It is easy to despair over London’s housing crisis.
The city is building fewer homes than it has for decades, a trend which looks set to get worse. The average rent of a two-bedroom home is more than £2,200 per month and even renting a single room can cost well over £1,000 a month. First-time buyers now need to find a £134,000 deposit — well beyond what could be saved by forgoing takeaway coffees (especially if you bear that rent figure in mind).
Homelessness is at epidemic levels. Almost 75,000 families are living in temporary accommodation, an increase of more than 100 per cent since the start of the 2010s and the highest number in living memory. And this summer brought a brutal reminder of the challenge climate change is bringing as Londoners sweltered in hard-to-cool homes.
An aerial view of London
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Faced with doom across almost every level of housing it seems reasonable to feel nothing but pessimism. There is no clear route out of the spiralling housing crisis and this has existential consequences for the city.
Already many ordinary people are finding they can’t afford to rent more than a single room in a house share. Many essential workers, including teachers, nurses, retail and transport, have migrated out of the capital to more affordable areas. Families are fleeing and the birthrate is plummeting.
But there remains hope that we could take a different route. At the start of this decade, London councils, with support from the Mayor and new funding rules, were embarking on the biggest programme of council house building since the 1970s, often well-designed, architecturally award-winning, family-sized housing. Many were forced to scale down or revert their plans as the fallout of Covid and Russia’s war with Ukraine hit the economy and the costs of borrowing and building rocketed.
Estate agents for sale signs are displayed outside a house estate agents in Clapham south west London
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New funding committed by Labour will not cover the full need — London has £3.3bn until 2030 when City Hall estimates it needs £4.9bn a year — but it is a move in the right direction. If the goal to build tens of thousands of new social homes in London is achieved in the next few years, that means tens of thousands of families can move out of temporary accommodation and insecure and devastatingly pricey private rentals and put down roots in the capital.
A dying housebuilding model
There are also positives among the negative headlines. The main reason private housebuilding has stalled in London is that demand has plummeted — not because young people don’t want somewhere to live, but because they simply can’t afford it.
International investors — the other major market for London new builds — have also turned their attentions elsewhere. Property developers present that as a crisis, but it is also an opportunity. In the 2010s London’s property market was red hot but it did nothing to solve the housing issues. In that same period rents and prices soared, flats were often sold off-plan and flipped before being left empty on completion, and many buildings turned out to be riddled with quality issues.
If that model is dying, might something better replace it? There are examples in cities the world over of models that have been squeezed out of London by speculative housebuilding, such as community land trust models, which are popular in Zurich and Scandinavia.
“The main reason private housebuilding has stalled in London is that demand has plummeted — not because young people don’t want somewhere to live, but because they simply can’t afford it.”
A younger generation of housing activists have shown their capacity to force through change. For the first time since the late 1980s, London’s renters have tenancy security longer than six months thanks to the Renters’ Rights Act, after a youth-led campaign eventually forced a cross-party consensus on ending no fault eviction. Rent control — which can work when carefully introduced — is their next target.
The rise of the renters
London’s politicians will have to be alive to this. The capital is one of the only places where renters make up an electorally significant voting bloc, and politicians will not be able to win here without their support.
And one of the major public policy successes of recent years has been climate-related — the move towards electric cars and public transport has already made our air cleaner. We need more of this — water gardens and permeable surfaces to protect against flooding; greenery and shading to offer respite from summer’s deadly heat. With the right leadership, London could become more affordable and greener by the middle of the century but it depends on the choices we make now.
Homelessness is also at epidemic levels
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Chancellor John Healey has a long interest in housing. He was a housing minister under Gordon Brown and shadow housing secretary under Jeremy Corbyn. In the early 2010s, as a backbencher, he helped establish a political campaign to call for more social housing when the rest of the Labour Party was less interested. In his Budget this month he needs to show the same ambition for new social housing. Doing so would set London on a path to a better future.
Change can come quickly. My dad was born in 1944, when London was still being cratered by V2 bombs and most working-class people lived in slums. By the time he was 35, millions of council homes had been built on former bombsites. I was born in 1988, when homes were affordable to dinner ladies and when social housing was so abundant councils worried about not being able to find tenants. By the time I was 35, all of this had been unwound. My first son was born in 2018. What will the city be like by the time he is 35? Grim as that future might sometimes look, it is not yet written.
Peter Apps is an Orwell Prize-winning journalist. His latest book, Homesick: The End of London, is out now (Oneworld, £12.99)