housingforthe99

Fundamental necessities like food and water are subject to strict regulation and inspection to make sure they’re safe and don’t damage people’s health. So why isn’t housing?

Sick of being ripped-off with sky high rents and poor quality housing, activists in Haringey took matters into their own hands, and organised a community housing inspection of local letting agents, drawing attention to high rents, short-term tenancies, discrimination against housing benefit claimants and high administration fees.

Haringey Community Housing Inspectors out in force

On Saturday, a team of around 20 ‘Community Housing Inspectors’ headed along Green Lanes to investigate letting agency policies. Of the agencies visited, four agreed to take part, while Winkworths, Kings Group, Bairstow Eves, Brian Thomas and Anthony Pepe all denied access or refused to speak to the self styled inspectors.

The protest took place against a backdrop of housing benefit cuts, a lack of Haringey letting agents willing to accept tenants on housing benefit, rent inflation outstripping wage inflation, and a concern that landlord and letting agent practices are leading to a significant change in the local demographic. Haringey Housing Action Group has committed to support any tenants facing eviction because they cannot pay their rent.

The protest was a success. As a member of the group said “We managed to gather information that will be of help to prospective tenants in the borough (the results will be publicly available), and we put across our demands to the letting agent staff, as well as to hundreds of passersby, many of whom told us of their own bad experiences of local letting agents. We also shut down a handful of letting agents, possibly the ones who felt they had more to hide. And we turned the tables on the letting agents who carry out checks on our homes without permission.”

Letting agents beware – this won’t be the last you hear of angry tenants.

Members of Haringey Housing Action Group protest high rents and Housing Benefit cuts

With private rents in London up an average of nearly 7 per cent this year, the London Assembly have decided to take a look at what’s going on.

Over the next couple of months, the Housing and Regeneration committee are doing a review of London’s private rented housing. They’re asking for views on three areas: affordability and tenure, quality and standards, and tenant and landlord rights.

They’re asking for views on the first area, affordability and tenure, by Monday prior to their meeting on 20 September. We’ll be sending some of our thoughts over – but the more the merrier! The more people they hear from saying that they’re sick of paying rip-off rents and public money going straight into greedy landlords’ pockets, the better!

Send your comments to paul.watling@london.gov.uk byMonday 3 September. Full details of the issues being covered are available at here.

With just days to go until ‘London 2012’, the spotlight is on the capital. But the event is also drawing attention to a local housing crisis of olympic proportions.

In an area where private tenants typically spend over 40 per cent of their income on rent, private tenants in and around the Olympic boroughs have been discovering just how few rights and little security they have when it comes to their homes. People have been forced to leave places they’ve lived in for years, temporarily vacate their homes with no alternative accomodation provided, or pay massively increased rents to be able to stay after their landlords decided to cash in on expected mega rents over the period of the Games.

Then there’s the issue of the housing ‘legacy’ supposedly being left for the people of East London. Supposedly the Olympic development is bringing 11,000 new homes with it, but this seems increasingly unlikely. And while a third of the new builds were meant to be ‘affordable‘ (desparately needed in an area where 32,000 people are on the waiting list for social housing), the new definition of this term means rents can still reach 80 per cent of market rates, with outcry at a recently completed ‘affordable’ scheme in nearby Islington demonstrating how such schemes benefit graduates and young professionals trying to get onto the housing ladder at the expense of those who most need help with accessing decent housing.

The developments are also spelling trouble through the process of gentrification or ‘regeneration’ which is seeing areas like the Carpenters Estate in Newham, home to around 250 people, threatened when the council revealed plans to demolish most of the estate, pushing the community out in favour of more exclusive developments.

Add these problems to anger about corporate profiteering by sponsors with dubious track records, repressive policing and an assault on civil liberties and it’s not surprising people are pissed off. Join Housing for the 99% to demonstrtate against the many negative aspects of the games at a protest organised by the Counter Olympics Network:

Whose games? Whose city?
Assemble 12 noon, Saturday 28 July 2012
Mile End Park, East London (nearest tube: Mile End)
March to Victoria Park for the People’s Games for All!
To include speeches, entertainment, “alternative games”, and children’s events.

If you’d like to join our housing bloc, meet on the edge of Mile End Park, opposite East London Tabernacle Baptist Church on Burdett Road, E3 4TU at 12 noon. Email housingforthe99@gmail.com for more information.

This morning a bunch of us paid a visit to the National Landlords Association (NLA). The NLA represents more than a million landlords who collectively make billions from their tenants – and, through Housing Benefit, the public purse – by charging rip-off rents. The organisations also actively lobbies against better regulation of landlords, and encourages its members not to offer secure tenancies.

So our visit was to make it clear that we’ve had enough of runaway rents and poor quality, insecure housing. With a good turnout and no rain (hurray!) we headed down to their London office on the embankment to air our new banner and placards, make some noise and generally make sure staff and passers-by didn’t get away without knowing why we were there.

We were also there with cardboard boxes and sleeping bags to highlight how the Housing Benefit cuts compound the problem of high rents, increasing the risk of homelessness for private tenants. Crisis report that there has been a 39 per cent rise in tenants becoming homeless because their tenancies have come to an end.

With over 8m private tenants in England, we’re pretty sure we’re not the only people who are pissed off. Over the next few weeks we’ll be planning our next steps – and would love contributions from anyone that shares our aims. Get in touch with your thoughts at housingforthe99@gmail.com or follow us @housingforthe99.

Do you ever think you’re paying a lot for not very much? If you live in the private rented sector, that’s probably not an uncommon feeling. In the last decade, rents charged by private landlords have risen at twice the rate of wages, and average rents for a two bedroom house in more than half of English local authorities now exceed a third of average local take home pay. So it’s not surprising that a recent survey found that over a quarter of private tenants have had to borrow money to pay their rent at some point in the past year.

It might not be so bad if we were getting high quality homes for these sky-high rents. But the government’s own figures show that private tenants are getting a much worse deal than people who live in other types of housing. A third of private rented homes are ‘indecent’, failing to meet the Decent Homes standard – almost double that of social rented homes – and almost a fifth fail basic health and safety standards. Private tenants are also most likely to live in cold and damp homes. And overcrowding is on the rise – figures show that there has been a 23 per cent increase in overcrowded private rented homes in the last year alone.

Yet landlords aren’t increasing rents because they need to – with interest rates remaining at record low levels, a recent survey shows that only 4 per cent have been doing so because of higher mortgage costs. Instead, they have put the rent up because they could, with a fifth saying they did so because their letting agent encouraged them to. Yet the government’s response to rip-off rents is to blame those on the lowest incomes – Housing Benefit is being cut with no regard for the consequences. Children are having their education disrupted as families are forced to leave the communities they have settled in, with massive swathes of London set to become areas where only the richest can live.

Enough is enough. Starting this week, private tenants and others who are concerned about high rents, cuts to Housing Benefit and poor quality, insecure housing in the private rented sector will be taking action for a better housing. Watch this space!