By Jaime Jover (@JaimeJover)

 

Few people that had heard about Airbnb in southern Europe 10 years ago. The San Francisco-based holiday rentals company had just started its expansion in the continent. During the first years of the 2010s, short-term leases’ growth was still slow in a context where the World –particularly southern European economies– struggled to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. However, the Airbnb business began to accelerate in larger urban areas by 2014, increasing exponentially in the following years. Rooms and, especially, single houses and apartments skyrocketed across southern Europe reaching a peak in 2019, right before the COVID-19 crisis broke out. European capitals such as Barcelona, Madrid, Milano, Lisbon, or Rome had listed up to 20,000 listings by then (more than 25,000 in the case of the Italian capital). The situation was worse in southern European second-tier cities, particularly those branding themselves as cultural tourism destinations. Athens, Florence, Porto, Seville, or Valencia accumulated between 8,000 and 12,000 listings before the pandemic (data form InsideAirbnb). Even nowadays, with international tourism arrivals at the lowest level in decades, there are still thousands of short-term rentals available in these destinations. In some of them, the Airbnb accommodation offer surpassed that of hotels. Numbers are not the only issue, but also concentration. Airbnb listings have colonized central locations with a vivid cultural and leisure offer appealing to visitors as well as surrounding neighbourhoods, which had never been touristic before.

 

According to InsideAirbnb data, between 75% and 85% of the Airbnb offer in cities are single properties, i.e., a good part of housing has lost is residential use to host commercial activities permanently. Short-term rentals are no longer an alternative activity, the one you do when you go abroad on holidays and decide to rent your place to visitors for a few weeks. Rather, it has become business as usual. Thousands of housing units have been deprived of the market –usually long-term leases–, turning into tourism. Higher revenues are usually behind this trend, which has alternatively attracted investors of all sizes and nationalities. In southern European cities, the majority of Airbnb hosts are no longer people with second-homes, but individual and institutional buy-to-let investors, from a couple of apartments to entire buildings. Intermediaries have also sprung up: short-term rental management agencies have given birth to a business that is closer to a horizontal hotel than to a peer-to-peer activity. The sharing economy is not about sharing anymore (if it ever were).

 

The housing shortage has had different consequences. In the long-term rental market, there are fewer options, and usually more expensive. Lower-income residents, families who have traditionally rented in the central locations and surroundings neighbourhoods have been forced to move out. In Portugal and Spain, the concept of ‘invisible evictions’ has risen to define the foreclosure of (usually long-term) tenants because the landlord would not renovate a lease, or he would but increasing the price abusively, knowing their tenants could never afford it. Even for those who own an apartment, sharing their building’s common spaces with unknown people have caused distressed, and decided to leave to other neighbourhoods. Impacts are also noted daily in the neighbourhood’s public spaces, with noise, dirtiness, and overcrowding being the most common disruptions. Tourism congestion in streets and squares results in a reduction of meeting places and translates into the loss of community and social bonds. Culture facilities or monuments commonly suffer from saturation, modifying how locals spend their free time. Excluding neighbours from their neighbourhood is also seen in retail habits and the transformation of shops, as many cater now almost exclusively to tourists. One would think about business opportunities and employment if it were not for tourism being the sector that concentrates the lowest wages and precarious labour conditions in southern Europe. Tourism, and especially Airbnb, has largely disrupted urban living in many cities across the Mediterranean; concepts such as touristification or overtourism have emerged to explain the nature of these rapid transformations.

 

Under such circumstances, governments’ response has been generally slow and insufficient to cope with the new challenges tourism is bringing over cities. In Italy and Portugal, national governments have passed legislation to assimilate short-term leases to tourism accommodation standards and taxation, by which there is a public compulsory registration, although leaving all the pressure of specific measures to municipalities. On the one hand, for instance, Milano or Torino have done nothing about it despite existing evidence of tourism-related problems. On the other hand, Venice decided not to control short-term rentals but visitors in general and started charging from 3 to 10 euros to tourists entering the city. In Portugal, registration entails symbolizing in the street the condition of a house or building as a short-term rental, which allows the public to identify them. Lisbon and Porto have also zoned central areas where short-term rentals are not allowed. However, criteria are lax, and its enforcement has been delayed. Greece has passed a similar bill with a peculiarity: short-term rentals must be listed only when their activity surpasses 90 days a year, following the steps of Amsterdam or Vienna. In Spain, government action varies depending on the regions, but almost all of them have also agreed to have public compulsory registration. In cities, Barcelona and San Sebastián have both zoned central locations as saturated, meaning it is not only impossible to open a new short-term rental or other accommodation business, but there is the need to decrease. Madrid has also zoned areas; however, spatial criteria are less restrictive, focusing on accommodation: only short-term rentals to street access are allowed. All these measures have been taken to court on the grounds of limiting the right to property or the municipalities not having the capacity to regulate tourist activities, and rules are expected in the following months.

 

Most of the measures taken by municipalities are the result of social mobilization. Right-to-housing movements such as Habita or La PAH in Portugal and Spain respectively have joined neighbourhood associations, tenants’ unions, or radical trade unions to denounce the situation. These alliances and coalitions have sprung up across the Mediterranean, alternatively coming together in the SET net: the Southern Europe facing Touristification network. At local as well as transnational scales, efforts have focused on analysing each situation, sharing experiences, and agreeing on discourses aiming at the tourist model rather than tourism because visitors are the last to blame: large hospitality corporations, airlines, tourists’ agencies, or governments must be held responsible. Therefore, proposals have generally had two lines of action: institutional- and activist-related. First, institutional activities have consisted of writing reports (by activist themselves or in collaboration with academics) with zoning, housing-related, or tourism-degrowth proposals, engaging in media conversation with appearances on press or radio stations, and having meetings with city officials, especially where there are (or have been) left-wing governments (Barcelona, Madrid or Rome). However, not all SET net members have followed this collaboration strategy. Second, activist-related activities have been common, especially raise-awareness campaigns and direct actions. The former includes handing out leaflets to residents and tourists or workshops with other social actors, while the latter encompasses demonstrations and satirical performances. Among these, for example, we could highlight counter-tourist routes (taking pictures of tourists visiting not touristic neighbourhoods) or the burial of the neighbour (carrying a coffin to make visible the exile of residents, and how it means neighbourhoods are dying).

 

Despite public outcry and mobilization, and the Covid-19 crisis, states and cities have continued to foster tourism-oriented strategies to attract visitors and real estate capital. Instead of analysing the urban economic structure or recognizing the tourism dependency and its volatile character in the pandemic context, governments across southern Europe insist on deploying tourism policies to reactivate local economies. State and local resources are still flowing to tax exemptions to building construction or renovation for tourism purposes or to international city-marketing campaigns, while public discourses shield on austerity to deny public housing projects or the implementation of rent controls –grassroots organization for such policies come, by the way, because of tourism-driven increasing pressure in housing markets in central locations–. Ruling-classes’ incapacity to imagine another urban context in southern Europe is outstanding. That is why we need to keep organizing and fighting against the monopoly of tourism economies that increase social and spatial inequalities between wealthy individuals and the working classes.

 

Jaime Jover is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), studying social geography, with specializations in critical theory, historic preservation, and urban tourism.

 

Cover photo credit: Jaime Jover

 

 

By Richard Goulding (@richmg_)

 

With Richard Leese retiring, Manchester City Council announced plans to provide affordable homes in the gentrifying neighbourhood of Ancoats, reported as the first council housing in the city since the 1980s. However closer inspection of those plans reveals a more complex picture.

 

The development will be taken forward by a company named “This City”, set up on an arms-length basis by the council. This City will, in a first phase, target two sites - one in Ancoats, and the other in the city centre’s neighbouring Piccadilly ward. The Ancoats site will build 122 new apartments and townhouses, of which 85 will be for market rent and 30 for a new “accessible” rent set by the council, charged at or under the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates paid to housing benefit recipients. In Piccadilly, the current plans are for 82 homes, of which 17 will be let at the council’s accessible rent and the remainder at market rate. While the exact locations of the sites have not yet been disclosed, it is likely the first scheme will be built at Wadeford Close, near to where Ancoats transitions to Miles Platting, and the second close by at the corner of Oldham Road and Livesey Street, long rumoured as a site earmarked for future affordable housing.

 

Manchester City Council’s plan to establish a municipal housing company comes as part of a wider trend, with local authorities taking advantage of loosened statutory restrictions to set up their own development vehicles to directly deliver housing over the past decade. Across the River Irwell for example, Salford City Council has had a wholly council-owned delivery arm, named Derive, since 2017, which aims to build 117 homes from 2018-2023. For some commentators, the rise of housing delivery companies means that council housing “is back”, with the 4,010 new homes completed by local authorities in 2018/19 higher than the entire number of council homes built in the decade from 2000-2010. The overall number of affordable homes built by local authorities remains low however, with 150 of the 204 homes planned to be built by This City in its first phase being for market rent.

 

Manchester City Council’s decision to directly build housing comes in the context of an ongoing housing crisis, with 13,466 households on the city’s housing register and 3,948 households in temporary accommodation in 2018. The council’s own targets to help meet this need are for 20% of new build housing in the city to be affordable. Meeting this target would amount to developing 6,400 new affordable homes by 2025, accounting for one fifth of the 32,000 new homes projected to have been built in Manchester from 2015-2025. Only 1,327 affordable homes have so far been built according to public figures from March 2020 however, many of which by housing associations operating in areas such as Clayton, Openshaw, or Wythenshawe. Housing associations in Manchester have the capacity for 4,106 more by 2025 according to the council, although only 765 of these, plus 579 earmarked for ‘infill’ sites across places like Burnage and Withington, were under construction as of last year. Even if housing associations fully hold up their share, Manchester will still be short of its target by 913 homes, hence the council’s decision to build its own.

 

A return to council housing?

 

While the council intends to scale up delivery through This City to 500 homes per year by 2025, there are caveats to how this may be achieved, including the possibility of part-privatisation. For now, This City remains wholly council-owned, with its financial cost to be supported by government loans borrowed through the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB). The council’s report setting out its plans states however that in future phases of development it will “seek an investment partner to work with to drive forward new developments, rather than fund through further PWLB debt”. Later, it explains the need to attract an investor once phase one is complete means “the proposition must be attractive to a third party and constructed in the right way for maximum benefits”. What this means is left unexplained. The council does say however that This City’s lettings criteria “won’t prescriptively follow the council’s lettings policy”. Whether this provides an incentive for the council to cherry pick relatively more affluent tenants less likely to present an arrears risk, as many big housing associations do, remains to be seen.

