia Rafique’s tenant was a student in Sheffield, and a member of ACORN.  She had been granted a tenancy agreement and had paid a £300 deposit.  But something seems to have gone wrong and she asked for the deposit back the next day. It wasn’t given to her.  ACORN campaigned over several months to try to get the deposit returned.

 

The campaign apparently included allegations (later conceded by ACORN to be unfounded) that the landlord ran a fraudulent business, had caused the tenant to sign a blank tenancy agreement and charged additional fees, and had ‘stolen’ the £300 deposit.

 

As well as singing outside at Ms Rafique’s home address, being rude to her in a supermarket and a number of other impactful campaigning activities, the case centred on a speech that the tenant had given at a rally at Sheffield Town Hall.

 

There are two important things to note about the High Court judgment.

 

First, I am not a defamation lawyer, and it is an extremely specialised subject.  What’s said about this case here must not be taken as expert commentary.

 

Second, the case wasn’t defended.  ACORN and the tenant had both been sued, but ACORN accepted that there had been “no good foundation” for the fraud & theft allegations and reached a settlement with the landlord before the hearing, so the judgment only deals with the claim against the individual tenant.  The tenant herself didn’t formally defend the claim, so the case concerns a ‘default judgment’, which is a sort-of automatic win which the court can award if the defendant doesn’t participate.  So the key issues in the case weren’t fully aired.  We don’t have the full factual background, nor any of the competing legal and factual arguments and analysis, that we might ordinarily expect to see the court weighing up.

 

The judgment

 

The judgment deals with three legal points:

• Harassment;
• Libel;
• Slander.

 

On the harassment point, because the tenant had not disputed the factual basis of the landlord’s complaints about the campaign, the judge accepted both that the incidents had happened and that the tenant had been complicit in them.  He decided that the actions met the legal definition of harassment.

 

As far as libel is concerned, this centred on the landlord’s complaint that the campaigning activities had been recorded and publicised.  The judge accepted that the tenant had published statements that were “meant and were understood to mean that the claimants operate a fraudulent business, and that they defrauded a vulnerable student by making her sign a blank contract and then added additional unexpected fees”.

 

The slander is the most interesting point because it’s not quite clear what the judge meant.  He said that the tenant’s speech at the town hall “imputes a criminal offence and disparages the claimants in their profession as landlords” (emphasis added). 

 

Clearly, it could be slanderous to falsely say that someone has committed a criminal offence, but the second part of the sentence is the difficult bit.  The judge might have meant that the allegation of the offence was, itself, disparaging of the claimants in their profession of landlords, or he might have meant that there were other, separate, words which were disparaging.  If it’s the latter, then it’s difficult to understand how the tenant had said anything different from Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say or the Diggers.  Was he saying that simply describing the nature of a landlord’s business and economic function, albeit in robust and critical terms, was against the law? 

 

Implications & resources

 

This trend for public relations-focused litigation by landlords seems to be an extension – the logical endpoint of – the ‘softlord’ phenomenon.  Despite hundreds of years of economic critique, and despite a rich tradition of tenants picketing landlords at their homes, private landlords simply cannot bear to be criticised, or to be thought of badly.  It’s somehow unfair to hold a mirror to the phenomenon of landlordism, and to point out that the exploitation inherent to the relationship looks an awful lot like a form of theft. It’s also somehow unfair for tenants to directly target landlords in a personal way, regardless of the fact that they are (directly and personally) profiting from tenants’ rent payments.

 

Will it happen often?  I suspect that not many landlords will have the stomach for this sort of fight. A defamation claim is an extremely costly, stressful and often humiliating process for all sides (win or lose – consider the ‘Wagatha Christie’ debacle).

 

Of course, there’s an element of the Streisand effect here, too: I’m sure I never would have heard of Zobia Rafique or her business as a landlord if she hadn’t brought this claim, and – equally – the case has done something to raise the profile of the dedicated campaigners at ACORN.  Particularly if tenants do robustly defend claims (perhaps pointing out the hundreds of years’ worth of anti-landlord analysis), landlords may end up with egg on their face even if they do technically win. But it’s yet another risk that we, as a movement, have to face. Another disadvantage built in to the system of landlord-tenant relations.

 

And, sadly, there are very few resources available to those without access to expensive legal representation.  Legal aid isn’t readily available for defamation proceedings.  It’s ironic that the crowning glory of Keir Starmer’s legal career was a case called Steel & Morris v UK, in which he persuaded the European Court of Human Rights that the UK government had failed the defendants in the ‘McLibel’ case because legal aid was generally unavailable in defamation cases (which meant that Starmer had represented the defendants pro bono at various points).  But legal aid provision has only got worse since then. So your best bet is still to ask whether Comrade Keir has got any time to represent you for free.

