Obsessing about how many homes are being built is a similar mindset to GDP-gazing—it fails to understand the true nature of the problem

~ Rob Ray ~

The Freedom publishing group has, for the last few years, been refreshing some of the works of Colin Ward, one of the most influential British anarchist writers of the late 20th century. Ward wrote extensively for Freedom Press over many years, across many topics, focusing on the idea of “everyday” anarchism—the ways in which society already incorporates anarchist ideas, and how we as anarchists interact with it.

Among his preoccupations, perhaps foremost was the debate around housing. An urban planner by trade, he applied anarchist theory to the sector through his analysis of squatting (Cotters and Squatters), architecture (Talking to Architects) and provision (Housing: an Anarchist Approach). A dedicated voice for decentralisation, open access and public interaction throughout the development process, he was an admirer of Walter Segal and the self build movement, who passionately advocated for a freeing of people to be participants in their homes, rather than passive consumers.

It would be interesting to hear his perspective on the current mess. 

Labour’s attempt to “fix” the housing crisis by “tearing down barriers and red tape” and commissioning a set of 12 new towns, if you squint really hard, looks almost a little bit like Ward’s injunction to let people build. He was a pioneering voice in the thinking behind the New Towns of the 1960s (particularly Milton Keynes) and a promoter of DIY building, critical of the ways in which council housing attempted a clunky one-size-fits-all solution to people’s living needs.

We are, however, long out of the time in which such a viewpoint connected to the ways land, bricks and mortar were organised then and in many ways, his writing is at its most important as a record of how foreshortened the horizons of discussion have become.

Rather than the State building homes, power has been handed wholesale to corporate developers, overseen by a bewildering and overbearing array of rules, compered by the power of the rich to see off infringements of their land while the rest of us see nearby green spaces gobbled up piecemeal. This has led, inevitably, to an orgy of profiteering and construction based on what the market will bear, rather than what the populace might need, or the environment might benefit from. 

On the edges of every market town huge new estates have been slammed down using barely-modified schemes from the databases of Barrett, Persimmon, or Taylor Wimpey. These characterless builds are a failure in every conceivable sense. The build quality is notoriously poor, postage-stamp gardens and communal zones are nothing but a perfunctory nod to the endless research showing how vital green space is to mental health. New amenities are rarely if ever included, simply adding pressure to existing services, while distance from said services turns the new estate almost instantly into a source of car traffic and pollution. 

Forced to jump through endless hoops (placed because otherwise these cartels would cheap out to the point of serious public danger), the production of a maximised profit results in homes that are totally unsuited in placement, design and price for where need actually lies, stranding people away from family and opportunity in alienated, isolated zones still mimicking (or at this point parodying) the ridiculous and unsustainable dream of 1950s suburban America.

So when Starmer talks of taking on the NIMBYs and of unleashing new construction, or Sadiq Khan suggests allowing building on the London green belt, what we very much aren’t talking about is a solution to the housing crisis. And not just because in bald numbers, there isn’t one (the number of long-term empty homes actually rose in Britain last year to 265,000, compared to 354,000 homeless people, while the average density per house has remained around 2.36 before we even get to 500,000 second homes pushing people out of the villages). 

What we have is a capitalism crisis, in which many of these houses are being kept empty deliberately, or are in unloved areas where people haven’t built job-creating industries. Meanwhile the “solution” of Labour’s neoliberal ideologues is to hand the rampantly corrupt, self-dealing development industry a free hand to concrete over whatever they like in the pursuit of profit. Followed by nearly all that new stock being snapped up by buy to let firms and rented out at “market” (ie. unaffordable) rates. 

Starmer and co. don’t have solutions to these issues because they barely even recognise them as a problem. For this (possibly last) generation of hands-off-the-wheel capitalist dogmatists the market will, in the face of all these decades of evidence, provide. 

But what could we do differently? Ward offers many useful possibilities in his writing, including his work charting the 20th century’s two major waves of squatting, his emphasis on self-directed building and co-operative approaches to housing, and his refusal to retreat into simplistic “council houses solve it all” thinking. 

Anarchists actually have a number of concrete examples of grassroots alternatives, in particular through the hugely underestimated Radical Routes, which has quietly helped so many people buy and control their own, truly social housing. Its small scale notwithstanding, the potential is there to continue expanding such projects, keeping the landlords’ hands out of people’s pockets and the houses themselves in much better nick, because the folk living there have a sense of ownership.

Land and its use is at the core of everything, as our very first major philosopher Proudhon identified in What is Property? Much effort has been expended by the ruling classes to put it beyond our reach. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight to regain that control, both piecemeal and through campaigning to push government out of this mindset where Corporates Know Best and into one that works with people, rather than over their heads.