 

Further questions of who may be housed by the homes built by This City are raised by the very different set of restrictions applied to homes built through municipal development companies in comparison to traditional council housing. Firstly, homes let to tenants through municipal housing companies are offered on more precarious terms than the “secure tenancies” offered through traditional council housing, to avoid these homes being subject to the Right to Buy. Secondly, as pointed out by urban geographers Joe Beswick and Joe Penny, the need to generate cross-subsidy by building market-rate housing makes the provision of affordable housing structurally dependent on the ability of local authorities to capitalise on rising land values that themselves drive a crisis in urban affordability. Manchester taking the decision to set its rents at or under the LHA rate mitigates this, with the council estimating this makes the homes affordable for someone earning the city’s average wage of £27,500. But given monthly LHA rates for a 3-bed in central Manchester of £747.93, a household on Manchester’s median income of just under £25,000 would still be paying over one third of their income on housing costs if rents were set at maximum LHA rates.

 

More affordable housing in Manchester is badly needed. Homelessness presentations in the city have now risen back to above their pre-pandemic levels, and the New Economics Foundation think tank predicts a “perfect storm” this winter for people on low incomes due to rising food costs, fuel price hikes, and deep universal credit cuts. Manchester City Council’s decision to build more affordable homes may mitigate some of this need in future years, though this remains a belated change in policy given an insistence by senior officials as late as 2016 that there was no need to increase, rather than maintain, the absolute numbers of the city’s social housing stock. But with scaling up delivery in future phases predicated on partnering with an external investor, it remains ambiguous whether accessible rents will be genuinely accessible to the people most in need in the city, and the proposals should not be conflated with a return to genuine council housing.

 

 

For more on local housing companies, read this piece published by GMHA, by Joe Beswick.

 

By Members of Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (@dwenteignen)

 

On September 26th Berliners will head to the polls to vote in a referendum, the result of which may have seismic implications for the right-to-housing movement everywhere. The issue at hand is a proposal that the government seize and take into public ownership more than 200,000 homes. For this special report, GMHA have been in conversation with organisers from Right to the City, the English language working group of Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen, the organisation leading the campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum. 

 

 

What housing are you campaigning to expropriate, and how did these large housing stocks come to be in private hands?

 

Andrei: We want to expropriate and then socialize all housing that is owned by corporate landlords who own more than 3,000 apartments. That will add up to at least 240,000, or 11% of Berlin’s apartments. We cannot be sure of the exact number because the ownership structures of these corporations are not transparent. Not even the local government knows who owns what and how much is paid. Regardless, corporate landlords control a significant proportion of Berlin’s housing and have gained a very influential position over the conditions of Berlin tenants. These landlords push for the highest rents and highest rent increases, and because of the number of apartments they own, their practices drive up the rents in the whole city.

 

This concentration is a symptom of the financialization of Berlin’s housing, which has become an investment for global capital management funds. The financialization of housing is of course a global trend, and Berlin is a particularly telling example of how investors can take advantage of previously low rents in order to make high profits. Backed by investment funds, the large companies that we are targeting not only bought the housing stock of smaller landlords. They also acquired much of Berlin’s former state-owned social housing. In 2006, Deutsche Wohnen bought 60,000 social housing apartments from a Social Democratic Party-led Berlin state administration. And it bought them for €450 million – that means around €7,500 per apartment!

 

In the hands of investment firms, because of their connection to the stock market, housing management becomes purely profit-driven. They buy cheap, disinvested apartments, often inhabited by people with migration or poverty backgrounds, and maximise profit through rent increases, taking advantage of the so-called “rent gap” between what was being paid and what price could be reached ‘on the market’. In the area around Kottbusser Tor (“Kotti”), for instance, Deutsche Wohnen took over large amounts of social housing and raised the rents, without improving the conditions. These apartments were mainly inhabited by people with migration histories, especially from Turkey. The pressure these companies put on tenants is then closely connected to histories of discrimination and the two issues cannot be considered separately. The problem with having investors as your landlords, aside from the extreme and heightened profit motive, is also the social distance they have to the housing they own. They tend to have no connection whatsoever to the city, the building and its tenants. But local, small landlords can and are bad ass speculatory too, they often increase the rent alongside the big players. You will be surprised to hear that the way housing in Berlin is currently managed means that it’s geared to making the super rich even richer.

 

Where has this campaign for expropriation come from?

 

Ian: The initiative Kotti & Co., which started in 2011, has always demanded the recommunalisation of the social housing that had been sold off – to Deutsche Wohnen. A recommunalisation working group of Kotti & Co. formed in 2015 to develop strategies of how exactly to achieve the demand of socialisation on a large scale in Berlin (Kotti&Co, 09.2019). 

 

In 2016, Deutsche Wohnen tenants elsewhere in Kreuzberg formed the Tenant Initiative Otto-Suhr-Estate in one large block that the company owned; the next year, this initiative networked with residents of twenty other Deutsche Wohnen estates and became the citywide tenant movement (Tenant Protest Deutsche Wohnen). Tenants of Akelius also banded together to form the Akelius-Mieter*innenvernetzun (Akelius Tenant Network).

 

People in Kotti & Co. noticed the potential of Articles 14 and 15 of the Grundgesetz, Germany’s constitution: the articles prescribe that private property rights are protected, but not without limit. In translation this reads “Property entails obligations. Its use shall serve the public good.” and that “Land, natural resources and means of production may for the purpose of socialisation be transferred to public ownership” in the event that this is not realised. The German words used can be interpreted to include housing. After consulting legal experts and other initiatives which had similar ideas, it was decided to escalate the pressure on policymakers by organising a citywide campaign for recommunalisation (Taheri, 2018). 

 

In April 2018, DW&Co. Enteignen was launched as a full-fledged campaign. Initial stages consisted of raising awareness that the practices of Deutsche Wohnen are not compatible with the social harmony in the city, and using this publicity to further organise tenants at the local level (Taheri, 2018). The experience of maintaining the tenant initiatives resulted in the formation of the Starthilfe-AG (start-aid working group, a group that supported tenants who wanted to organise their apartment blocks), which became a working group of the new campaign. This group possessed the knowledge needed to help new tenant initiatives get on their feet quickly. This is the context from which the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen campaign emerged – organising at both the neighbourhood and city levels (Strobel, 2020).

 

 

What are the campaign's connections to the recent campaign over rent controls?

 

Mateo & CP: The Rent Cap is a separate initiative from the DWE Campaign. The Rent cap or Mietendeckel originated in 2018, when the jurist Peter Weber published a paper arguing that the federal states could enact regulations on maximum rents because of their jurisdiction over housing. His proposal failed to enter into discussion within the Linke-controlled Senate Department for Urban Development, but was taken up by some Berlin SPD members.

 

The campaign "Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen!", a citizen initiative, had by this time gained popularity and seeing its  influence on the public debate, the SPD leadership was pushed to launch "something of its own" (Mayor Michael Müller, SPD).

 

Even though a significant block within the party did not agree, the majority of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) voted against supporting the expropriation initiative and started campaigning to pass a law that would decrease rents when applicable, freeze the rent prices for 5 years, and apply strong fines to the companies who violated the law. Die Linke (The Left Party) supported the Rent Cap law and after some modifications and toning down, the law was passed.

 

Both landlords and their political lobby (CDU – Christian Democratic Union, FDP – Free Democracy Party  and AfD – Alternative für Deutschland) worked against the rent cap. A lawsuit was filed with the German constitutional court, questioning Berlin's jurisdictional competence to enact such a law, at the same time that house owners quietly went on a landlords' strike, leaving apartments vacant thereby artificially reducing the supply of housing in the city for people searching. New tenants were expected to sign "shadow rent agreements", which included the rent that would have to be paid if the rent cap law was overturned. After the court ruled against the interests of tenants in Berlin, many of us are faced with shadow rent debts we are unable to pay.

The Bundnis Mietenwahnsinn, an open coalition between all of the housing  initiatives in Berlin probably should be mentioned here, although the specific rent cap legislation did not arise from their demands directly. Meitenwahnsinn brings all the tenant and housing initiatives together for really large demonstrations where tens of thousands of people fill the streets of Berlin calling for an end to “Rent madness”! (Mietenwahnsinbündnis) formed to prepare the first Mietenwahnsinn protest, which took place in 2018. There are weekly meetings. Usually each group sends one or two delegates. The preparation for the yearly Mietenwahnsinn demo, usually in march, is the busiest, then there is a second demo usually in sept (coming up on the 11th). The Mietendeckel (rent cap) issue helped mobilise a large number of people to attend the Demo but generally themes for the Demo are open and depend on what people bring. Key groups involved are Zwangsräumung verhindern, also the Berlin tenants union / Mieter:innengewerkschaft, Mieterpartei, and Selbstvertretung Wohnungsloser Menschen, (self-represented/self-organised homeless people). The relationship between DWE and Mietenwahnsinn is one of mutual support.

What’s the social base of the campaign? 

Ian & CP:  There are several key contexts you need to understand about Berlin, to understand where the campaign has come from. The legacy of WW2 and the Cold War created a very specific demographic, physical and policy legacies in Berlin. In the island that was West Berlin there was rent control (the Mietpreisbindung). In the East there was state provided housing. More recently there is the Mitespiegel legislation which limits the per-square-meter price that can be charged based on location, modernisation, age of the building and so on. 

 

Berlin is a city of renters – 85% of the city's residents are tenants. Tenants’ rights are strong, it is difficult to legally offer tenants a lease on an apartment that has a limited time period (conditions must be met, the tax office cares if you don’t meet them), it is common to have a lease without an end and tenants know that it it very difficult to carry out a legal eviction. One of the effects of the Mietspiegel legislation includes tenants resisting modernisation in order to resist the rent rise it will bring, this explains the continued existence (and popularity) of coal heated apartments in Berlin! However, the Mietspigel can only do so much. If the apartment is modernised, even just cosmetically, the rent goes up and the tenants are pushed out if they can’t afford it. As the average price of rent goes up in an area so does the legally allowable maximum rent that can be charged in every flat in the whole area. Interestingly, Deutsche Wohnen, who owns the largest amount of housing in Germany has used its well resourced legal department to try to overturn the Mietspiegel, (Mieterverein, 01.2019) to eliminate even this weak legislation.

 

Over the last ten years tenants have rights and their housing security has been eaten away. Between 2008 and 2018, rents for new leases in Berlin increased by 112 percent. This means that a large proportion of the residents of the city are directly affected by the issues our campaign addresses. Where there was once housing security, now there is stress and precarity.