 

Obviously it’s better if you join a renters’ group. They’ll have better access to professional and institutional advice, they’ll be better prepared than individuals to weather the storm, and solidarity in the face of an oppressive landlord is absolutely crucial.

 

But for the groups themselves, this case exposes a difficulty.  We must start from the position that we believe our members when they come to us with a problem, but at the same time we have to be alert to the possibility of launching a public campaign and later having to admit that the allegations weren’t true, or weren’t provable.  We need to be careful, and do our best to be sure about what’s happened before launching a campaign. It’s useful to have protocols for social media posts, especially when dealing with private landlords.

 

The take-home point is that if you’re going to actually defame your landlord, by saying something specific which you later admit is untrue, don’t be surprised if she wins. But if a group is confident about the allegations, or if it’s simply going to describe what it is that landlords do, then even the most litigious landlord will know that they have an ugly fight on their hands.

 

Postscript - publication

 

A draft of this article was sent to a number of people involved in housing campaigns, because concerns had been raised that drawing attention to Zobia Rafique’s decision to sue might encourage other landlords.

 

Obviously it’s important to do the comradely thing, and to avoid any needless risk to activists and groups.

 

But when something goes wrong it’s also important that everyone can learn from it. The feedback received from almost everyone was that these sorts of issues need to be discussed, openly and frankly, rather than hidden away. All of us in the housing movement, and not just those directly affected by the case, need to treat these issues as learning opportunities. There was an appetite, and a need, to do so here. 

 

While it’s important to balance the risk against the benefits, a well-advised landlord would (I hope) baulk at the idea of bringing expensive defamation proceedings even in the most clear-cut case. Only the daftest and most bloody-minded will try. Besides, the landlord community is talking about this issue internally, and it has access to lawyers who will be well aware of the possibility of taking legal action against our movement. The risk of making things worse simply by having this discussion seems to be fairly low.

 

 

Nick Bano is a lawyer and campaigner specialising in homelessness and tenants' rights. He is currently working on a book for Verso on the housing crisis.

 

 

By Greater Manchester Housing Action (@gmhousingaction)

 

On Thursday the planning committee will consider an application by Renaker for permission to build Trinity Islands: four skyscrapers incorporating 1,950 apartments and with a Gross Development Value of £741 million. The developers have declined to make any significant contribution to support affordable/social housing either on site or through the section 106. The MEN newspaper reports that the developers are offering £106,000 to the Council, not enough for one social housing unit to be built and likely a PR stunt aimed at an angry public and easy to please Planning Committee. They claim in the viability assessment that, “the enclosed viability cannot support further s106 /affordable housing contribution". Viability assessments are a sham in which consultants make calculations that nearly always precludes supporting councils to deliver social or affordable housing. Even with a supposed 12% return Renaker are on for a near £89 million profit.  

 

Earlier week the MEN published a special report from Jen Williams documenting the soaring housing crisis in the city. She spoke to a range of councillors from across the city, “Didsbury East councillor Linda Foley this week warned of a looming ‘tsunami of people’ needing the council’s help; Ardwick’s Amna Saad Omar Abdullatif, whose community sits in the shadow of the booming city centre, described one family whose rent ‘was going up and up and up, and they were managing and managing and managing, until it was no longer viable to manage’, as their landlord hiked it every six months.”

 

It is clear to Mancunians, including Labour councillors, that the city is at a crossroads.

 

We have consistently warned for over five years now that the real estate boom in the city centre is fuelling a housing crisis. The Council has allowed developers to make soaring profits without any contributions to affordable or social housing – certainty not the 20% set out in the local planning guidance.

 

We were ignored, but all the evidence now shows we were correct in our assessments.

 

We call on Council Leader Bev Craig and the Planning Committee to refuse planning permission for Trinity Islands and to contest the viability assessment of the developers. This has long been the practice in London Boroughs such as Tower Hamlets who have a dedicated internal team to capture public value. We cannot allow skyscrapers with a value approaching a billion pounds to be given planning permission without a significant financial contribution toward addressing the housing crisis.

 

To carry on now despite all the evidence means there is no turning back for Manchester. The housing crisis is out of control, now is the time to travel down a different path.

 

Cover image: Renaker.

 

 

By Jacob Stringer (@radiagonalist)

 

The Housing Crisis is a Land Crisis, a pamphlet on Community Land Trusts by Lily Gordon Brown, was a welcome intervention in the discussion of the future of housing in the UK. Radical positive solutions to the inaccessibility of decent housing are too seldom discussed among housing activists. While some may think all housing should be council housing, I suspect this idea would struggle at the ballot box, and it ignores that many council tenants find themselves locked in a constant struggle with their landlord bureaucracies. This is not to denigrate council housing however, which was the greatest effective re-commoning of land ever achieved in the UK. Rather I think it’s important to recognise that as well as affordable housing, people also want housing that they have some control over. While no-one would turn down new council housing, as a housing movement we may want to spread our positive efforts across multiple de-marketising housing tenures.

