By Lily Gordon-Brown (@lilygbrown)   On a recent trip to New York City (NYC), I hoped to gain an insight into how the deep-rooted financialisation and diminished affordability of the city compares to the happenings on this side of the Atlantic. More so, I was excited to see how the growing housing movement across the …

By Jonathan Silver (@InvisibleMapper)   This year, the invasion of Ukraine brought sharp focus to the global wealth that has surged into British real estate over the last few decades. Around the time of the invasion, calls from across British society to seize oligarch owned property came from what might have previously seemed like unlikely …

By Jacob Stringer   A recent visit to Berlin has given me much cause to reflect on the thorny topic of how to win better housing for everyone. I have been part of the London Renters Union for 5 years and while little in housing has improved in that time, we have always been able …

by Lilly Hill   A report from the frontlines of the battle to save Ryebank Fields.   Walking through the football fields of Longford Park in south Manchester, with their striking view of the city’s ever expanding skyline in the mid distance, through a gap in the blackberry bushes, you suddenly find yourself submerged in …

By Abi O'Connor (@abioconnor_)   The Conservative party takeover of Liverpool City Council represents a perfect storm in which corporate powers are able to trial new forms of urban governance which are vacant of democratic representation and wholly unaccountable to the people of the city. The possibility of these even further mechanisms of privatisation reveals …

By Lily GB (@lilygbrown)   “Thrones are crashing everywhere, and the men of property are secretly trembling” (p. 27)     The ‘manmade’ environment is a colloquialism so embedded in everyday dialogue that we rarely pause to dissect the meaning behind it. While it often refers to ‘human’ made constructs, it is also reflective of …

By Nick Bano (@nickbano)   In 1649 the radical Christian group the Diggers made a public declaration explaining that, in their view, landlords are thieves:   “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh …

By Greater Manchester Housing Action (@gmhousingaction)   On Thursday the planning committee will consider an application by Renaker for permission to build Trinity Islands: four skyscrapers incorporating 1,950 apartments and with a Gross Development Value of £741 million. The developers have declined to make any significant contribution to support affordable/social housing either on site or …

By Jacob Stringer (@radiagonalist)   The Housing Crisis is a Land Crisis, a pamphlet on Community Land Trusts by Lily Gordon Brown, was a welcome intervention in the discussion of the future of housing in the UK. Radical positive solutions to the inaccessibility of decent housing are too seldom discussed among housing activists. While some …

By Nigel de Noronha (@deNoronhaNigel)   In the first of series of articles examining the racialised impact of student accommodation in the wards of South Manchester, Nigel de Noronha examines the background to the growth in student population in the area. This work has been gratefully supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and originally appeared …