 

What Berlin also has is a long history of tenant and housing movements and initiatives. There was and to some extent still is a strong squatting scene (Hoffrogge, 04.2021) that provides autonomous spaces in the city. Tenants associations that provide legal advice and representation are large and strong – you’d be hard pressed to find a tenant who is not a paying member.

 

Then there are the collective tenant initiatives that have formed to resist the displacement caused by the financialisation and commodification of housing. So to answer the question – the tenants of the city and their organisations are the social base of the campaign.

 

 

And how are you organised?

The referendum works in this way: initiatives can propose legislation if they collect enough signatures to oblige the government to hold a referendum. The signatures must be provided on a specific paper form along with the signer’s address and date of birth so that the election office can verify them as a resident of Berlin. The first phase required collecting 20,000 signatures – in the event 77,000 were collected between April and September 2019. Then the proposal was subjected to over a year  of official legal examination before being declared valid. During this time, the government attempted to have DW&Co Enteignen agree to water down the wording of the demand to socialise housing to being a mere suggestion. The campaign held firm to its line and did not submit to this co-optation attempt. The parties of the state government could not agree on passing a socialisation law at this stage.

 

Therefore the campaign initiated the second phase, which required gathering the signatures of 7 percent of eligible voters in Berlin, about 172,000 people, with the aim of forcing a referendum on the issue. The approach to accomplish that was to organise Kiezteams (neighbourhood teams) in every district of the city, who could collect signatures in public places. Some of these emerged from the tenant initiatives. The barriers to entry were made low: every Kiezteam and campaign working group, as well as the whole campaign, hosted regular online meetings, as well as creating a mobile app in which anyone could view and join upcoming public collection drives. Many others also downloaded the form and collected signatures among their social circles and co-workers, without being bound into campaign structures.

 

Besides Kiezteams there are a number of thematic working groups. All of them have elected representatives in a group of twenty people that keeps the campaign together and deals with financial matters: the coordination circle. The general campaign meeting takes place every two weeks; these meetings are where major decisions are made democratically. The Kiezteams came together with the Sammel-AG (collecting strategy working group) at the Sammelrat (collection council), which also meets every 2 weeks. Now the required number of signatures have been collected, there are new working groups concentrating on turning out the vote and persuasive conversations.

 

The collection phase began under a severe Corona lockdown on 26.02.2021 and lasted until 25.06.2021 (DWe, 2021), by which time the campaign submitted 359,063 signatures to the election office. This was a record – despite the pandemic. DW&Co Enteignen had collected more signatures than any other such initiative in Berlin before. At the time of writing, this means that the referendum will take place on 26.09.2021 (Berlin election office, 01.07.2021), alongside the Berlin state and federal elections. The campaign estimates that about 2,000 activists were bound into its structures and collected somewhat regularly. Now they are door knocking, handing out the campaign newspaper, flyering and holding street conversations. There is a campaign bus. There is a campaign film. The DWE-App is chock a-block with ways to participate. We have pulled out all the stops! 

 

What links does the campaign have to Die Linke, other left parties and the Trade Unions?

 

Alexander & CP: “Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen!” is a non-partisan campaign that draws support from a wide swathe of Berlin’s voters, from all different political parties and backgrounds. The campaign, furthermore, receives support from a broad range of trade unions, including the Berliner Landesverbände (local branches) of Ver:di (a huge catch all Union) and the IG Metall (the largest industrial union in Europe) who have both lent their support to the campaign. The right to the city affects the working class directly, and we are fortunate to receive support from Berlin’s strong workers’ movement. In return the DWE campaign has supported the Unions, most recently joining striking nurses at Charite and Vivantes Hospitals.

 

From the start, Die Linke has been an integral supporter of the campaign. Die Linke members collected more than 32.000 signatures in support of the referendum (170,000 were needed and around 350,000 were collected) in the first half of 2021. The campaign’s support, however, does not solely rest with one party. It stems from the working people of Berlin who realize how fundamental the right to affordable housing is for basic life in the city. As a non-partisan campaign, we are, furthermore, forging a broad coalition to bring all those who believe in our mission together in solidarity.

 

At the time of writing, the lead SPD (Social Democratic Party) candidate for Berlin is making statements against expropriation. As she is likely to be part of the coalition government that will implement the socialisation of large corporate landlord owned housing, this shows that even if we win the referendum on September 26, the democratic struggle doesn’t end there.

 

 

Can you tell us more about the mechanism the campaign has used – the city-wide referendum? Has this been used as a recurrent tactic by the Berlin left for some years now? 

 

Nik: The referendum is a tool for direct democracy in some states of Germany, and can be initiated on the state level. The first referendum occurred in the 1920s to expropriate and redistribute wealth from royalty, and was initiated by the communist party. However, the referendum failed, although a strong majority of Berlin voted in favour.

 

There have been a number of city-wide referendums in Berlin over the past 30 years. These initiatives have come from both the right and left, but in Berlin are more often left-affiliated efforts. It is fair to say that it is a common tactic by the Berlin left to push popular policy change, and includes other current efforts for a car-free Berlin center, and for climate neutrality in Berlin by 2030. However, these efforts involve a lot of people, require a lot of work, and are not always successful. If done with an organizing perspective and built up from below as it has been done in the case of DW& Co Enteignen, such referendums can open up spaces for making unprecedented connections on the neighborhood level, hence spurring politicization among people whose lives usually do not coincide.

 

Germany is a federal country and Berlin is a state which means that it has the power to legislate the socialisation of housing as proposed in the referendum. Furthermore, if we are successful in Berlin, it can be a model for other German states.

Successful referendums in recent years include a bill to disclose the partial privatization contracts of the city waterworks, the preservation of the entire Tempelhofer Feld (a 380-hectare former airfield that’s now a park). 

 

How do you see overcoming the financial argument of the compensation to real estate companies?

Toni : Berlin can afford to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co, because according to the German Constitution, the affected companies don’t have to be compensated with the exact market value of the apartments. 

 

We propose that the public-law institution finance the compensation by issuing bonds to the companies that can be paid off through the steady rental income. This would add no additional burden to the Berlin state budget. Once the loans have been paid off, the rental income can even be invested in building new housing.

 

Our fair rent model is based on desirable rents and uses them to calculate financially viable amounts of compensation. We assume that people should spend a maximum of 30% of their income on warm rent in order to be able to live well. We therefore set a rental price of € 4.40 per square meter, as it would also be affordable for low-income people in Berlin. Such a rent could pay a compensation to the companies of € 8 billion.

 

We think our model is fair because it grants the highest amount of compensation that can be reconciled with the goal of budget-neutral socialization as well as avoids any form of speculation on rising rents in the future.

 

 

And if you win – what then? Is there a risk of it being struck down in the courts similar to the Mietendeckel being ruled unconstitutional?

 

Beatriz: If we win the referendum, it is almost certain that private real estate companies’ representatives will challenge the campaign in court. However, the legal standing of the socialization campaign is much more solid that the Mietendeckel. Whilst the constitutionality of the latter was challenged by lawyers from the very beginning, various legal, governmental, and scientific bodies have reported on the legality of socialization of apartments from real estate companies with more than 3,000 apartments.

 

The German Constitution (“Basic Law”) divides authority between the federal government and the states. The federal government can exercise authority over the states only in those areas specified by the Basic Law. Otherwise, each German state has authority to set its own rules. In 2015, the federal government imposed a “rent brake”, which allowed landlords to increase rents by no more than 10% above the local market level. Proving insufficient to stop soaring rents in Berlin, the state of Berlin introduced its own “rent cap” law, the Mietendeckel. The Mietendeckel was ruled unconstitutional because according to the Basic Law, rent law is one of the areas over which the federal government exercises authority over the states. Thus, it is not up to the Berlin Senate to regulate rent. A measure like the Mietendeckel would have to be introduced at the federal level, akin to the “rent brake” introduced in 2015.

 

The legal context surrounding the socialization campaign is completely different. The article invoked by the Deutsche Wohnen & Co. campaign is part of the Basic Law of the German Federal Republic. The distinction between federal and state powers does not come into play here. It is purely a matter of whether the German constitution allows for the socialization of apartments. Article 15 of the Basic Law says “Land, natural resources and means of production can be transferred into common ownership or other forms of public economy for the purposes of socialization through a law that regulates the type and extent of compensation”. Because Article 15 has never been invoked before for the purpose of socialization of apartments, the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing asked three constitutional lawyers for their assessments on the legality of the socialization campaign. All came to the same conclusion: yes, it is legally possible [see full reports here and discussion here]. Moreover, the scientific services of both the Bundestag and the House of Representatives reached the same conclusion: the socialization of housing is legally admissible under the Basic Law of Germany. There is thus plenty of evidence that the socialization campaign is legal and won’t be struck down in the courts like the Mittendeckel. The point of legal contention promises to be the “extent of compensation” owned to the private real state companies whose apartments would be expropriated. Our campaign explains on our website how it calculated the amount of compensation and how it can be paid for.

 

The campaign centres around the ‘right to the city’, which many in Berlin are excluded from due to not having the relevant citizenship to vote in the referendum, or to offer a signature that is counted as valid on the petition for the referendum. How have these barriers to the democratic process impacted your work and how has it changed the messaging for the campaign? 

 

Trevor: In the signature collection phase of the DWE campaign, an incredible 359,063 signatures were collected and submitted. However, 32.7% of these were invalidated by the Berlin electoral office, mainly because those who signed do not have German citizenship. At least 1 in 5 people living in Berlin are not eligible to vote in the referendum, meaning many who call Berlin home are disenfranchised from participating in this referendum on a subject that directly and deeply affects their lives.

 

Beyond the profit-driven housing practices described above, the housing market is rife with racism, prejudice, and discrimination, and those with less security, for example due to poverty or a migration background, are often exploited. Yet we are not given a voice to vote on this — a clear failing in a democratic system. DWE’s working group, Right to the City for All, seeks to address this democratic deficit by fighting for changes to Berlin’s election laws. The collection of approximately 50,000 political signatures (those not counted as valid by the electoral office) demonstrates that these changes are desperately needed.

 

For the next phase we have created a flyer for the doorknockers to share with people who are not eligible to vote that outlines other ways that they can get involved – this is available in Polish, Turkish, English and German. We have also added our voices to the ongoing, decades long fight for voting rights for migrants by holding our own demonstration.

 

What is the current political opposition to the campaign, for example is there a split within the red-red-green coalition?

 

Brad: The reaction to Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen among the parties of the current ruling coalition in Berlin, the so-called Red-Red-Green coalition (Die Linke, Social Democratic Party and the Greens), has been largely positive.  The campaign has successfully worked to bring both the language of expropriation and the discussion of radical solutions to the housing crisis in Berlin into the political mainstream.