 

I have lived for some years in housing co-operatives, which also de-marketise land through collective control. I love housing co-ops but Lily Gordon Brown is correct that they can become inward looking. There are some potential solutions to that problem – one network of German housing co-ops has payments towards future co-ops built into the rent of each member of the network, ensuring that every co-op looks outwards and forwards as they add new co-ops to the network. Community Land Trusts can be another solution to the problem, made more open as they are by membership beyond those who live on the land.

 

To add to the history of CLTs given in the pamphlet I think it is good to look at some proto-CLT types in the UK, and see how people have been trying to address the problems CLTs answer for some time. In 1980s London a battle in the GLC about what would happen to a large chunk of the South Bank was won by community advocates who set up Coin Street Community Builders. While CLTs as such did not exist in the UK at the time, this organisation created through struggle was set up as a non-profit company with housing co-ops nested within it, creating something a bit like a CLT. Coin Street has successfully managed for the community an area of extremely expensive land in central London ever since.

 

Another near-approach to CLTs can be seen in social housing in the form of ‘Community Gateway’ Housing Associations. These usually have two differences from normal HAs: they are more democratic and community-led, and they manage land and facilities as well as housing, aiming to be a community as much as a housing provider. A successful example such as Phoenix in South East London demonstrates both the range of activities such an organisation can be involved in, and the significant attempts to ensure that member tenants are able to exert some control over the professional staff. I am not entirely sure why the Community Gateway model didn’t spread further, though I could hazard a guess at lack of political commitment from councils, who probably preferred the ease of passing their stock over to more ‘efficient’ – and subject to managerial capture – standard Housing Associations.

 

Managerial capture is a risk in any supposedly community controlled housing. Some of the housing associations that later merged (under government pressure) into the big conglomerate HAs started out relatively democratic and accountable to their communities. Now we are left with HAs whose growth obsession and debt obligations mean they act as profit-maximisers even if on paper they are non-profit organisations. Managerial capture has happened too to some housing co-operatives, either through failures of internal management or simply through drift and complacency among members. It would be a great shame if the CLTs being set up now were prone to managerial capture and lost their democratic ethos over time. If we are not on our guard I think it quite likely many will go in that direction, however well-intentioned their founders.

 

There are then some boring technical democratic matters that are worth thinking about from the beginning when the CLT constitution is written. What is the balance of residents to professionals in positions of power, and what will it look in 30 years, 50 years time? Can the residents in fact exert any power over professional staff? Can committee members be recalled? Can a general meeting of the CLT overturn a poor management committee decision? These and many other democratic issues are worth thinking through carefully when considering whether the democratic ethos will survive long term. Some of the standard CLT constitutions out there seem to rely on the goodwill of people at the helm rather than robust democratic procedures. Which works until it doesn’t, particularly once the founders are gone.

 

Then there is the question of scale. While I don’t question the motives of the founders of London CLT, who have worked hard to create good places to live, it is impossible to conceive of ‘London’ as a community. What will community control mean for an organisation with thousands of properties scattered across different sites across London? Tenant Management Organisations in council housing are also meant to give greater control to the community, but Kensington and Chelsea set up one TMO across the whole borough, and it became clear that even one borough of London was not a community, and communities could not meaningfully exert much control. The price of that was seen at Grenfell. Can community control really can be exerted over the places people live if the organisation spans the whole of London? And as the organisation grows larger and needs more professionals to run it, won’t the risk of managerial capture grow ever greater?

 

If CLTs are to be part of a transformative movement in which people gain greater control over their lives rather than having to submit to the vagaries of capital – and I do think they can be – then it’s worth thinking about these questions of scale and democratic structure. If we are to create CLTs, let’s make sure they will not devolve over decades into yet more bureaucratic capital-centric ‘non-profit’ entities, but instead remain of the community and for the community, resisting market forces in perpetuity.

 

 

 

Jacob Stringer writes and researches on housing organising, and is a member of the London Renters Union.

 

Cover image: Chris de Soysa.

 

Copies of Lily's pamphlet The Housing Crisis is a Land Crisis are still for sale at £4.00 each (includes p&p).

 

To order, please send money via paypal to paypal.me/gmhousingaction, be sure to un-click 'paying for goods or services' (so we don't lose 30p to Paypal fees!), and include your address in the 'additional details' section. We’ll get it posted out to you!

 

By Nigel de Noronha (@deNoronhaNigel)

 

In the first of series of articles examining the racialised impact of student accommodation in the wards of South Manchester, Nigel de Noronha examines the background to the growth in student population in the area. This work has been gratefully supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and originally appeared on the Greater Manchester Tenants Union's website.

