Speculators cash in as homelessness grows

While homelessness grows and people struggle to pay exorbitant rents, rich property speculators in central London are cashing in.

There were 52,960 households in temporary accommodation in England when the figures were last updated six months ago. They include an estimated 70,000 children who have no permanent roof over their heads.

Homelessness has risen 25% over the last three years. And the official increase back in 2011 was itself the largest in nine years. Over the last year, 5,700 people were sleeping on London's streets while some our million are on council waiting lists for a home.

This does not take account of 400,000 “hidden homeless” – those who squeeze into the homes of families or friends and never make it to the council lists.

The ConDem cap on housing benefits, currently claimed by some 660,000 people, will make many more homeless in the months to come.

The right-wing free-market Institute of Economic Affairs notes that: “Runaway housing costs have become one of the most pressing issues for low-income households in the UK. House prices have doubled in real terms since the mid-1990s alone, from an already very high level. No other developed country except Australia has experienced a price explosion of such a magnitude.”

Shelter, the housing campaign, estimates that 3.6 million children in the United Kingdom live in poverty after their housing costs have been paid.

When it comes to buying, most new households are priced out of the market. But for those speculating in property, soaring prices are truly wonderful.

Yes, that will be the super rich who are buying up luxury apartments at One Hyde Park. They include British entrepreneurs, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, Nigerian and Arab oil billionaires.  

One tax-haven sleuth has found that five flats in London were bought for a total of more than £82 million by a group of Isle of Man companies under the name of Rose of Sharon.  Ukraine’s wealthiest man seems to have bought two flats in Hyde Park for £144 million.

Despite forking out such astronomic sums, of course, you won’t find many of the billionaires actually living at these properties. In the case of One Hyde Park, only 17 out of the 76 apartments will actually be lived in. It’s an investment and buying through a company means that the owners can avoid a lot of tax.

There is an inverse relationship between the haves and the have-nots. The higher property prices soar, the harder things are for those lower down the scale. Even middle-class professionals are finding themselves priced out of the market.  

The solution to the housing crisis lies within the problem itself. There are over 300,000 long-term vacant properties in England alone. Housing practitioners have long proposed creative ways of bringing them back into use.

Instead of property developers, land speculators and private landlords controlling the supply and price of housing, we need a housing programme that works for people.

Immediate measures are needed:

• End housing benefits cuts and phase out private landlordism
• Reduce council and housing association rents to make them affordable
• Cash for refurbishment as part of a consistent national approach
• Requisition empty and unused properties
• De-criminalise squatting
• Replace mortgage debts with payments re-negotiated according to ability to pay
• A ban on building in the Green Belt
• Improve public transport links to low price property areas
• Social ownership of land, builders/developers and the financial sector.

In short, a housing strategy designed to meet need and for ecological care rather than as a source of income or profit for developers, speculative builders, investors and landowners.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Arab Spring meets Jewish Summer

The rhythmic Hebrew slogans used at many of the protests are strikingly similar to punchy Arabic lines that have reverberated throughout the Middle East since January: "Ha'am doresh / tzedek chevrati" ["The people demand social justice"], one observer noted.

On Saturday night, more than 150,000 people – out of a population of seven million – gathered in 12 cities across Israel as part of the biggest social movement the country has witnessed.

Small-scale actions that started with tents being pitched in Tel Aviv and other cities over soaring housing costs have grown into a mass movement against the right-wing Netanyahu government, unemployment, the ruling families who own most of the economy and deep inequality.

Recent demonstrations have included marches against the prices of petrol, boycotts of expensive cottage cheese that forced manufacturers to lower prices and lengthy strikes by social workers and doctors over pay and working conditions.

Middle-class Jews and Israeli Palestinians have come together in local encampments in a way that seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. And they have shaken the country’s ruling economic and political elites to their core. There were reports that Bedouin tribesmen had joined the marchers in outlying towns. A poll by showed that 87% of Israelis support the tent city protests.

In echoes of the movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Spain, many on the march demanded fundamental change. It was a moment when the Arab Spring met the Jewish Summer. One of the placards read: “Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu!”

Activist Daphni Leef, who initiated the first tent village protest in Tel Aviv against housing prices two weeks ago, told a crowd of 70,000-100,000 Israelis gathered outside the city's main art museum that "we don't want to replace the government, but to do more than that. We want to change the rules of the game".

A steady influx of wealthy diaspora Jews from New York, Miami and Paris who bought up flats in Israel's big cities has driven up prices in many affluent neighbourhoods along the Mediterranean coast in cities such as Tel Aviv and Netanya, in addition to Jerusalem.

Since 2008, the price of an average apartment has gone up by 55% rent by 27%, far in excess of wage increases.

Many protesters say they do not want to live in the distant suburbs, where rent is cheap but amenities are far. Public transport is notoriously bad in Tel Aviv, where people joke that "the Messiah will arrive before the new light rail is built".

Efraim Davidi, a political scientist at Ben Gurion University, says there is a simple reason why the vast majority of Israelis support the protesters against the government. "The situation of working families is getting worse and worse. It's very difficult to buy an apartment, car, food," says Davidi. "Prices here are like in Europe, but salaries are like those in the Third World."

The Arab Spring is making itself felt in this unlikely context. The regimes being challenged are quite different, but the impulses are similar – corruption, inflation, unemployment, inequality and a failure of the existing political system.

In Israel, the Zionists who dominate a nationalist state founded on a single ethnic group have used the threat of an external “enemy” in the shape of Arab regimes to hold sway over a seemingly pliant population.

The shattering of the Mubarak regime and the heroic uprising by the Syrian people in the face of a murderous assault by the Assad dictatorship has served to loosen the Zionist grip. As The celebrated author David Grossman told the crowd: "The people are loyal to the state, but the state isn't loyal to them."

The idea that the Jewish state represents all Jews equally is being exposed and blown apart and with it will go the raison d’être of the Zionist regime itself. Class rather than ethnic and religious questions are now coming to the fore in Israel, with the nature of capitalist rule on the agenda. A real unity of Jewish and Arab workers in the region, leading to self-determination for the Palestinians, is a greater possibility now than it was before the Arab Spring.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor