It was rent day, yesterday or the day before. I can’t really remember anymore because every day feels like rent day if you are like me and millions of others who pay more than 50% of their income to keep a roof over their heads.
You do not need to be an economist or a historian to know that our era is an epoch of enormous class inequality. We haven’t seen this imbalance between the rich and ordinary workers since the 1930s.
Affordable housing is in scarce supply in the world's richest nations. From the USA to the UK, and Canada in between, it's impossible to find a place to call home that doesn't leave you penniless to rent it. It is not bad planning or natural disasters causing this; it is outright greed from the 1%.
You can't feel safe or secure as a tenant because landlords know tenants are a cash crop whose value increases by changing the leaseholder rather than retaining long-term lets. On average, 30% of the adult population are renters. But they are never treated as a voting block by political parties because renters are wannabe homeowners.
As a renter, you have no political clout because corporate landlords have deep pockets for lobbying; whilst you as a renter have six eggs in your fridge and an open tin of tomato sauce. Besides, most politicians have done very well personally off the housing crisis and are in the landlord game.
I will not be surprised to see a return of variants of the 1930s doss houses, flop houses and the rooming houses as a political solution in capitalist society to the 21st-century housing crisis.
Every day, I wake up with the same dread that if the economy does not pick up or my health grows worse; I will end up dying in a doss house just like my granddad did in 1943.
Governments need to build social and rent geared to income housing with the speed they use to manufacture lethal weapons to send to Ukraine to fight their war against Putin. But that’s not going to happen. Governments are no longer in the business of building infrastructure. They are in the business of selling infrastructure or partnering with private enterprises as Tony Blair did with PFI to create new infrastructure that generates profit for private equity holders.
Waiting lists for affordable housing are soviet in their estimated timeline between applying and receiving housing the applicant can afford.
Ten years ago, I put my name down for rent geared to income housing in our region for my then 89-year-old father and me. Outside of a letter each year asking if I still required housing assistance, I heard nothing back from them. Six years into our application wait, my dad died, and still, I heard nothing from them.
I started to believe I would not hear anything from them until I was on my deathbed. But then, out of the blue, at the end of July, the housing office called me.
I was given a tentative, conditional housing offer; that had more catches and caveats than Faust’s bargain with the devil. And mine wasn't even given to me in writing. I wasn’t allowed to physically inspect the unit. The unit was situated in another city 30 minutes by car from where I live now. I was not told how much my rent would be, only that it would be "around" a certain amount. Occupation of the unit had to occur on a specific date, three weeks from their contact with me.
The housing office emailed me a video link to a five-year-old 30-second clip of the unit's interior. After watching it, I thought they could have edited the video down to 5 seconds considering the unit's dimensions were 280 square feet which is the size of a room at a Motel 6.
I don’t really need or desire much for what is left of my life. But what I don’t want; is to spend it in a living space that makes me envy a battery hen's existence. I still can not understand how a housing office would expect someone who is skint to give notice on their current lease, downsize their possessions of fifty-eight years because their new apartment is the size of a motel room, as well as hire and pay a mover in the span of twenty-one days. The entire request was more suitable to be a pitch for a new tv reality show than how a citizen should be treated by their local housing authority.
The offer my housing office gave was doomed to be declined because it was unworkable in the time span given to me. I don't think the offer was cynically made to me. It was just an offer made, from an overworked underfunded department that no longer comprehended that its purpose was about humane housing, and not turning affordable housing applicants into numbers for their XL spreadsheet reports which don't tell the real story.
In the end, I didn’t move. I just couldn’t because of the time factor or the fact, that they never sent me a written acknowledgement of tenancy, an agreed rent amount, a lease, or a code of conduct agreement. It just seemed to me that there was no upside to this, even if my rent proved to be cheaper in the long run.
I don't think democracy will survive the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, or the climate crisis when our governments are so dysfunctional they serve the needs of the 1% more than any other class. But who knows? One thing I am certain of; I will be at least sixty-eight before I get another offer for subsidised housing in this region. My local housing office stipulates if you refuse a housing offer- you start from scratch and apply afresh. When I told a friend about my recent encounter with subsidised housing, she remarked,
“You just don’t fit, and the system hates things that don’t fit.”
The problem is nobody fits anymore- except the well-to-do.
Klause Schwab “ you will have nothing and be happy. They are imprisoning us in debt and will kill us. All these crisis are manufactured. To transfer public wealth to the rich empires. In a word. We are battery hens going to the slaughter learn about WEF world economic forum. They are controlling our governments. Work or die look up the social credit system. Tech will control us remotely. That’s why they want a cashless automated society. Its worse than you think 8 billion of us are being culled. Its global
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