 

Fallowfield in the 1970s was home to many students. The Owens Park complex accommodated many first-year students whilst the terraced houses opposite provided multi-occupancy housing and profitable investment for landlords who packed them high.  With the proportion of young people attending university around 13% at the time and many fewer students from overseas the effects of ghost towns during the holidays were limited to these student ghettoes. With the growth in the proportion of young people attending university and increasing numbers of overseas students there are now around 1.9 million studying full-time. This additional demand for housing in university towns and cities leads to studentification, with significant impacts on the affordability of housing.  Research into this has been carried out, It has been the subject of research, particularly in smaller towns and cities. A recent article explores resistance to the financialisation of student housing in Dublin.

With 63% of students in England leaving an existing home to move into a new one in the 2019/20 year, there were more than a million living in student halls and other rented accommodation. Figure 1 shows how those moving to student halls have become increasingly reliant on private sector accommodation.

 

Figure 1 – students living in halls from 2014/15 to 2019/20Source: HESA Statistics

 

More than half a million live in rented accommodation and the number has increased by 10% between 2014/15 and 2019/20.  The growth in specialist student accommodation reflects both private halls and group accommodation with enhanced facilities.  Investment in buy-to-let properties has also targeted the rising demand for student accommodation.  The income from students is significantly more than from working households. The consequence is that new housing built for families is bought by landlords and let to students in popular parts of our university towns and cities. The universities also contribute to increased demand for the available housing by hosting events which feed the demand for AirBnB properties reducing the stock of affordable housing even further..

Figure 2 shows how these student households were concentrated in Manchester and Salford based on the 2011 census. They dominated neighbourhoods around Oxford and Wilmslow Road.

 

Figure 2 – proportion of student households by output area in 2011Source: Census 2011

 

Major changes since then include the development of the MMU campus in Hulme and the development of private student flats and new build for investment properties.  In 2019/20 there had been a growth in full-time student numbers by 4% to more than 65,000 in Manchester and a growth of 13% to 18,670 in Salford.  The official figures are not available for the last two years, but we know that there was a significant increase in both years due to changes in examination arrangements arising from Covid-19. The extent to which accommodation choices reflect different types of students is not clear from the research into studentification.  The rise in the financialisation of the market might be expected to contribute to increasing segregation of the student cohorts by citizenship, race and class.  The scale of this segregation will be explored once the universities have responded to FOI requests.

The growth in student numbers and the extent to which they are developing distinct neighbourhoods will contribute to the remaking of the neighbourhoods around the universities with the likelihood that students will displace other residents in neighbourhoods such as Hulme, Moss Side and Ardwick together with the potential shift away from university-owned and private housing in Fallowfield. Plans to redevelop the Owens park site with investment from Abu Dhabi to “deliver strong financial returns” were announced in 2014 and planning permission granted in 2015.  After they pulled out two years later another deal with Carillion was announced.  The following year Carillion went bust.

The housing in the Fallowfield area has suffered from decades of neglect by private landlords whose incentive to invest is limited.  Local facilities are geared to the student market and the area is ready for further financialisation as institutional investment seizes the opportunities to redevelop parts of the area.

 

 

 

Nigel de Noronha is a Research Associate at Manchester University, interested in housing, inequality, social justice, race and migration. He is a member of the Greater Manchester Tenants Union.

 

 

By Lily Gordon-Brown (@lilygbrown)

 

There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a housing emergency. However, it is not only housing which has been subjected to commodification and financialization in recent decades, but also the land that sits underneath it. Land has become a site of speculation and regarded as an asset to be traded on the market. Moreover, recent findings suggest that around 25,000 landowners have control over half England (Shrubsole). This astoundingly unequal state of affairs is a concern for our movement.

 

To fight these twin crises of land and housing, a movement has emerged. From renter unions, social housing tenants campaign groups, to the big housing NGOs – there is a broad front of organisations pressuring landlords and the government over the right to housing. Alongside this, another movement is looking to challenge the power relations entrenched within land and housing: community-led housing. This forms the focus of the pamphlet that this article introduces

 

Across disciplines like urban studies, geography, and economics, there is a swelling recognition of the importance of land. Yet this debate sometimes feels confined to the academy, and remote from everyday organisers in our movement. It is time that this work is brought into the mainstream and starts to underpin our own understanding. To this end, my lockdown 2.0. – as well as spending every other hour trawling Indeed for a new job – was consumed by researching the political economy of land, particularly works by the likes of Stuart Hodkinson, Brett Christophers, and Laurie MacFarlane, who respectively explore theories of enclosure, dispossession, land financialization.

