 | Stuart Woolgar on Property Guardians – a r… |
“In the race to rent?” That’s what the advert from Rightmove asked at my local bus stop. It made me angry – housing is a right, not a race. But in the last two decades, instead of building housing for people, we’ve built a housing crisis. One which renters are at the sharp end of.
Read the full article here.
Over the past year I’ve been busy working on a jointly-authored book for the newly-incarnated Left Book Club.
The Rent Trap brings together a lot of the work myself and Rosie Walker have been doing on housing as journalists and activists. We interviewed everyone from policy-makers to people living in the worst housing conditions, and many degrees in between. What we are aiming to do is show why we have fallen into a rent trap, and look at some of the things we can do about it. Publication is due in March 2016. To find out more, check out the Left Book Club site.
The rise of housing campaigns in the UK has been amazing. Ten years ago there were a few campaigns, mostly local around protecting council housing from privatisation or demolition. Now there are dozens: private renter groups, anti-gentrification campaigns, anti-eviction campaigns, homelessness campaigns, and radical housing action. The Green European Journal asked me to write something up on housing campaigns in the UK, and it was clear to me that I had to write about the Focus E15 Campaign, which went from a small group of single mothers doing street stalls to a high-profile and active campaign on all aspects of the housing crisis.
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