DECEMBER 2, 2025
Mike Phipps reviews Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, by Peter Apps, published by One World and Eviction: A Social History of Rent, by Jessica Field, published by Verso.
Two more books on the housing crisis! The first one is by Peter Apps, who previously wrote an award-winning exposé of the Grenfell scandal. It focuses on the human impact of the housing crisis in London. As he puts it, “We have deliberately changed the primary purpose of houses from providing a home for a family to providing an income-generating asset for an investor.” On the street where he grew up, houses once available to low-income families are now attainable only to the top 5% of earners.
In 1981, over a third of Londoners lived in social housing, more than double the number who rented privately. The social housing sector embraced 872,926 households – compared to 178,000 in New York, for example. Nor had they been exiled to the capital’s outskirts, as in Paris.
But as elsewhere in the UK, Thatcher’s Right to Buy programme and grant cutbacks reduced the housing stock and changed the social make-up of council tenants, increasingly drawn from the socially marginalised. Over the next decade, private landlords, once almost an endangered species, were revived with the help of easier evictions and other anti-tenant measures.
By the mid-1990s, home prices began rising rapidly, fuelled by the search by global investment funds for ‘safe assets’. Houses were increasingly bought on a buy-to-let basis by wealthier landlords. Over the next decade, the house-price-to-income ratio would soar, just as the New Labour government created a new rent formula which increased social rents above the rate of inflation.
Under Blair, councils were also required to work with the private sector to access the investment they needed for social housing. Many transferred their housing stock to housing associations, whose lack of democratic accountability would become a major problem when the service level they offered declined.
Councils unwilling to take this route were left with no money for major repairs. Redevelopment of crumbling estates necessitated private developers, who had little interest in providing affordable homes. The result was gentrification and the displacement of long-standing local communities.
When the Tories returned to power in 2010, a harsh programme of austerity combined with a massive speculative boom in London’s property market created a perfect storm. The boom could have been harnessed by those in power to demand truly affordable housing in the new developments, but in fact they made the developers’ work easier. In the 700-home development at London’s Mount Pleasant, for example, personally signed off by Mayor Boris Johnson, the developers refused to include anything higher than 10% of affordable housing, despite local planning targets seeking 50%. “A revolving door began to spin between council planning departments, developers and the consultancies which worked to broker relations between the two,” notes Apps.
The unregulated private sector market allowed quality to nosedive. Council environmental officers discovered shocking ‘accommodation’ in their localities – in one case, six ‘tenants’ paying rent to sleep in old commercial meat freezers, with no natural light or ventilation. As rents spiralled, the government cut benefits and introduced other punitive measures.
Today, London’s social housing provision is in a parlous state. Despite some well-managed estates, much is high-priced, in disrepair, and overcrowded in 15% of cases. Waiting times on average are 55 years in the Borough of Greenwich, 38 in Newham.
The private rented sector is even worse. The individual stories that the author scatters throughout the text underline its inhumanity. In Catford, a pensioner who was forced to leave her accommodation after a steep rent hike, appealed to Lewisham Council for help. They offered her a private tenancy in County Durham, warning that if she refused it they would help no further. In Harrow, doctors had to provide inhalers for a number of children living in a privately rented block due to respiratory problems caused by damp and mould.
Homelessness has skyrocketed. By 2024, there were over 65,000 households in temporary accommodation, an 80% increase since 2011. Some get housed late in the day for a single night and return to wait in council offices the next day for their next ‘home’, a routine that can go for days. Children in temporary accommodation are three times more likely to die in childhood, compared to the general population.
The result is an exodus from the capital – especially of the young. London’s population grew by 625,000 in the ten years from 2011, but the 2021 census showed 62, 412 fewer children, a figure that also reflects a 25% drop in London’s birth rate, a far faster fall than the national rate. The future looks bleak, as ageing renters will see their pension eaten up by rent and face poverty in their last years.
Apps offers some radical solutions, including the nationalisation of private lets, which comfortably passed in a city-wide referendum in Berlin in2021; local authorities having the power to requisition land at sub-market rates and public land for free; and incentives for reuse and repair rather than grandiose redevelopments.
