Home offers sanctuary and privacy
Scottish Unionist politician and Conservative thinker wrote in 1923, that to make democracy stable, the government needed to promote a property owing democracy, to meet the rise of socialism with constructive conservatism. Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy was one of the defining policies of her long tenure in Downing Street from 1979-90, aimed at property-owning democracy by giving tenants in local-authority housing substantial discounts so that they could buy their own homes. Right to Buy gained remarkable success in that it lead to the sale of more than 2 million homes and resulted in immediate transfer of wealth, increasing home ownership and contributing to the rapid growth of an under-regulated and precarious private rented sector. In 1979, as one-third of people in England lived in council housing built, owned, and administered by local government, 40 per cent of the council homes were bought under the Right to Buy to private landlords, who rent them out at three or four times the price of an equivalent property in the social housing sector, resulting in private renting becoming unaffordable for those in lower or middle incomes. Out of 35 European countries, Britain ranks among the lowest 20 per cent in terms of home ownership.
Today, the house price inflation fuelled by central bank quantitative easing, austerity, and unintended consequences of the Right to Buy, has turned our dream into reality.
Planning Barrister Hashi Mohamed in A Home of One’s Own emphasises the emotional fallout of constantly having to move, describing the sense of helplessness and stress his family faced, with no control over the most significant aspect of their lives. Living in a state of housing instability overlaps with homelessness.
A home is important because it offers sanctuary and privacy and helps improve mental health and emotional resilience, and can help break people out of cycles of poverty. In the past 30 years, we have seen homeownership dwindle as council housing stocks deplete and more of us are caught in insecure tenancies and it is not just in London, there is not a single major city in the world today not suffering from the affordable housing crisis.
Hashi Mohamed examines the myriad aspects of housing -from Right-to-Buy to Grenfell, slums, and evictions to the Bank of the Mum and Dad. A Home of One’s Own is a personal study of the crisis confronting global metropoles – and an exploration of the ways we can remove barriers, improve equality and create cities where more people have a place to call their own.
A Home of One’s Own by Hashi Mohamed, Profile Books £5.99