 

Concretely, the members of the Red-Red-Green (Die Linke + Social Democratic Party + The Green Party) coalition have reacted differently to DWE. As mentioned, Die Linke not only committed to directly supporting the campaign, but groups organized through Die Linke collected 32.662 signatures over the past four and a half months; a major, material contribution to DWE by any measure. While the Green Party in Berlin didn't directly collect signatures for the campaign, delegates to a party meeting in March sent a strong positive signal when they voted (by a large majority) to back the campaign's goal of having a popular vote on expropriation.  That being said, the Green’s platform only includes expropriation as a last resort for addressing the housing crisis and attitudes in the party are still split. The leadership of the Berliner SPD has been even less supportive of DWE, with several prominent Social Democrats speaking out recently against the initiative.  The current SPD mayor Michael Müller called it “a confrontation that doesn’t help us move forward”, while the relatively right-leaning head of the Berliner SPD Franziska Giffey rejected the idea of expropriation tout court and pointed instead to plans for more construction in the coming years as the solution to Berlin’s housing problems.  However, regardless of the positions taken by some of the senior members of the Berliner SPD, the campaign is excited to be shaping the mainstream discourse around the housing crisis (a recent article in Die Zeit, which has a comparable political slant to the New York Times, is titled “Expropriation Can be a Part of the Solution'') and sees drawing these figures into directly addressing the strategy of expropriation as a win.  

 

While Red-Red-Green may not be presenting a completely positive, united front on the question of expropriation, more leftist members of the coalition, in particular certain groups within Die Linke, have provided valuable support to the campaign.  Further, whatever differences there may be amongst these three parties, we are confident that the voters who brought the current coalition into power, including those who voted SPD, are broadly in support of DWE and expect to see that reflected in the results of the election in September.

 

The referendum falls on the same day as Germany’s federal elections. How prominent are these issues of rent controls and public housing in them?

 

Berta: To be 100% enthusiastic: we made it relevant! DWE made it relevant and brought it into the public discourse. We ask for political parties to declare a position on the theme.  To say it a bit less enthusiastically: the Mietendecke being overturned in April means that the parties who identified as promoters of that law (the SPD for example) are now undifferentiated from the right wing parties that opposed it – the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and the FDP (Free Democracy Party) who all oppose expropriation. All of these parties argue that building new housing is a more appropriate solution – and they are being aided in spreading this message by some fancy front campaigns that look like they come from the real estate industry. Let’s see what happens!

 

 

Are you confident of winning the referendum?

 

Camilo: The short answer? Yes! The energy of the campaign and the nearly 2,000 activists involved is very high. There’s a lot of positivity and it’s no small achievement that we collected a record-breaking number of signatures for a referendum initiative in Berlin. And this happened with all the restrictions of the pandemic. In the upcoming months, even more people will know about the campaign and the opportunity we have to reclaim the city for its people. This energy is only going to grow. 

 

But, we acknowledge that it will not be easy. The opposition from these corporations, their shareholders and the political parties that support them is going to be strong. They have powerful lobbies. But as it stands, the city is unaffordable for many and at the root of that is the speculation of housing stock by these large companies.  It is poised to become even more unaffordable if things don’t change. We believe in the strength of our arguments and that those arguments will resonate with Berliners, who are able to vote on September 26th.

 

 

This interview was done with a collective of members from DWE. They say of the process for answering the questions: Instead of handing the questions to someone who already knew the answers we decided to pair mentors with learners and answer one question each. This way more of us could get our heads around the information. This is a difficult task because many of us are not fluent German speakers, so we are not able to access the information about the history of housing in Berlin or even the basic campaign material. The response to the call out to our 150 person list was overwhelming, we needed 11 people but almost 40 people indicated they would love the chance to get some support to work out what the hell is going on. One of the reasons that the english language working group (Right to the City) of the DWE (Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen) campaign exists is to bridge this gap between the german speaking parts of the campaign and the non-german speakers. Thank you for this opportunity to share the knowledge amongst us and with a wider audience.

 

---

 

References:

https://iniforum-berlin.de/dossier21/

 

 

By Helen C 

 

As  community activists, ACORN are used to being met with responses like “it’s a middle class concern” when campaigning for the value of public spaces. In reality, safe and free access to quality public space is vitally important to the working class and an issue we will always fight for.

 

It seems as though to our police, governments, and even some members of the public, meandering romantically through a leafy park is a pastime for the middle classes; if working class people are using the same spaces, they must be up to no good. As we have seen locally in Liverpool, with the recent enforcement of three dispersal orders covering the Waterfront in the weekends following the lifting of Covid restrictions. The reason cited for this was that it would be a deterrent from “larger groups gathering on residential premises”, and opposition was met with abstract references to general antisocial behaviour in the city centre. Local government were practically gloating with enthusiasm and refused to consider any arguments that they were acting disproportionately or scaremongering. There were ‘concerns for the safety’ of residents of the affluent area and council officials believed it was their responsibility to act as security against these apparently menacing loiterers – despite the Anti Social Crimes and Policing Act 2014 specifically reminding police to respect the human right to the freedoms of expression and assembly.

 

To understand the injustice around the privatisation of public spaces, we need to address the detriment it has on marginalized communities. This isn’t difficult to understand, when you think back to the lockdowns and the summer picnics and winter walks that provided a temporary respite from the urban jungle for many of us without large gardens. A study taken by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation states the value of a social respite outside of the constraints of capitalism; and also casts doubt on the legitimacy of a definition of ‘community’ that gatekeeps ‘problem’ groups. The social value of public space is wide ranging and lies in the contribution it makes to “people’s attachment to their locality and opportunities for mixing with others, and in people’s memory of places” (Dines and Cattell et al. 2006). Places can provide opportunities for social interaction, social mixing and social inclusion, and can facilitate the development of community ties.

 

The same study outlines that the commercialisation of public spaces has the negative consequence of further excluding marginalized groups and making them even more vulnerable – ‘anti crime’ dispersal policy is regularly justified with a set of stereotypes that imply spendability – or lack of. From the limited public speaking opportunities in shopping centres to ‘hostile architecture’ to dissuade rough sleepers, and now dispersal orders, the narrative deployed is usually one of concern around crime – despite these groups being more likely to be victims of crime, and increasingly so in the age of austerity. It simply isn’t logical to strip away one of the last remaining social resources that doesn’t require the exchange of money. In Covid Britain, the working class are criminalized for sitting in parks, whilst the middle class flourish on their front lawns.

 

The results of policies that seek to privatise land are already evident, and when we acknowledge ‘these strange times’, the consequences bleaker still. In June 2020. A survey by the National Youth Agency reported that upto 2,000 of 10,00 youth centres would struggle to re-open despite increases of demand of up to 66%. In groups of marginalized youths, multiple SEND studies correlated isolation due to a lack of specialist services and support groups, with enhanced mental health struggles. Public spaces are widely valued by local councils as an important resource for communities, yet the 225 most economically deprived neighbourhoods are less likely to have access to public spaces and services as a result of austerity.

 

When there is little alternative for the working class, dispersal orders act to erase those deemed unfavourable by the wealthy, and it would be naive to assume the council and police responsible are unaware of this. Whatever they may tell themselves otherwise, dispersal orders are a tool of neoliberal class division – drawing a line between affluent ‘strollers’ and poor ‘loiterers’. Land can not be considered public when economic status is a barrier to access. The people who built this city’s parks, docks, and streets, deserve to enjoy them. Public land is a working class issue.

 

By Sean Benstead 

 

On July 16th, reports began circulating on social media that a group of travellers had set up an unauthorised transit pitch on Hough End Fields. By the 27th, Section 77 notices had been issued and plans for eviction by police-supported bailiffs were underway. This article aims to address local resident hostilities to the travellers’ presence on the fields and argue that both communities have common cause when it comes to fighting for greater democratic oversight over land use. For traveller communities, there is an urgent need for acts of solidarity while local residents gain nothing from facilitating their eviction. 

 

The Debacle

 

Unfortunately, yet predictably, instead of cross-community solidarity the travellers were met with hostility from local resident-led campaigns. On social media, some members of the ‘Save Hough End Fields’ community campaign noted that some travellers had come and cut through wooden anti-vehicle bollards to drive their trailers onto the public fields. From then, many contested rumours of repeated incidents of anti-social behaviour began to spread like wildfire. Some of those incidents were later discounted by a local police inspector, noting “no mention of any issues occurring” and that “the traveller site was quiet”. All regularly planned events, such as outdoor yoga, football and a local community mosque event commenced as planned with travellers in attendance. The police report confirmed that events went ahead without incident.

 

In Manchester Evening News, local residents reported that the travellers had “cut down several trees, left rubbish and constantly rode motorcycles and quad bikes in the area which has messed up the grass”. On social media, there were complaints of outside toilet use alongside claims that the travellers were using a local resident’s bins. However, instead of this being understood as denoting a need for access to waste management services, it was interpreted by many as provocation and insolence. Furthermore, no comment was made of the anti-vax, conspiracy-orientated ‘Soul Camp’ that was pitched nearby, and remains at the time of writing, who had been cutting down trees to fortify their occupied area. 

 

On the 23rd of July, after numerous complaints from the local community and members of local campaign groups, GMP Officers and staff from the Manchester City Council (MCC) Neighbourhood Compliance team jointly carried out site visits. Reports from the Neighbourhood Compliance team, given by Rabnawaz Akbar as the Executive Member for Neighbourhoods at MCC via email, were that the team was “seen as the team who [were] there to evict them from Council owned land so engagement with [the compliance team] officers [was] minimal and, on many occasions, [could] be hostile”. 

 

It remains unclear what kind of engagement, if any, really took place. According to someone from the traveller family who was there, the only contact with the authorities they had before the Section 77 notice was given was from police taking photographs of their registration numbers. What does remain clear is that the loudest voices in the local community were very much aligned with the move of our local authority to evict.

 

A “Public Space” fallacy?

 

In the aforementioned article, residents shared that they were “shocked that the travellers were allowed to stay and take advantage of this public space”. Here, the devil is in the details. Travellers have been firmly categorised as the Other and external to the rights afforded to the “public” to access this “public space”. Indeed, this “public space”, narrowly conceived, is the domain of an exclusive community. 