 

In looking into this question, I quickly came across groups attempting to challenge the status quo through the organisational formation of Community Land Trusts (CLTs). CLTs are membership organisations which are classified as ‘non-profits’. They are usually predicated on geographical location and contain a self-defined community. The main purpose of a CLT – one form of community-led housing ­– is to buy land and retain it in perpetuity by separating the ownership of any given building from the land which it stands upon. CLTs are most used to provide genuinely affordable housing – based on median local income – but the land retained can be put to any use that the community desire, such as winter gardens and community kitchens.

 

Perhaps the most significant point here is that the land acquired by the CLT is permanently removed from the for-profit speculative market. Any profits generated through the CLT, either through the rents collected from residents or homeowners on the CLT land, must be held as social increment and is to be reinvested back into the community. The primary objective is to de-commodify land and housing and revitalise use value over exchange value.

 

CLTs are a complex world and invite many questions about whether they can genuinely transform the anatomy of land and housing as it stands. Thus, what initially started as an article proposal morphed into a half-year research project whereby I interviewed CLT members, organisers, and academics from across the UK and the US. It is worth noting that due to the complex nature of the topic and the research limitations imposed by lockdowns, I was not able to cover everything. Rather, the pamphlet intends to answer three main questions:

 

• What are CLTs and where did they come from?
• What can CLTs offer us in our response to the land/housing crises the UK and the US?
• Do CLTs possess a ‘transformative potential’?

 

The pamphlet, never intended as either a celebration or condemnation of CLTs, can be understood as an exploration – guided by those at the heart of these projects. However, without giving too much away, it has largely turned out to be a positive appraisal.  It includes interviews from CLT organisers in Liverpool, London, New York, and Wisconsin and with academics who dedicate a great deal of their work to researching CLTs and the opportunities and limitations they might offer. The interviews were wide-ranging and informative, and tempted an imagining of a world where land use is determined by and for the community, and shelter is seen as a home and not an asset.

 

The pamphlet also considers land commissions, community wealth building and public-private partnership models, each of which intersect with the discussions around CLTs – which constitute only one part of a much larger movement to challenge the status quo. Nor does the pamphlet underplay the central role that public housing has to play in any solution to the housing emergency.

 

That all said – we hope you get hold of a pamphlet which is now available to order in printed form, using the instructions below. A digital version of the essay will be uploaded in due course here too.

 

Please don’t hesitate to contact me on Twitter or via email on lilsgb@outlook.com if you would like to further these discussions or bring anything forward that I have missed throughout work. As a Master’s student studying housing and community planning, these discussions already dominate my mind!

 

 

 

The Housing Crisis is a Land Crisis

£4.00 each (includes p&p).

 

Bundle deal with The Myth of the Good Landlord pay £5 and get the pair! (SOLD OUT)

 

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By GM Tenants Union and GM Housing Action

 

A new report raises concerns about the proliferation of Airbnb and other short-term letting platforms (STLs) in the city and its effects on local residents. 

 

 

The report, written by academics, journalists and members of Greater Manchester Tenants Union and Greater Manchester Housing Action, finds a threefold growth in Airbnb listings in Manchester between 2016 and 2020, and growth by nearly a factor of four for entire properties

 

Figures suggested if pre-pandemic growth trends continued at the same level they had for the previous four-year period, Manchester would lose huge chunks of its housing stock to short-term lets. 

 

By the end of the decade the transfer of long term rental properties into the short term sector might shut out over 4,000 households or 9,400 residents. With more than 13,000 households on the social housing waiting list home sharing platforms such as Airbnb will massively exacerbate the housing crisis. 

 

It focuses its analysis on the neighbourhoods of Moss Side and the Northern Quarter, showing that the problems of anti-social behaviour and disruption to neighbours exist in increasing numbers outside of the city centre and are leading to the loss of family homes. 

 

While so far Manchester has treated the problem of STLs only in terms of impacts of anti-social behaviour and neighbourhood disruption; the report links these issues with the broader impact that short-term lets is having on our housing market, with the housing available to short-term visitors already greater than Manchester’s priority social housing list. 

 

The report notes the increasing domination of Airbnb by professional landlords and agencies which manage properties on behalf of landlords, rather than ‘hosts’ renting out spare rooms. Twelve such ‘management services’ exist in the city. 

 

The report highlights how the short term letting market is removing housing from the stock available to local people to buy or rent, and orientating it towards the tourist or short-stay market. 

 

The research calls for greater regulation of the short term rental market, and for the Council to fully engage with affected communities.

 

The research was undertaken by Dr Luke Yates (University of Manchester), Dr Jonathan Silver (University of Sheffield), Andrea Sandor, Isaac Rose and Rowena Davis.

 

To download a copy of the report, head here.

 

By Isis Barei-Guyot

 

What is a PSPO?