Little of this will happen without community organising. The London Renters Union and similar groups will need to grow and step up their campaigning if things are to change.
Let’s hope so. Apps’ book comes with a warning: the level of precarity and displacement wrought by the housing crisis undermines people’s fundamental sense of identity and belonging and fuels far right narratives. Others pose the problem even more starkly: “The housing crisis is not merely about roofs and rent – it’s about the future of democracy itself,” writes Bartosz Rydlinski, referring to a Europe-wide plight where one in five Europeans aged 30 to 34 still lives with their parents. “A generation locked out of stable housing is a generation with diminished stake in the democratic order.”
Meanwhile in Leeds…
Jessica Field’s book also focuses on the plight of renters, but it comes from a very personal place. For five years between 2017 and 2022, the author’s mother Hazell was a leading figure in her community’s campaign to prevent their mass eviction, after her family and 69 other tenant households learned that their landlord, corporate investment company Pemberstone, was seeking to demolish their entire tenanted estate in south Leeds and build up to 72 new executive-style houses for sale.
The background was the usual story: scant investment in the estate, growing disrepair and decline and then the offer of a shiny new private sector development, with minimal social housing. To win its case, Permberstone resorted to moralising – they were apparently not prepared to allow their tenants to continue renting properties that were becoming unsafe.
There is a long record of moralising landlords, evicting tenants for their own good. Field takes us through the history of slum landlordism, but also of renters’ resistance, as in the massive rent strike in Glasgow in 1915, as well as smaller battles in her own area of Leeds.
Her own estate was owned by the National Coard Board, which nationally once held 140,000 properties. As the mining industry waned, so did the NCB’s commitment to home maintenance. Managed decline became the norm. Then, in 1976, even before Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation bonanza, the Board decided it would ‘get out of housing’ and rushed to sell its remaining stock. Houses too dilapidated to sell were simply boarded up. As neglect intensified, the NCB sold off entire estates for a pittance. Under private landlords, repairs and maintenance stopped entirely, yet rents rose. Eventually, evictions paved the way for developers, attracted by the vast profits that could be extracted and facilitated by the national context of rising rents and less secure tenancies.
The prospect of eviction and being pitched into the expensive, competitive private renting market – Leeds City Council has lost 35,000 council houses in the past thirty years due to Right to Buy – galvanised a fightback on Hazell’s estate. The campaign generated widespread local support and national media attention and succeeded in getting the landlord’s plans unanimously rejected by the council planning panel. But Pemberstone appealed and the campaign found it difficult to mobilise as effectively as before, with the onset of the Covid pandemic.
The Government planning inspector agreed with the landlord’s seeming concern for the fate of their tenants. “In short: Pemberstone’s neglect of the houses gave Pemberstone the right to evict,” the author notes drily. An entire neighbourhood community was destroyed along with its vital social networks.
It’s unsurprising that the tenants’ campaign did not win: in recent years, just a handful of such campaigns have caused enough of a stir to prevent the worst excesses of mass eviction. Yet the protests – often women-led – are growing in size and number and have helped make housing the central political issue it needs to be.
Labour rightly made renters’ rights a priority on gaining office, yet its housing reforms will do little to alleviate the dire position facing renters, the author argues. While ending Section 21 no-fault evictions is positive, increasing landlord notice periods from two to four months is still well below the requirement of other European countries. Nor do these piecemeal reforms tackle the huge issue of affordability.
“The whole system needs an overhaul,” concludes Field. “The structure of the housing market, where skyrocketing profits are made through land-banking and sales, means that private builders can’t be neutral constructors of affordable rented houses.”
And, Labour take note: “The solution to this 150-year-plus eviction crisis isn’t for the state to enable the building of more houses… The future landlords in this simplistic build-more terrain will continue to be investors.”
Field’s father was 65 and her mother 57 when they were evicted. Small wonder that for her the essence of any new approach must be housing security – people feeling secure in family and neighbourhood communities. Government policy is a long way from that.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Main image: Image: Parkhill Avenue.https://www.geograph.org.uk/reuse.php?id=2831383 Creator: Picasa; © Copyright Thomas Nugent Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed
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