 

At the time of the encampment, contact was made with an organiser for the campaign group, which describes itself as a “community action group to preserve public green space at Hough End”, to appeal for calm, an open dialogue and advocacy for council provision to meet the traveller’s needs as opposed to calls for police intervention and eviction. The response given was disappointing. The individual noted that “It's difficult [for them], living half a mile or so away, who supports travellers’ rights in theory, to disagree with the local residents”. Furthermore, they note that they are “proudly a pragmatist [...] as a pragmatist I have to consider that for the majority of the group having open space to walk on, to not have giant fences or polluted streams, to not have their grass replaced by plastic, nor to have it festooned with tyre marks is their priority”. They went on to note that the main quarrel with this particular group of travellers was that they had removed the wooden bollards which were placed on the fields’ entrance specifically to keep them out. The right to not be excluded through physical barriers like fences is, again, not universally applied to all people. 

 

It transpired that these frustrations also related to historical experiences at Hough End Fields and that this public space has been used as a transit site by travellers for many years. Evidence suggests that the eviction-first response from MCC and GMP authorities in July, instead of deliberative and negotiated land access and service provision, has been the standard procedure over the last decade. This decade has also seen the planning and implementation of MCC’s socially destructive development regime that prioritises unaccountable global financial capital, private development and enclosure over public needs. As such, Manchester’s urban development is predicated on undemocratic land value appropriation to the detriment of universal use. 

 

This firmly places the ‘Save Hough End Fields’ community action group, whose aim is to “preserve public green space”, in a place of natural solidarity with the traveller community. Both communities have been under attack through MCC-led enclosures that aim to facilitate rent extraction. For Hough End residents, this struggle was against the enclosure of their public space for pay-to-play football pitches. Meanwhile, traveller communities have seen public sites sold from under their feet for private development causing an exacerbating crisis of site provision. This solidarity must be realised under the demands for universal, democratic use of public land.

 

The Need for Solidarity

 

With an eye to the history of GRT (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) land struggles and state harassment, alongside the legal provisions against trespass in the now imminently legislated PCSC Bill, it is clear that without cross-community solidarity the assaults on our GRT communities are only going to get worse and more frequent. A liberal pragmatism, understood as a political end in itself, can never confront the threats that GRT communities now face. We need deliberative, but determined, cross-community solidarity that recognises mutual need and a universalised conception of public rights of land access and use. And we need this now. 

 

A recent report released by Travellers, Family and Friends, released January this year, revealed a shocking unmet need for pitches on a national level. The report reveals that whilst over 1696 households are currently on waiting lists for pitches, there are just 59 permanent and 42 transit pitches available nationwide. None of these are in the North of England. Meanwhile, large council sites such as the one at Dantzic Street in Collyhurst, itself in a dire state and highly vulnerable to flooding, have been sold off to private developers for redevelopment into luxury flats. The damning report also notes that the general state of existing sites elsewhere are dangerously overcrowded and have been described as “not fit to use” and “in a terrible state” by locals. 

 

In 2020, there were around 3000 travelling families that likely have no legal or safe place to stop and found to be on unauthorised pitches with intermittent access to sanitation, water, healthcare and education services. This is likely to increase with the dispossession of the families from the Dantzic Street site without adequate provision of desperately needed transit and permanent sites in Manchester. The narrowing of the conception of “public space” to exclude the traveller community ultimately serves to facilitate local state-capital development regimes of mass dispossession. In contrast, cross-community solidarity means negotiated access to public spaces alongside local advocacy through our council representatives for service provision with actual input from, and deliberation with, travellers themselves. These acts and conversations can also serve as small-scale models of deliberative democracy in action. 

 

In a final conversation with Rabnawaz Akbar, he noted that there were pledges made from the Neighbourhood Compliance team to reform the way that initial engagement with travellers takes place. He noted that “initial engagement should be seen in the same way that Neighbourhood Teams would lead on engagement with any other sections of the community [and] ensuring residents are linked into any services they may need”. Further discussions have been set to take place. This was an outcome of advocacy despite local resident hostilities. Can we imagine what can be achieved through solidarity and a united call for a deliberative and democratic oversight to MCC’s development regime?

 

Sean Benstead is a local campaigner on land, environment and GRT issues.

 

Interview with Gordon Maloney of Living Rent

 

Last week, announced as part of the power-sharing arrangement between the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Greens were proposals to introduce rent controls in Scotland. If implemented, this would be the first time rent controls were in place in Britain since the 1970s.

 

Yet this policy didn't drop out of the sky – it was the result of over 7 years of tenant organising spearheaded by Living Rent. To discuss what the deal means, how it came about, and what the next steps are GMHA sat down with Living Rent's Gordon Maloney. 

 

 

What has been won?

 

The deal announced last week outlines a number of major victories for the tenants’ movement – including a commitment to a national system of rent controls, greater and more effective penalties for illegal evictions, a ban on winter evictions, a new housing regulator, and greater rights for tenants – including to have pets in their homes.

 

It’s important to note that the Government haven’t done these things, just promised to do them – and that the deal published is quite light on detail – and so there is still a lot of work to do. We’re particularly concerned that landlords and their lobbyists will be working hard to water down any new measures, but even with those caveats this represents a dramatic step forward for tenants’ power.

 

Why is this such a significant victory?

 

On one hand, that remains to be seen - there is still a long way to go and a lot of work to be done to make this a reality. We are also clear that not all models of “rent controls” are the same – and so it will take a huge amount of effort to make sure that we secure the radical, transformative model that tenants in Scotland so desperately need.

 

On the other hand – and even with those caveats – this is a perfect example of the power of working class organising. When the campaign began almost 7 years ago, rent controls were still considered by many to be a fringe idea and tenant organising was at its lowest ebb in decades. We have turned that around completely, and secured an enormous concession from the government in the face of furious and well-resourced lobbying from landlords and their allies. It is proof positive of what can be achieved by patient, persistent and uncompromising organising.

 

 

How does this represent an advance over ‘rent pressure zones’?

 

The truth is that almost anything would have been an advance over rent pressure zones.

 

It was widely acknowledged that rent pressure zones had failed, not just by us but by the housing sector more broadly, including by organizations like Shelter. We've written a lot about why that was, but the short version is that in order for councils to use the rent pressure zone powers, they needed to provide a level of detail that simply didn't exist – and that councils alone couldn't collect.

 

For us, however, the question was always deeper than just implementation. We believe that RPZs were far too limited and weak in scope to meaningfully impact high rents. For instance, RPZs don't touch on the quality of rented housing at all – which is one of the things that we think is most important.

 

What rent pressure zones were, however, was an acknowledgement from the Scottish government at the time that market forces alone couldn't be relied on to make sure housing was affordable for everyone. The challenge we have now is to make sure that the new measures put in place are not simply RPZs repackaged and tweaked, but a radical and transformative model of rent controls that actually reigns in and brings down rents.

 

 

How was it won? How long was the battle?

 

It’s been a long campaign, so we could probably spend all day reeling off all the things that we’ve done over the last 7 years. It involved all sorts of traditional campaigning tactics, like petitions, opinion polling, holding demonstrations and protests, and social media campaigning. It's also involved a huge amount of lobbying and working with supporters within the main parties in Scotland. In particular within the SNP, there is a big grassroots movement amongst their members in favour of rent controls – for example, a few years ago their youth wing affiliated to the campaign, and in 2016 the SNP conference even voted – unanimously – in favour of a national system of rent controls. We’ve also worked well with supporters in Labour and the Greens.

 

But in my view, the one thing that has helped the campaign more than anything else has been building an independent power base of organised tenants up and down country, able to fight and win. For us, politics is a question of power - not simply of ideas. That means that whatever glossy policy documents we've produced have been far less important than the slow work of building power in communities and neighbourhoods up and down Scotland. Rent controls have always been a common sense policy solution with overwhelming public support, so what has changed isn't the policy idea – but the social forces behind it.

 

What has the reaction of the landlord lobby been? 

 

The formal landlord organisations have been relatively silent about this - but that’s not surprising. It is widely understood that rent controls are an extremely popular measure, and that landlords are not a group of people who enjoy much public sympathy. Because of this, we often see that they are reluctant to have these sorts of discussions in public, preferring instead shady backroom chats where their misrepresentations and blackmail can’t be so easily challenged.

 

The reaction from individual landlords, on the other hand, has been in some places utterly hysterical. One landlord went so far as to post online, in response to the news: “In the 60s, the Chinese murdered our kind. Fact.”

 

Do you foresee any challenges ahead in terms of turning the policy into law? And afterwards – legal challenges etc?

 

I think we have been right to celebrate the announcement itself as a big victory – it’s important that we do celebrate the wins we get. But we are under absolutely no illusions about what happens next.

 

There is a long way to go before we actually have rent controls in place, and the proposals are in many ways very light on detail. It would be possible for the Scottish government to implement something that, on paper, fulfils their promises – but in practice fails utterly to help tenants in any meaningful way. So there is a sense in which the work is just beginning.

 

So over the years to come, we will need to match the lobbying efforts of landlords and their allies, and force the Scottish government not to water down or weaken or drop the proposals. That is a huge task – and in some ways is harder than the campaign to win the principle of rent controls, but I believe that we have demonstrated the power of an organised tenants moving and I'm extremely confident that we can do this too.

 

What is Living Rent’s strategy for dealing with this?

 

Our strategy for the next 5 years isn't likely to be particularly different from our strategy over the last 5 years. The way we will win is not by coming up with some particularly innovative idea – the proposals we’ve been making for rent controls are basically just copy-pasted from systems elsewhere in the world – but by building power.

 

That means that, yes we will need to get into the weeds of the policy detail and will need to be feeding into consultations and working groups and things like that, but much more important than any of those dates will be building working-class, tenant power in every community in Scotland.

 

That's also important because it will help not just in winning rent controls, but in winning all the other demands we’re going to be making over the next five years and beyond as well. By focusing on organising, rather than just campaigning, we can build a permanent infrastructure of tenant power that can absorb victories not as something that takes the wind out of our sails, but as something that emboldens tenants to demand even more.

 

What are the next policy priorities for Living Rent?

 

Post-election, we're going through a process now of developing those priorities, so I'm reluctant to pre-empt that process, but we are clear that even once the proposals outlined in the co-operation deal are in place, there will still be a long way to go. Even if rents come down, the private rented sector is still going to be exploitative and tenants will still face abusive power imbalances. 

 

But once it’s recognised that landlords cannot provide affordable housing themselves – and need to be forced to lower rents by legislation – to me, it begs the question of why we have landlords at all.

 

What is your message to tenant organisers elsewhere in the U.K. and beyond in light of this victory?

 

I speak to a lot of people outside Scotland who seem to believe that we've been pushing at an open door, and that because we don't have a Tory government everything has been clear-cut simple and easy. That is nonsense.

 

When we launched the campaign seven years ago, people thought we were mad – even people in the housing sector and on the left were telling us what we were demanding was impossible. A prominent housing NGO even told us that by demanding rent controls, we were undermining other demands for greater security for tenants.