 

As we approach a time of year that is extremely challenging for those rough-sleeping in the UK, particularly due to harsh weather conditions, it is concerning to see that a banner for a City Centre Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) has been erected in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens. Public Spaces Protection Orders, according to Manchester City Council’s website, are rules put into place to deal with “problems” or “nuisance” in an area that is affecting the local community’s quality of life, ensuring that we can “all” use and enjoy public spaces, “safe from antisocial behaviour”.

 

Manchester council has previously stated that the heavily challenged PSPO is focused on anti-social behaviour, and is not intended to target rough sleepers. Yet the original plans for a PSPO in 2019 proposed to fine individuals £100 for intimidating or aggressive begging, and the banner in Piccadilly Gardens prohibits the following:

 

• You must not consume alcohol outside of licensed premises
• You must not discard hypodermic needles or syringes
• You must not urinate or defecate, unless in a toilet
• You must move location upon valid request if occupying a tent or structure
• You must move location upon valid request if causing an obstruction
• You must provide your name, address and date of birth if suspected of breaching this order

 

Who is it for?

 

It has been widely acknowledged both within and outside of academia that access to citizenship often rests on an individual’s ability to conform to a set of behaviours that are deemed socially acceptable. This is reflected in the PSPO’s focus on keeping citizens safe from ‘antisocial’ behaviour. Yet it has also been acknowledged that citizenship is increasingly tied to the ownership of property, (see Ananya Roy’s work on propertied citizenship) and as the PSPO demonstrates, those without property are generally considered to be sources of antisocial behaviour.

 

The antisocial behaviours listed above often cannot be avoided by those without access to shelter, such as needing to urinate and defecate when there is an identified shortage of public toilets in Manchester’s City Centre, the ones that are provided do not always remain open during the evening, and rough sleepers are often not welcomed within establishments offering toilet access to the public. It is also worth noting that access to water and sanitation is a human right.

 

The use of ‘obstruction’ is also vague, are all bodies that take up space therefore open to being labelled as obstructions? Who decides if requests are valid? Finally, when the prohibited behaviours obviously affect the rough-sleeping population more than other populations, it is concerning to see the provision of an address is a must. If a rough-sleeper cannot provide these details, it could be considered a criminal offence, which could lead to a fixed penalty notice of £100, or prosecution, which could lead to a fine of up to £1,0000. The consequences of this for an individual who does not have access to housing are obvious.

 

The disproportionate effect that fines have on those with lower incomes as opposed to those with higher incomes has been acknowledged repeatedly, yet authorities continue to impose them, and continue to profit. It is therefore also worth considering that the relocation of Manchester’s Christmas Markets to Piccadilly Gardens in 2021, and the potential financial gain to Manchester Council from tourism, will influence the vigour with which the order is enforced.

 

Developing with compassion

 

This is not a denial that there is antisocial behaviour in Manchester’s City Centre, or even Piccadilly Gardens. Instead, it is suggested that the PSPO disproportionately targets the rough sleeping population, allowing Manchester Council to bypass taking responsibility for what has been labelled a ‘homeless crisis’ in Manchester, and placing the responsibility on rough-sleeping individuals themselves. As noted in a letter written to Manchester City Council by Psychologists for Change challenging the proposed PSPO:

 

“Whilst it is acknowledged that rough sleepers may engage in behaviours such as substance use and crime, it is once again emphasised that such behaviours are very rarely a ‘choice’ and may be more accurately understood as a survival strategy.”

 

Once again, the focus on individual responsibility and a rejection of state responsibility within the PSPO correlates with understandings of neoliberal citizenship and austerity urbanism.

 

Who, then, is the “all” that this order proposes to serve? Will rough sleepers be able to enjoy public spaces more as a result of this PSPO? Unlikely. The mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham has been quoted as saying “no woman or girl should have to live in fear of going out”- what about the safety of women rough sleeping in Manchester’s city-centre?. In conclusion, this PSPO is to make people feel safe from rough sleepers, implying that, regardless of citizenship, rough-sleepers do not have the same right to safety in Manchester as those with access to housing, and therefore do not have a right to the city.

 

Realistically, the majority of us are a lot closer to becoming homeless than becoming a billionaire, and it is therefore worth considering what the future of a society that prioritises the safety of some over the safety of others will look like. While a clean, safe and welcoming city centre is obviously desirable, there are options beyond denigrating a population which does not have the resources or recognition to defend itself, but this requires us to move beyond considering homelessness or rough sleeping to be a lifestyle choice, and instead challenging the structures in our society that tolerate social injustices against fellow citizens.

 

Isis is a second year PhD Development Policy and Management student in the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester.

 

By Isaac Levin-Schtulberg

 

As the months since July’s ‘freedom day’ roll forward, those residing in the UK have been reacquainted with a lifestyle that they once considered a stable normality. The daily slog of COVID briefings, statistics and superfluous analysis about COVID-19’s radically transformative long term impacts have become resigned to what many want to be a bygone era.

