Homelessness is hell: all forms of poverty are misery-making, but having nowhere to sleep on a long term basis compounds the experience.
Whether you’re placed in short-term accommodation, sleeping on friends’ sofas or, in the worst case scenario, rough on the street, not having your own home as a sanctuary erodes self-worth and self-confidence. When you have children, the fear and guilt can be overwhelming: families I’ve spoken to were homeless because of outside circumstances they had no control over – landlords selling up; revenge evictions; cuts to income through housing benefit cuts, job losses, or diminishing work hours; or fleeing abuse. But everyone absorbed the stigma society attached to the homeless and poorly housed and felt, in turn, they had failed their children.
No one should feel that way, particularly given that many of these families have been forced out of London. The only properties and accommodation they were offered were outside the capital, in Hastings, Coventry, Birmingham or other cities miles away from their families and communities. Often they were met from the train by a council official who sorted out their initial housing then left them to fend for themselves in their new city.
What’s all the more remarkable about this relatively commonplace practice is that the councils on the receiving end of the process have no idea how many people have been shunted off to them. Hastings council warned the London exodus had left their already struggling homelessness service creaking under the weight of people deemed too poor to live in London.
This week, the head of homelessness services at Birmingham city council, Jim Cranshaw, told MPs that Birmingham had officially been notified of 130 families who’d been moved from London to the city, but the true number was far higher. One London council had an official based in Birmingham, who met families off the train and helped them find accommodation. The head of a homelessness charity in another city in the south-east told me two officers from another local authority were placed in the West Midlands, rehousing families.
Inevitably, Cranshaw told MPs, this exodus of the poor has led to Birmingham housing more people outside the city. The number of homeless families in temporary accommodation in Birmingham has risen from 799 at the end of 2014 to 1064 a year later.
Where will people live? If council funding is cut as a housing crisis escalates, families will continue to be treated like packages in a cross-country game of pass the parcel. Once one city is full, another is used as a dumping ground. Does this continue forever until cities are hollowed out citadels of wealth, studded with empty skyscrapers turning empty profits, while poor families are told they don’t deserve a stable home or the opportunity to live in one region for more than a few years?
The situation is completely unsustainable, but while politicians dig their heels in and continue cutting council funding and exacerbating the situation, children are being constantly uprooted.
Often, when ordinary citizens dare to complain about tax evasion and inequality, they are accused of indulging in “the politics of envy”. If calling for fairness is seen as envy, some people need a reality check.
But the “politics of envy” rhetoric is integral to a climate that allows people to be pushed out of a city simply for being poor. Those who argue that if a city is unaffordable for a family, they simply shouldn’t live there misunderstand how cities work and the need for people who drive buses, clean offices and hospitals, treat people in hospital wards and teach children in schools.
If you are resentful that a family can live in a city thanks only to affordable housing, it’s a resentment that is blind to the needs of many people earning an ordinary income.
Cities should be for everyone, not just a soulless hub of wealth. If families are being pushed out of London, Birmingham and Oxford, ask yourself – where will it end?
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