Correspondence - The following letter is a reader’s response to the article Housing - A Never-ending Crisis under Capitalism in Revolutionary Perspectives 43

I must admit I was gladdened by the article on housing. Personally I suffer in terms of housing needs. I have the joy of living in an inner city area of a northern city, not on a sprawling and unkempt estate, but an area noted for its turnover of successive waves of immigration and its pernicious poverty.

Currently we have new friends arriving - Poles, Albanians, Kosovans, Slovaks and so on. We also have that unfortunate new breed, certainly for this area, the gentrifying lower professionals. They have most definitely driven up house prices locally.

We also have our very own crop of buy to let landlords, my own included. There are one or two points I would like to make, though, in terms of personal experience.

First of all, rents in the area are being forced upwards. It would appear that the appearance of that new wave of immigration - the new house buyer, the lower professional, often with a very PC personal agenda and an unbelievable selfrighteousness - has fuelled a rise in house prices definitely keeping house purchase out of the reach of those previously unemployed or marginally employed.

Having had the “benefits” of New Deal funding for some years, a few scraps have finally trickled down to one or two long time local residents (the material normally trickling down is somewhat different). We do have a few local entrepreneurs taking up the buy to let baton. Rents have risen ridiculously. Local council housing has virtually disappeared, flats and houses demolished wholesale, often almost directly following huge amounts of money spent on refurbishment. Our beloved local council, administering housing benefit via a large corporation (Liberata), do not pay out housing benefit at a level keeping pace with those rent rises. Capped benefits (maximum rents etc.) thus reinforce an increasing depth of poverty. Liberata and local council preside over the enforcement of poverty.

Housing is a stick with which to beat the poor, and beat them harder.

Secondly, it is easy for the racist right to make headway given some of the ways in which housing priorities are portrayed and delivered (social housing that is). For the Liberata bunch it is easy given the antiseptic safety of their PC heaven, I mean haven. They live in committee rooms entirely divorced from the reality of the working class, seeing the world through rose-tinted office windows, rose-tinted reports.

It is true that there has been a surge in building here in this city. Cranes dot the skyline. The properties built, though, are plush new offices and expensive flats. For us, the dwellers at the bottom of a very tall ladder, all that is on offer are minimum wage jobs and an ever further out of reach first rung on the ladder. This city is increasingly a city divided into those in and around the minimum wage and those well above that.

There are certainly fewer instances of an even pay scale, gradations in wage rates, so fewer opportunities to move beyond expensive private landlords or the increasingly rare social housing.

A further problem for the poor is the length of private leases. A high student population in a city means that one-year leases are common. Indeed, a local estate agent has made a small fortune out of basic threemonth leases. For those forced into such situations they have to find renewal fees four times a year or are forced to move - not something easy to do when in receipt of benefits, or on a low wage.

Recent rises in house prices will not continue though. Given the evidence before us now, I would expect a serious slowing and then decline in house prices, leaving some house buyers with equity shortfalls.

What would the effect be on the private rented sector, on the buy to let treadmill?

What is going to be the experience of those at the base of society? Will we see any sort of response from government? Will they lose that in the post or on a couple of disks?

There will definitely be a lot of wringing of hands, wailing and self-righteous beating of chests in professed sympathy by the suited congregation of bureaucrats for those affected. The only glad note would be the ringing of their system’s death bells. That melody will be set down solely through the combined actions of those beneath, a chorus of the caverns above ground. For those of us who have to suffer, until then we are nothing more than ghosts in our own lives. We are treated as though we are without substance, that substance is for us to find and make real.