 

But over seven years of uncompromising organising, and by facing down the lies and misrepresentations of our opponents publicly, we have completely changed the political space in Scotland. Rent controls are now political consensus in Scotland, alongside many of the other demands we've been making around housing.

 

This was only possible by building an organisation that wasn't going to let the demand go, and that refused to content ourselves with the halfway measures offered by the government – for instance when rent pressure zones were introduced. 

 

All the usual caveats about seeing it through, of course, but what we have already won demonstrates – undeniably – the power of organising. It’s impossible to see that and feel pessimistic. If tenants can beat landlords, then the working class can beat anyone.

 

 

Gordon Maloney sits on the national committee of Living Rent, Scotland's Tenants Union.

 

 

By Nick Bano, Joe Bilsborough, Lily Gordon Brown and Isaac Rose

 

“I’m very proud to support John Lewis”

Sir Keir Starmer

 

“I love John Lewis”

Boris Johnson

 

 

This month saw the eye-catching news that the John Lewis Partnership – purveyors of furnishings to the Parliamentary class – is setting its sights on the residential property market. The company is considering setting itself up as a large-scale build-to-let concern, possibly by building flats above retail space.  What does this tell us about the housing crisis, capital and the economy?  What does it tell us about the nature of rent extraction in the UK?

 

The first and most obvious conclusion is that John Lewis thinks that this is going to work.  They are no fools: they have been running successfully for more than 150 years, and they are now giving us a clear indication that they see profits in residential property.  This is understandable, as town centres are gutted of retail spaces and the value of commercial buildings (particularly office space) is threatened by the pandemic.

 

Any fool, though, can see that housing is profitable. What’s more interesting is the optics of the company’s expansion, and what it shows us.

 

John Lewis has been the darling of the middle class and commentariat for many years.  The 2010 Parliamentary expenses scandal centred around the ‘John Lewis list’: their merchandise had a sort-of ‘Goldilocks’ status of being plush enough for an MP’s flat, while not being so extravagant that it would be embarrassing to claim it on expenses.  During the 2015 election the ‘John Lewis test’ was identified by Tristram Hunt (then a Labour MP, now engaged in a bitter dispute about sacking dozens of his workers and outsourcing their roles – a very un-John Lewis policy).  The ‘John Lewis test’ asked whether the Labour Party was doing enough to woo John Lewis’s ‘aspirational’ class of shoppers.  Then, after Boris and Carrie Johnson’s high-end renovation of the Downing Street flat, the party leaders publicly fawned over the company when Keir Starmer ham-fistedly argued that their wares ought to have been good enough for a head of government.

 

The rental market now has a reputable supplier.  As home ownership becomes an increasingly remote prospect even for wealthier people, and renting becomes inevitable, John Lewis has stepped into the breach.  If the well-to-do are to be forced to rent – if the ambition can no longer be home ownership – then there has to be a form of renting that caters for them.  A respectable landlord for the genteel renter.  Indeed, the suggestion is that a John Lewis flat would come with the option of having John Lewis furniture, and a Waitrose on the doorstep.

 

This, perhaps, tells us something about the increasing socio-economic segmentation within the renting population.  The rental sector is not a homogenous mass of buy-to-lets.  Instead, we are increasingly seeing rental projects that specifically target particular demographics: ‘co-living’ arrangements; monstrous planning applications for expensive student accommodation; the ‘guardianship’ industry; higher-end build-to-lets; and companies that seem to specialise in exclusive prefabricated communities. And within this new large and socially variegated rental sector, John Lewis seems to have anticipated demand for fully-furnished and decorated ‘Instagrammable’ new-builds.

 

It is notable that John Lewis sees its future in build-to-let, because this is at odds with the government’s emphasis on increasing home ownership (fostered by mortgage support schemes, which tend to be targeted at new-build homes). This might suggest that the company doesn’t think the government will succeed. John Lewis has placed its bet on the growth of an emerging form of higher-end landlordism, which is inconsistent with a shrinking rental sector, and more consistent with the idea that more and more people in their 20s, 30s and beyond are going to need to keep renting.

 

Given its cachet as a ‘respectable’ firm, as well as the increasingly complex dynamics and class interests within the renting population, the more cynical among us might also see John Lewis’s move as an interesting attempt at undermining the groundswell against landlordism.  It might be more difficult to make the case that ‘all landlords are bastards’ (a slogan couched in more measured and persuasive terms in these excellent pieces by Tristan Cross and Tom Lavin) if the ranks of landlords include a beloved workers’ cooperative: aspirational but not elitist; successful but worker-friendly; a far cry from the vicious and cold-hearted landlord of the popular imagination.

 

The key point of Cross’s and Lavin’s pieces is that there can be no such thing as a good landlord because landlordism is inherently exploitative.  This truth sits uncomfortably with John Lewis’s traditional claim that its model is a gentler form of capitalism, in which cooperative ownership smooths over the exploitation that takes place between companies and their workers.  But there is no suggestion that John Lewis will export this commitment to cooperative principles to its housing arm.  By becoming a landlord, the company will enter into a new form of exploitation, and one which is unmediated by any supposedly progressive principles.

 

This development also illustrates a shift in one of the things that makes UK landlordism so unusual.  Unlike most major economies, where the rental market is dominated by large institutional players, the majority of the UK’s landlords are small-time individuals.  There is some evidence of a rise in global corporate landlords in the UK, and John Lewis’s plan adds to that.  For better or worse, we may increasingly see a housing market dominated by finance capital, rather than individual owners.

 

John Lewis is the sort of company that would probably never publicly support contentious policies like the Tories’ proposals for tearing up planning law, but it seems that they’re happy to quietly benefit from them.  The government has recently relaxed restrictions on converting commercial property into residential, which is surely a boon to a retail company looking to develop ”sites in its existing property portfolio”.  The decision from John Lewis, together with the government’s proposals, might also be showing us the direction of travel: a society in which housing is wrested from declining high streets and town centres.

 

The counterpoint to all of this is that it might actually not be telling us very much at all.  Perhaps John Lewis’s move simply indicates a greater degree of frankness and transparency about companies’ involvement in land and property than we’re used to seeing.  It’s not often pointed out that Sainsbury’s property portfolio is worth £10.1 billion.  Homelessness charity St Mungo’s appears to derive far more income from its function as a landlord than from its fundraising activities.  Rent extraction is at the heart of a great many businesses, and John Lewis’s decision to market itself as a residential landlord might be more of a cosmetic exercise than a genuine shift.

 

As some of the authors have previously argued (here and here), residential property is very much the UK’s key national industry.  In that context it is unsurprising that its domestic capital seeks refuge in a sector that’s so heavily protected by the state.  The UK looks after its landlords through a huge variety of legal, financial and structural measures and – as John Lewis muscles its way into the market – the quotes from Starmer and Johnson at the top of this article may contain more truth than they realise.

 

Let’s imagine for a moment that a post-millennial centrist is sent to Mars for a lengthy exile.  If the Martians asked them to name something so typically British that it brings a tear to their eye, there’s a good chance (if they’ve momentarily forgotten about the 2012 Olympics) that they’d well up at the thought of the John Lewis Christmas adverts.  Ask an exiled British leftist (or anyone under 35) the same question and they’d probably start griping about landlords, rent and the housing crisis.  Perhaps it’s unsurprising that these two totems of British society – its weird ‘respectable’ capital and its unusually severe housing crisis – are going to start to look alike.

 

 

Nick, Joe, Lily and Isaac are writing on the housing question in the UK, their work appearing on this blog and elsewhere.

 

 

By Joan Ruthurford

 

I'm a retired town planner with an interest in campaigning for a more inclusive built environment.  I supported the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People (GMCDP) in responding to the Government's recent consultation on 'Raising accessibility standards for new homes'.  It will probably surprise no-one to learn that the consultation was framed in technical language and was clearly aimed at developers, rather than at the people who would actually benefit from accessible housing, that is, older and disabled people.

 

The consultation asked for opinions about five options.  GMCDP supported Option 4: To mandate the current M4(2) - accessible / adaptable - requirement in the Building Regulations as a minimum standard for all new homes, with M4(1) - the current minimum - applying by exception only.   A set percentage of M4(3) - wheelchair accessible - homes would also be applied in all areas of the country.  GMCDP advocated a minimum of 10% wheelchair-accessible housing, which has been the standard in the London Plan for a decade.

 

The draft Greater Manchester Strategic Framework proposed M4(2) as the minimum for new homes, but had no standard for wheelchair-accessible housing.

 

GMCDP is one of the oldest disabled people's organisations in the country (founded in 1985) and has long campaigned for accessible and adaptable homes so that disabled people can choose to live independent lives.

 

GMCDP are currently working with the People's History Museum in Manchester to put together a public exhibition on the theme of 'Nothing About Us Without Us' (the history of the disabled people's movement).  As part of the exhibition GMCDP have interviewed a number of disabled people about their experience of living independently during the pandemic.  A film of these interviews is being compiled.  The consistent response from disabled people is that 'Independent Living Saves Lives'.

 

Most disabled people would prefer to live in a home of their own that has been designed to be accessible or has been adapted to meet their needs.  Many disabled people are prevented from doing this by lack of choice. The pandemic has emphasised the significant disadvantages of living in a residential institution compared with living in a home of one's own.  

 

If a disabled person lives independently - that is, in an accessible home - they have control over the number of visitors.  They can make sure that appropriate Personal Protective Equipment is worn and the necessary protocols followed.  This reduces the risk of infection compared with living in a residential institution, where the person does not have the same level of control and the incidence of illness - and sadly even death - has been very high.  

 

The restrictions on residents in (and visitors to) care homes and other institutions have consistently been tighter than for disabled people living in their own homes.  Recent press reports have confirmed that the more restrictive controls on movement imposed on care home residents have lead to depression and had other long term impacts on people's mental health and well-being.

 

The Government's consultation on accessible new homes ended in December 2020.  Since that date GMCDP has continued to raise the issue with Greater Manchester MPs.  In response to our MPs, Lord Greenhalgh (Minister for Building Safety, Fire and Communities) said:

 

"The consultation is part of a full review of Part M of the Building Regulations... It includes a research programme on the prevalence and demographics of impairment in England and ergonomic requirements and experiences of disabled people."

 

Lord Greenhalgh states that the Government is currently considering responses to the consultation and will publish a report 'in due course' setting out the next steps.  (The consultation began on 8 September 2020 and the closing date for comments was 1 December 2020, that is, six months ago). 

