Red Pepper » Right to the City

Tenant troubles

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:00:58 +0000

In July last year, radical housing group Housing Solidarity took up the case of three private tenants in east London who found themselves stuck at the centre of a dispute between the landlord of their new flat and the letting agent, Victorstone Property Consultants. The landlord had changed the locks, leaving the would-be tenants without their new home or the £3,451 they’d paid for rent and deposit. While they managed to recover some of the money from the landlord, Victorstone had held on to around £1,200 that it refused to repay. The money was only returned after Housing Solidarity organised scores of people to call, email and fax Victorstone. Within two hours the company had caved in.
This is just one example of new groups using direct action casework, an organising model that had its roots in the unemployed workers movement of the Great Depression, when people organised to demand their basic needs were met by relief offices. Today, the model has been adopted by the London Coalition Against Poverty, whose members Hackney Housing Group and Haringey Solidarity Group’s housing action group have both won victories in cases where families were at risk of homelessness due to eviction by private landlords.
With sky-rocketing rents for what is often poor quality and insecure accommodation, and those on low incomes being hit by no fewer than seven different cuts to housing support, it’s no surprise private tenants are starting to fight back. But historically, private tenants have been notoriously badly organised, lacking the community links and a common and publicly-recognisable landlord.
And the problems of private tenant organising cannot be underestimated. Many private tenants don’t even know who their own landlord is, let alone whether there are any other tenants and if so where and who. Insecurity of tenure exacerbates the problem, as private landlords can easily evict ‘troublesome’ tenants.
Although there have long been a handful of private tenants organisations, the rise in activism has been driven mainly by newer grassroots groups with a younger demographic and new ways of organising, communicating and taking action. Instead of replicating the committee meetings, annual reports, and formal structures of traditional tenants groups, these new groups generally work with more open structures and have much greater propensity to use social media and direct action tactics, often based on individual struggles.
In May, concerned about the impact of housing benefit cuts on private tenants in the borough, the Haringey group organised a public event to bring people together. One of the outcomes was a specific focus on the problems faced by private tenants, inspiring actions such as a ‘community housing inspection’ of local letting agents, which exposed discrimination against housing benefit claimants, inflated fees, insecure tenancies and extortionate rents.
2012 also saw the establishment of the vibrant Edinburgh Private Tenants Action Group. This has already seen success after its targeting of letting agents over tenants’ fees led the Scottish government to clarify that all such fees are illegal in Scotland. Again tailoring action to tackle problems faced by their members, in July the group converged at the offices of DJ Alexander, some of them in TV cop costumes inspired by the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’ video, and designated it a crime scene due to the illegal fees the agency was charging.
Similar creative tactics were adopted by the Hackney private renters’ group Digs and other housing campaigners, who held an action in December to coincide with the national day of action called by UK Uncut. More than 50 people shut down a branch of Starbucks for an hour to hold a ‘housewarming party’ highlighting the cuts’ impact on access to decent housing.
To date, most of the new groups have worked within existing structures, albeit in novel and often powerful ways, to deliver results. But there are clearly limits to this approach, and demands for reform, including rent controls, increased rights for tenants, such as greater security of tenure, and more stringent requirements of landlords, are already being made.
But for many campaigners there is also recognition that the problems faced by private tenants cannot be tackled in isolation. The private rented sector is an expensive way to house people and delivers the worst outcomes in terms of decency and security, with the exception of temporary accommodation.
So different groups are increasingly working together to call for more and better access to other housing tenures, particularly more social housing. They are situating calls for reform within a wider critique of the current housing system, and rejecting the market as a just or effective means of distributing access to this fundamental human right.
Illustration by Martin Rowson

Lambeth’s short-life sell off

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:23:44 +0000

Lambeth Council is at an advanced stage of flogging off the last of its ‘short life’ properties to private property developers. Evictions of the people in them were already due to have started as Red Pepper went to press and those emptied are being sold at auction.
At one time the council had about 1,200 of these properties, houses in such bad state of repair that they were given to people on the housing list at no or low rents to do up themselves. Today they have about 170 left. Some residents have been in these short life houses for 30 or 40 years and are now in their sixties and seventies.
Many are run by housing co-operatives, a number of which have now grouped together in a ‘super-co-op’ to campaign against the sell off and propose an alternative co-operative solution (see www.lambethunitedhousingco-op.org.uk). But this is no block to the council selling off these houses off on the private market and destroying the co-ops, and with them well-established communities. The residents have often spent thousands of pounds putting in new windows, central heating and on general repairs. The housing was given to them precisely because at the time the councils wouldn’t spend that money.
In July 2011 a small group of cabinet members decided to push ahead and terminate all short life properties, revoking the licences and putting them on the market. Since then there have been a series of court cases with the council trying to evict or harass people to leave. Private Eye reckons that at least £175,000 has been spent paying the legal firm Devonshire’s bills so far.
Lambeth Council rejected offers from social landlords to take over these properties. A local co-op, Ekarro, offered to pay 25-27 per cent of value to keep them in social ownership – it was refused. For a long time Lambeth claimed it was negotiating a deal with Notting Hill Housing Association and needed the tenants to leave to achieve it. It soon became clear this housing association turned property developer was going to sell off 80 per cent of the properties on the private market, keeping only one fifth for social housing. This deal fell through as well. So with its eyes on £32 million worth of property Lambeth turned to the private market itself, entering a hugely expensive process and paying off a series of corporate vultures.
Money no object
When a property is vacated the council pays to make it uninhabitable to ‘stop squatting’. Later, it pays the multinational Camelot to go in and make it habitable again for its ‘guardians’, people often in desperate housing need who live in the property. The council then pays a fee of anything up to £100 a week for Camelot ‘protecting’ the property. The guardians, who have no tenancy rights, live in the property paying Camelot a deposit of £500-600 and a ‘rent’ of up to £65 a week. Little wonder this Netherlands-based multinational had a turnover of £20 million in 2011.
The council then has to pay auction houses such as Andrews and Robertson fees to sell properties at an average of 30-40 per cent below market prices. A recent 10-bedroom house in The Chase in Clapham, cleared of short life tenants, was sold for £1.6 million. At the same time a much smaller house in the same street was being marketed for £2.6 million.
How much will be left of the £32 million after the lawyers, multi-nationals and auction houses take their cut is anyone’s guess. What is certain is that very little will go into providing new social housing because Lambeth Council does not build any. It has said: ‘We are selling off properties that are uneconomic to refurbish and part of the money generated will go into the Single Capital Programme of which part will be used to allocated housing.’ (Our emphasis.)
Lambeth Council argues that all evicted short life tenants will be offered priority in council housing. But this misses the point – the members of these co-ops do not want to move and see their communities destroyed. Neither do they want to take someone else’s place on the council waiting lists. Lambeth already has 25,000 on its waiting list and only 25,000 council properties; by selling its housing it is just contributing to London’s housing crisis.
Not going quietly
The co-op members are not going quietly. They are fighting the council in the courts, where in a series of shambolic appearances by council lawyers, things have moved very slowly. The co-ops have the support of local MP Kate Hoey, who even forced an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on the issue last December.
A protest at Rectory Gardens, where some of the properties are located, at the beginning of November halted a planned viewing organised by auctioneers. But with evictions now starting, protests must be stepped up locally.
For more information go to www.lambethsaveourservices.org