 

Weird as it may be considering the increasingly rampant number of daily cases and deaths, it feels as though the memory of COVID-19, and the unprecedented transformation of life that came with it, has begun its gradual decline into what will eventually be a distant memory upon which we will reminisce. Yet, in the analysis of COVID-19’s future consequences, an important topic has been overlooked; how the ensuing economic crisis reflects a growing trend of the financial industry utilising crises as a means to entrench and accelerate the financialisation of housing.

 

To understand what this means, why it is important and how it is happening, I spoke with two experts in the field; Desiree Fields, a researcher on housing financialisation at the University of California, Berkeley, and LSE visiting fellow, housing and urban policy expert, Glyn Robbins.

 

Our conversations illuminated a transition from 1980 to the present, a period where housing transformed from a social good into an asset, underpinned by self-serving financial governance, unregulated banking and foreign investment. These changes, or its financialisation – the increasing role of financial actors, markets and institutions in economies – have already created a system which facilitated the destructive 2008 subprime mortgage financial crisis, alongside intense gentrification, extortionate housing costs and declining living standards. Now, with the incipient economic aftermath of the pandemic, we risk witnessing these issues exacerbate as we edge perilously close to a new landscape of global corporate landlordism.

 

“You’d be remiss to talk about this without starting with Thatcher’s Right to Buy”, Glyn told me. The Right to Buy scheme – where those renting council houses could buy their homes well below market value – marked a huge step in relinquishing governmental responsibility for housing.

 

As Right to Buy allowed the working and middle classes to buy their council homes en masse, a speculative feedback loop of house buying, inflating prices and increasing borrowing to buy more houses pushed prices up ever higher. Consequently, in the mind’s eye of UK society, housing transformed from a home, an indispensable public good for all, into a supposedly low-risk asset class that could make you rich.

 

The average house’s value tripled in the following decade, making homeowners far wealthier. In 1989, unfortunately, the music stopped. The housing market had crashed. Suddenly, the properties bought through Right to Buy were sold to extremely wealthy investors intending to profit in the increasingly expensive rental market. For politicians, this was terrible for votes, for business interests and, for the many property owning politicians, themselves. From then on, a slew of policies, first from the government and then the Bank of England, were enforced to ensure that housing – unlike other investments – never lost value.

 

Interest rates were continuously cut to encourage borrowing to buy houses after the 1989 crash. Meanwhile, new, increasingly risky mortgage-based financial instruments boomed, allowing the financial services industry to make trillions on the housing market; unimaginably more than the underlying value of the assets that were being traded on capital markets. Accompanying these were hugely risky low-to-zero deposit mortgages, ensuring people who could not afford homes bought them anyway, consequently indebting a generation. Nonetheless, capital kept flowing into the financial industry’s housing securities.

 

Concurrently, the responsibility for house building shifted, beginning to lay squarely on private property developers. Their chief aim was profit, which meant fewer, more expensive homes were built, increasing housing’s scarcity and its value with it. The combined effect of these changes was that housing became more expensive and the financial industry became totally enmeshed with housing. Regardless of if it was financially viable, more houses were continuously purchased through the financial sector dishing out unpayable mortgages that could then be traded for huge profits on capital markets. This culminated in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, all the while skyrocketing the price of a house by an absurd average of 1145%.

 

It cannot be understated just how bad this shift has been for people in the UK. The financial crisis in 2008, a situation created from increasingly risky strategies in the financial industry’s mortgage securities trading, destroyed millions of lives. The austerity policies that followed 2008 made matters worse. Stagnating wages from the crisis and the austerity policies that followed has meant that communities – particularly black working class communities – have been unable to keep up with the boom in rent prices. Communities like Brixton and many more like it, once hubs of black culture, have had their inhabitants priced out.

 

Despite this system being perceptibly broken, so perilously destructive that the UK is failing to meet the human right to adequate housing according to the UN, it is a totally intentional element of the UK economy. After 2008, for example, the Bank of England utilised quantitative easing (printing money) to buy government bonds (debt) in order to prevent the significant reduction in asset prices normally expected in economic turmoil. This, alongside continually low interest rates, has made sure the returns on investments into government bonds are low and mortgage repayments are less expensive, incentivising investors to buy property, propping up property prices.

 

The consequent demand for London’s housing as an investment has allowed 13% of the city’s homes to sit unoccupied, the same city where 170,000 people are currently homeless. Now, property markets in cities like Manchester are experiencing the same destructive trends. Despite social housing being in huge demand, their being rented at half of local market rates has meant its production has been decimated; they are just not profitable to property developers and councils do not receive the funding to build and maintain them as they used to. The affordable rent housing that has compensated for social housing’s decline is also far less affordable – being leased at 80% of the already overpriced market rates – ensuring continued growth in gentrification and homelessness.