 

GMCDP's response to Lord Greenhalgh is that a research programme as described is irrelevant and would only serve to delay the essential upgrade of the Building Regulations to a mandatory minimum accessibility standard.  GMCDP pointed out that there is currently a national shortage of accessible and adaptable new housing for disabled people.  That our population is ageing and increasing age often brings impairment and that there is an as-yet-unknown impact of Long Covid-related impairments.  All these issues point to the urgent need to increase the amount of accessible new housing as quickly as possible.

 

GMCDP asked for a commitment from the Government to a date when the outcome of the consultation will be made public as it is clearly of significant interest and concern to disabled people and their organisations.  Further, if the decision is taken to mandate higher accessibility standards for all new homes, a commitment to a date when this will happen.

 

GMCDP also asked for clarification about the proposed research into the 'ergonomic requirements and experiences of disabled people'.  As the main active organisation representing disabled people of all impairment groups in a major city region, GMCDP would have hoped to be included in this research, but have not been approached to take part. 

 

I attach two links that provide further information about this topic.

 

https://gmcdp.com/care-homes-covid-19-and-independent-living

 

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/coronavirus-control-over-support-is-helping-keep-disabled-people-safe-evidence-suggests/

 

Joan Rutherford is a retired town planner, writing on behalf of the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People.

 

By a CATU Phibsboro-Glasnevin member (@CGlasnevin)

 

Nowhere is Ireland’s long-running housing crisis more visible than between Dublin’s two canals, which ring the city centre from east to west. The four postcodes in this stretch account for around a third of all homeless people in the country, while average rents stand at an eye-watering €1,974. 

 

Substandard and insecure housing, overcrowding, rough sleeping, forced evictions and extensive use of state-funded but privately-run ‘emergency accommodation’ are all standard features of Dublin’s housing system in 2021. 

 

Our members form a north Dublin branch of the Community Action Tenants’ Union (CATU), an all-Ireland tenants’ union launched in 2020. The neighbourhoods of Phibsboro and Glasnevin have been badly hit by the housing crisis. Chronic overcrowding, poor housing stock and a rental system weighted heavily in favour of the landlord class has led to extreme housing insecurity and inequality in our community. Close to 3,000 people are currently on the public housing waiting list in this one small part of Dublin city, yet social housing construction remains pitifully low. 

 

Since our local branch launched in May 2020, we’ve been involved in successful membership defences and forced eviction threats, as well as growing our own base locally and contributing to the development of CATU at a national level. As a grassroots tenants’ union, we’re led by our members on deciding on issues that matter locally. 

 

In January 2021, plans for around 600 co-living ‘units’ were announced at two very prominent sites within 1km of each other in our neighbourhood. Our members immediately brought it up for discussion at a branch meeting and a decision was taken to campaign against the developments. We were soon joined by neighbouring CATU branches in Cabra and Mountjoy Dorset. 

 

Our members had good reason to object to the proposals. 

 

Co-living has become somewhat of a byword for the totally ineffective and insubstantial Government response to the housing crisis in Ireland. In 2019, the then Housing Minister made desperate attempts to justify co-living schemes on behalf of the influential property developers who had introduced the model to Ireland, going as far as to refer to the undersized units as ‘trendy boutique hotels’ in one interview.

 

In Dublin, like Manchester and other cities where housing has been weaponised as an instrument of international finance, co-living seeks to maximise profits for developers and the private equity funds who back them by squeezing space and lowering standards. Rents in short-lease co-living developments typically run to well over €1,000 per month, and on essentially every level do not meet any of the basic needs of practically everyone living here. New co-living developments were banned in Ireland at the end of 2020, but a neatly-signposted waiver on applications that were entered before the deadline were given the green light to proceed. 

 

Our campaign was relieved when Ireland’s national planning body rejected the first co-living scheme in April. There was no such luck for the second proposal, which envisages almost 300 tiny co-living spaces crammed into a local shopping centre. The development in Phibsboro, a neighbourhood on the northside of Dublin city, has sparked significant public backlash. As a community union, the focus on harnessing these views into a progressive campaign which not only challenges the project’s blatant attempts at profiteering, but also loudly advocates for a Phibsboro for the many, not the few. 

 

 

 

Organising in a pandemic

 

The owners of the Phibsboro Shopping Centre is a real estate company called MM Capital who are keen to take maximum financial advantage of Ireland’s dysfunctional housing system. MM Capital continues to insist that co-living is the ‘only option’ for this prominent site. Their criteria for measuring the viability of potential uses of course only extends to maximising profit from every square foot of the site, rather than truly considering the best interests of the community. 

 

Despite the obvious impediments to organising opposition during a lockdown, we looked around for some way to bring people together, some way that people could break out of the political isolation that the necessary physical distancing has placed us all in.

 

Until mid-May, any significant physical interventions in the community were limited by the Gardaí’s (police) selective enforcement of the COVID restrictions on mass gatherings. 

 

Despite this, we managed to stage pop-up events with a co-living model, designed to highlight the plans locally and spark discussions with members of the community who opposed the development. This drew great local attention and managed to bring what was at stake back into public conversation on social media.  

 

 

We also launched an online survey/petition that would ask people what they thought of the co-living plans. The idea was that the petition could serve as a hub around which a community campaign could be built and alternatives proposed.

 

The results have been encouraging. Within the space of a few weeks the petition was completed by around 1,500 people with the overwhelming sentiment that co-living is not wanted in the community. Our members follow up with signees who have agreed to be contacted by phone, text and email, to see if they want to join the campaign in any way. 

 

As well as giving people the opportunity to get involved with the campaign, the petition left space to share thoughts on alternative uses for both sites and give voice to a frustration felt by locals in the area at the unjust nature of the housing crisis. Despite making up a huge portion of the population, it’s clear people in Dublin feel they have little or no meaningful outlet for their rage at a system that has failed to provide the most basic of needs; decent and secure housing. This, in the most expensive city to live in the eurozone, while an investment fund is freely allowed to railroad overpriced and banned co-living into the middle of the community. 

 

“The current proposal to turn Phibsboro Shopping Centre into hotel room sized ‘co-living units’...is based on a policy of maximising profits for investors and developers at any cost rather than progressive urban planning that puts the needs of our society first,” read one typical response to our petition. 

 

Others pointed to the deep frustration and human impact of the housing crisis on peoples’ lives in our community. 

 

“I'm 27 with a full time job and can't afford rent anywhere in Dublin unless it's sharing a bedroom with three other people for €600+ a month. It's not sustainable. There is nothing young people can do, we're already working non stop with no prospects of ever owning our own homes or even finding sustainable affordable places to rent longer term. Co-living is not the answer, it's dehumanising and depressing.”

 

Going forward: linking struggles

 

As pandemic-related restrictions ease, we’re confident our real life engagement with the community on the co-living plans will continue to resonate with people who live here. 

 

We’re encouraged by the responses we’ve had on the street, knocking on doors, on social media and to our petition. We know that despite the official approval and lack of political will to vocally challenge the plans, the public mood is with us locally. 

 

As well as the co-living campaign, we’ve recently seen a number of evictions among members as pandemic-related protections end. The lack of quality affordable housing, abuses suffered by tenants and those in precarious housing situations, and the seemingly relentless facilitation of developers’ interests over the needs of ordinary people in Dublin are all connected. We see part of our mission locally to draw the links between these factors and engage the community in the process. 

 

This is all the more relevant given the local political reaction to the co-living plans in Phibsboro. Despite vocal early opposition from a number of local politicians, the political will to challenge this development and advocate for the building of inclusive and socially useful amenities has largely vanished. This is despite widespread anger at the effects of the housing crisis, and the role of private equity firms in perpetuating the misery it continues to inflict on working people. The muted and ineffective response from local politicians underlines the Irish political establishment’s complicity in creating and perpetuating this housing crisis; organised communities must make their voice be heard collectively instead. 

 

Our members therefore see a real mandate to continue our opposition to co-living in our community. We’ll continue our fight against the plans in this part of Dublin, up to and including direct action, while also loudly advocating for the infrastructure that our community so badly needs; decent, secure and truly affordable housing. 

 

Follow CATU Phibsboro-Glasnevin for more on our campaign.

 

By Tom Gillespie, Isaac Rose, Jonathan Silver

 

 

Factory opening

 

On the left bank of the River Irwell, where the Granada TV studios once stood, is a construction site ensnared in delays, overspend and hubris. Dubbed ‘The Factory’ in a not-so-subtle reference to Tony Wilson’s iconic record label, this site is the new permanent home of Manchester International Festival (MIF). Designed by ‘starchitect’ Rem Koolhas, and with its origins George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda, it forms the centrepiece of a cultural regeneration strategy that could be called ‘Bilbao-on-Irwell’. If you believe the hype, it will be one of the ‘world’s most ambitious art spaces’, a place ‘where we invent tomorrow, together’. It is also £76m over budget, with £50m of Manchester City Council’s own money sunk into the project, alongside central government’s contribution of £78m.

 

Who stands to benefit from the public funding ploughed into The Factory? One significant financial interest is the property developer Allied London who acquired the Granada Studios site during their development of the adjacent ‘Spinningfields’ business district. Allied London plan to develop the site around The Factory into St John’s, a 25 acre mixed-use neighbourhood including apartments, hotels, offices and retail space.

 

Geographer David Harvey argues that urban cultural spaces often come to serve the interests of capital accumulation by attracting new flows of investment and inflating land rents. In the case of Manchester, the presence of The Factory is certain to increase property values on the St John’s site. Despite being almost entirely funded by the public, therefore, it is large developers that are poised to reap the financial benefits from this project: public funding for the arts is being used to create the conditions for private profit.

 

The Factory raises questions about the type of city that is being built through Manchester’s pursuit of culture-led urban regeneration. The strategy of instrumentalising culture in order to attract real estate investment first adopted in the 1990s has succeeded in transforming the city centre beyond recognition. However, this approach has also fueled an increasingly brutal housing crisis characterised by speculative inflows of finance capital, skyrocketing housing costs, the displacement of working class communities, a social housing waiting list of over 13,000, and large numbers of people living in poor quality temporary accommodation.

 

The Factory is a useful starting point for understanding Manchester’s unequal urban geography because it embodies the city’s infatuation with commodifying its late 20th century musical history in the service of property development. This is a model that combines Blairite urban regeneration with ubiquitous references to the city’s 1980s and 90s pop cultural heyday. Once the cradle of industrial capitalism and the birthplace of radical philosophy, politics and culture, 21st century Manchester is strangely trapped in a 90s groundhog day; still high from the Madchester scene and fetishising a nightclub that was demolished and rebuilt into apartments 20 years ago. Crucially, this staid approach has no answers to the city’s contemporary housing crisis.

