by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The Great Property Scandal is a week-long series of programs intended to highlight the consequences of the housing crisis.
Architect and TV presenter George Clarke's segment on empty homes threw the spotlight on the million homes lying empty in the UK, at a time when two million families are on the waiting list.
Mr Clarke argued that bringing the 350,000 long-term empty properties back into use would be a cheap way to house thousands of families.
In another segment of this series he tried to convince the Government to launch a low-cost borrowing fund that would allow tenants and landlords to get some money to do a property up and offset the costs with rent income.
His idea is that if someone has got an empty property that needs work done to it, they can personally apply to get some of those funds at a low cost borrowing and that if that was a long-term scheme and people borrowed against it, they could just do the property up and offset the costs with the slight increase in rent to pay the loan back. Which basically means the money goes back into the system.
The show featured a young couple who convinced their council to let an empty home below the market rent. Thanks to that, the couple spent a few months and just £3,000 to do the property up.
Mr Clarke also took the campaign to the Tory party conference where he tried to convince the country's top politicians to sign his empty homes petition. Housing minister Grant Shapps gladly accepted while secretary of state for communities and local government Eric Pickles refused, offering George Clarke a hug instead.
Channel 4 cameras also followed a young veteran who struggled to find a council home and was forced to sleep on a couch in his mother's house while his visiting son slept on an armchair. The show ended with a family of ten who moved into a large, previously empty home in Birmingham. Mr Clarke and his team spent seven weeks deconverting the house from three flats to a large family home with six bedrooms to fit the demand in the area.
Mr Clarke has argued that building a new house of that size would have cost a housing association more than £200,000, when it cost only half of that to refurbish the property to good, energy-efficient standards.
The biggest problem as regards to empty homes is that the number if much higher than the figure of 350,000 quoted. The quoted figure does not include those empty homes, more often than not former council homes, that are no longer on the empty homes list as they are to be torn down and redeveloped.
Such redevelopment often takes decades and often never really happens while estates stand empty, such as, for example, the Ocean Estate in Stepney, East London. Or the estate in Hackney in the 1970's that stood empty for about 15 years over the late 60's, throughout the 70's, and was finally redeveloped into houses and maisonettes, reducing the stock from about 5,000 homes to 500 homes on that same area of land.
We have enough empty homes in Britain to house all of the homeless families and individuals and that several times over. Problem: There is no political will to do something about it. Homelessness seems to be something factored in to keep the rents high.
Come one, let's get the finger out and get those homes back into use. And I am not even talking about those properties that could become homes though were something else before.
Homelessness in a supposedly civilized country is a disgrace...
© 2011