 

 

And here we are now, at the tailend of a pandemic and at the beginning of what will likely be another economic crisis. Once again, there is a commitment to propping up property prices through low interest rates and quantitative easing, exacerbating the problems to which we have become accustomed.

Although, on the horizon, a more insidious development is firmly in view. The largest firms in the financial sector have raised billions of dollars to buy up distressed property in Europe after the pandemic. In fact, buying up distressed real estate – distressed meaning on the verge of foreclosure or in serious need of repair – has become the hottest new investment opportunity. Purchasing swathes of cheap, distressed property in times of economic hardship, with the aim of making some repairs to sell or re-let for much higher prices once the economy settles down, has been Blackstone’s latest trick. The worsening gentrification, homelessness and poverty as a direct consequence is of little concern to Blackstone’s 3.5 billion dollars of profit made by doing this. Now, in the context of economic hardship, Blackstone is targeting Europe with 10 billion dollars to buy such property, while Lloyds banking group is planning to buy 50,000 UK homes with a similar plan in mind.

 

Worryingly, Desiree explained, this has presented a novel situation where firms like Blackstone or banks like Lloyds could become global corporate landlords, displacing the traditional independent landlord or medium sized real estate company. If this comes to fruition, it is worth considering how quick evictions may become when your protests are met with a soulless investment firm. Or, if the price of housing and rent is determined by a small number of corporations in the financial sector, how likely is it that they will endlessly gentrify the UK until every area has a price range so expensive it drives out every renter who cannot afford to be extorted.

 

The actions of firms like Blackstone, alongside fiscal policy that intentionally props up property prices has become the playbook for all financial crises. What makes the current crisis unique is that the lockdowns have caused some people in the UK to lose their entire income, while the rest lost a reasonably sized (and sometimes essential) proportion of it. This has left rental debt stacking up and, with the eviction ban now lifted, up to 2 million people are currently living in fear of homelessness.

 

Should enough rent go unpaid, and homelessness cascades out of control, a wave of small-scale private landlords may foreclose on their homes as they become unable to pay off their mortgages. It will be these distressed properties, likely situated in unprivileged areas, that Blackstone, Lloyds or other corporations will target. It appears we are awaiting a wave of  gentrification, rent/housing price growth and homelessnes like never before.

 

Protections must be given to at-risk tenants to prevent this. However, viewing the overall problem in the longer term, fixing such a multifaceted issue is much more complex. What is clear is that housing must be pulled away from capital markets as much as possible. This means doing away with the incessant need of growth in the housing market. One method of doing so should be increasing the supply of affordable housing through environmentally considerate property development. As written about here and explained to me by Desiree, simply having distressed property be brought into public ownership alone could help to massively increase the UK’s social housing stock and stem the growth in property prices. The regulations on financial services that were expected after 2008 must be made now. Otherwise, we leave ourselves hopelessly prone to another catastrophic economic crisis from the unleashed profiteering of the financial industry.

 

By allowing a minute part of the population to profit handsomely at the cost of normal working people without repercussions, as occurred in 2008, we continue to forget the mistakes of the past and leave ourselves ever more vulnerable to the consequences of insatiable greed. These changes are not impossible, there is just not enough pressure on governments to regulate financial institutions. Thankfully, there has been a flowering of tenants unions across the UK and US. It is these organisations that people like Desiree and organisations like GMHA are looking to for progress.

 

In Berlin, local tenant unions lay at the core of setting up the referendum which voted to expropriate the homes owned by corporate landlords to stop the incessant growth in rent prices. If we do not act as those in Berlin have, collectively organising with tenants unions to hold policymakers and financiers to account, we will fail to desist from the incessant focus on maintaining unsustainable growth in the housing market.

 

These policy decisions and jargon-laden financial services may seem conceptually distant from our daily lives. However, it is the exceedingly profit-first mentality in the backdrop of crises like the pandemic that may further propel us into a society where our landlord is an algorithm coded by J.P Morgan. It is in such a society where the home has lost its value. From a place of family, togetherness and safety; transcended to a reflection of the hollow value that money plays in our society. A reflection which shows how the interests of the vast majority are less than negligible against the very wealthy few.

 

Underneath our daily reality, a battle is raging. A battle between your average renter/homeowner against corporations in the financial sector over controlling how we live, who lives where and for how much. It is in times of crisis such as now, when getting through the day, the week or the month is the insurmountable challenge, that these cataclysmic changes happen silently to our detriment. As of now, this battle is being lost. It is time we paid attention.

 

Isaac is a Politics and Philosophy undergraduate at the University of Manchester, a researcher for the Peterloo Institute think tank and a member of Greater Manchester Housing Action.