 

Capital of the long 90s

 

The defeat of Corbynism in 2019 and Keir Starmer’s subsequent election as Leader of the Labour Party has generated renewed discussion around Jeremy Gilbert’s concept of the ‘long 90s’; the idea that we are all trapped in a cultural and political 1990s timewarp. Culturally, this takes the form of a stasis evident in the lack of musical innovation since the turn of the millennium. Politically, it is manifested in the persistent centrist belief that neoliberal economic globalisation and technocratic liberal democracy represent a post-ideological ‘End of History’, and that social problems are best addressed through the operation of markets.

 

At the national scale, Starmer’s Labour leadership, with its abandonment of Corbynite social democracy and increasingly farcical lack of policy ideas, does appear to represent a return to a post-Cold War centrist politics in which managerial ‘competence’ is deemed more important than ideological substance. But what does the continuing influence of the long 90s look like at the urban scale? We contend that Manchester, a city preoccupied with late 20th century cultural references and trapped in a Blairite urban regeneration model, is the capital city of the long 90s. The socio-spatial outcome of this cultural and political stasis is an increasingly unequal city and a deepening housing crisis.

 

The origins of the current leadership in Manchester lie in the takeover of the Council by the New Left, led by Graham Stringer, in the 1980s. While more famous iterations of this occurred in Sheffield, London and Liverpool, Manchester was also swept up in this generational challenge to the older paternalistic Labourism.^[1] In 1984, the Left took control of the Council after a bitter four year struggle with the right wing leadership. This Left had a social base in the burgeoning liberation social movements in the city and in the white-collar, public sector trade unions. Once in power, they advanced a political agenda of representation; defending the gay community from police violence; creating an equal opportunities committee structure; and attempting to develop decentralised neighbourhood services. Economically, they spoke of a prefigurative socialist municipalism; planting the seeds of a new society at city-level.^[2] Yet this strategy was predicated on the expectation that Labour would soon win a general election, ushering in a political shift across the country and releasing funding to allow the Council to pursue its municipal socialist policies. With Labour’s defeat in 1987, this route was walled off and the political struggle with Thatcherism decisively lost. With it, the rug was pulled from under the strategy of municipal socialism.

 

In its place, the Council pursued a strategy of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’: embracing public-private partnerships and competing with other cities in order to attract funding and investment to regenerate a city centre suffering the effects of deindustrialisation. This involved the Council partnering with private developers to transform central Manchester into a high-density residential area through the construction of private apartments for young professionals. The dramatic transformation of the city centre since the early 90s led architecture critic Owen Hatherley to describe Manchester as ‘a flagship for urban regeneration’. Politically, entrepreneurial Manchester came to be ruled by a ‘narrow governing coalition’ of the Council leadership working closely with property developers. This shift of the late 80s, as the Council faced up to the twin realities of Tory rule in Westminster, and the rapid decline of the city’s manufacturing base, laid the groundwork for the Manchester of today. While Stringer spearheaded this shift, it is his successor Richard Leese, Leader of the Council since 1996, who is most closely associated with Manchester’s entrepreneurial turn.

 

The ascent of the New Left to political power within the Town Hall coincided with a high tide of dynamism within Manchester’s artistic and musical landscape. Factory Records and the Haçienda are well known, but these represent merely a fraction of a complex ecosystem of venues, record labels, pirate radio stations, pub siderooms and artists studios. The roots of Manchester’s house music scene of the 1980s lay in Black clubs in Hulme and Moss Side, which from the late 70s onwards were playing the new music coming out of New York and Chicago. Undergirding all this cultural innovation was a crucial material factor: cheap space. This was typified by the role Hulme’s crumbling brutalist council estate played in incubating the city’s now mythic post-punk scene of the 1970s-80s. Despite the habitual references to Factory Records and the Haçienda in urban boosterist discourses, there is a persistent sense that Manchester’s elite rather miss the point of what enabled the innovation of this era, and where the roots of the culture were. As DJ and writer Dave Haslam observes, ‘The Haçienda wasn’t a disco version of the Trafford Centre.’

 

The Council’s entrepreneurial strategy involved the commodification and commercialisation of public space; a cleanup of the rougher edges of urban culture; and securing the city centre as a playground for consumption. This leant heavily on the ideas of Richard Florida, high theorist of neoliberal urban boosterism, who argued that for cities to compete globally they had to be successful in attracting what he termed the ‘creative class’; people in professions as wide and varied as ‘scientists, poets, actors, writers, finance, legal, healthcare and wealth management.’ By growing these sectors, and focusing on ‘the three Ts — Technology, Talent and Tolerance’, cities could rise up the global rankings and attract inward capital investment, particularly into real estate. New Labour heavily promoted this form of regeneration, which was enthusiastically embraced by Manchester. While this approach is hardly unique — geographer Oli Mould describes the creative city agenda as a ‘systematic requirement’ of contemporary urbanism — Manchester was praised by Florida himself in 2003 as the UK’s most ‘creative’ and ‘enterprising’ city.

 

Who led this transformation? Although the Council leadership were key, they were situated within a wider assemblage of actors across the city’s emerging culture and real estate complex. Hatherley refers to them as ‘a strange 'post-rave urban growth coalition’ of ex-modernists, ex-Situationists, ex-punks and ex-socialists’. Perhaps nobody better epitomises this trajectory than Tom Bloxham, who moved from selling posters and music to selling ‘quirky’ flats. Urban Splash, the company he founded, has played a key role in the gentrification of the central neighbourhood of Ancoats, contested by residents’ struggle to preserve historic community infrastructure. More broadly the company has acted as a major cheerleader for Manchester’s culture-led regeneration, and Bloxham is now Chair of the board of MIF and The Factory.

 

 

 

Over time, urban regeneration and real estate investment has cannibalised the conditions that made Manchester‘s late 20th century cultural renaissance possible, reducing ‘culture’ to a narrow, elites-only affair, perhaps best symbolised by MIF. Hatherley observes how Manchester’s success in mobilising its musical heritage in the service of urban regeneration has had a stultifying effect on cultural innovation in the city: ‘Manchester — capital of regeneration with its loft apartments, its towering yuppiedromes, its titanium-clad galleries — has produced virtually no innovative music since A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology in 1995’.^[3]

 

This can be seen in Capital and Centric’s redevelopment of Crusader Mill as profiled in BBC2’s Manctopia series. This development pushed out nearly 100 artists — the largest artists studios complex outside of London — and the last of the South Asian textile businesses operating out of the mill, to be replaced by a series of ‘pop up culture’ events. These temporary cultural activities were designed to make this “Red Light’ area a desirable place for its future home buyers: the developer, Tim Heatley was caught on camera expressing his wish to sweep away the sex workers that have used the area for decades. The gentrification of Crusader Mill was put under the spotlight by former resident artist Sam Meech. And this particular property company is not finished there, with Talbot Mill in Castlefield also becoming a victim of the real estate boom. There are a series of other closed cultural spaces (and more on the way) across the city that have left artists and musicians without facilities. While the Council poured tens of millions into the Factory, existing and proposed community spaces such as the Ancoats Dispensary, the Nello James centre, the Moston Miners Club and the Hulme Hippodrome struggled to raise much smaller amounts to use culture to transform working-class communities.

 

From house music to housing crisis

 

How does Manchester’s status as the capital of the long 90s relate to the housing crisis we see unfolding in the city today? The strategy of the Council has remained unchanged since the 1990s when it sought to regenerate a city trapped in terminal post-industrial decline by attracting investment to transform the city centre. This process has globalised significantly since the 2008 financial crisis, and the Council has successfully attracted investment from Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong. However, a narrow focus on building private apartments for market rent or sale has contributed to growing housing unaffordability in the city. Despite hopes that the wealth generated would trickle down to the wider city’s residents, urban regeneration has in fact deepened spatial inequalities by creating ‘a kind of parallel, private new town in the central city’ surrounded by deprived urban neighbourhoods.

 

 

Local campaign group Greater Manchester Housing Action (GMHA), with which we are all involved, has been at the forefront of contesting Manchester’s neoliberal urban development model. GMHA has published critical research on the processes of financialization and privatisation that have contributed to growing urban inequalities in the city. The campaign’s vibrant webspace hosts a kind of think-tank from below, full of ideas and debates from across the housing movement covering issues as broad as the struggles of GRT communities to the revolving door of councillors working for developers to the economics of student housing. GMHA has also been active in organizing around various struggles: supporting a residents’ campaign to fight plans to build Purpose Built Student Accommodation on top of the last pub in Hulme; leading opposition to plans for co-living developments in the city centre; co-ordinating a campaign to reinstate the Council’s suspended planning committee; opposing the government’s planning reforms and calling for Andy Burnham to establish a Land Commission.

 

 

These campaigns sit within a citywide assemblage of local groups from media co-operatives to tenants unions to the climate movement. Across the wider region we enviously watch local politicians consciously breaking with the long 90s by rejecting neoliberal urban development approaches that enable the extraction of wealth by big capital. Most high profile are the experiments with ‘community wealth building’ in Preston; but we may also look to attempts to expand the urban commons through the Liverpool Land Commission; and, closer to Manchester, Mayor Dennett’s ‘sensible socialism’ in Salford, which has as its centrepiece the construction of council housing.

 

Within Manchester itself, a coterie of left wing councillors have begun to challenge the long 90s model of urban growth — sometimes with success. A few policy shifts have been notable in response to this pressure. For example, the Council is now planning to build its own affordable housing on public land. Is this a belated acknowledgement that the long 90s model of relying on the private sector is busted? Time will tell.

 

Those pushing for an alternative vision of a city filled with beautiful, low-carbon social housing, independent cultural venues and public green space continue to run up against the buttress of political power in the city, led by figures who emerged in the 80s and govern as if we are still living in the neoliberal 90s. In a Centre for Cities podcast Council Leader Richard Leese spoke about the local Labour Party he confronted in the 1980s: “It was effectively an old guard, complacent, very paternalistic and very patronising - certainly as far as the city was concerned… And a new wave who wanted to change things ... Who wanted a different approach.” Today, it is time for Manchester to finally move beyond the long 90s generation and mode of governing to embrace a radical approach appropriate to addressing the major challenges of our times.

 

---

 

 

^[1] The wider ‘New Urban Left’ is surveyed in Wainwright, Labour: A Tale of Two Parties, 1987.

^[2] S. Quilley, ‘Manchester First: From Municipal Socialism to the Entrepreneurial City,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 24.3, 2000.

^[3] O. Hatherley, The New Ruins, Verso, 2010, p. 120

 

 

 

Cover image: Jonathan Tomlinson.

 

This article originally appeared on Verso.