We need to be brave and radical on housing
COLUMNIST
TRANSFORMING disused shipping containers into housing seems exactly the sort of innovation that’s needed to help solve the crisis in the system.
In Cardiff, old shipping containers will be used to build eight energyefficient family homes in the Ely area of the city.
The plan is to use them as a stopping point for families facing homelessness before longer term housing is found.
“The shipping container project is a quick and cost-effective solution to providing homes for those in need in the city,” says cabinet member Lynda Thorne.
“They also give us the flexibility to respond to changing demand as the homes can be relocated and reused.”
In the modern housing sector of haves and have-nots, immediate and cheap solutions are needed that won’t continue to drive families in need of a roof over their head into a peripatetic existence between bed and breakfasts.
Using shipping containers to help address the shortage of housing seems at the same time exciting and preposterous.
Exciting because at a time when there’s apparently no magic money tree to invest in support for people who need it, councils are finding original ways to make things work anyway.
Preposterous because, well, shipping containers for family homes?!
In London, the unfettered property development industry has manufactured a situation where 80% of property built is affordable to just 8% of the city’s population.
The Tower at St George Wharf, for example, is a 50-storey block of flats which have sold for between £580,000 to a staggering £51m.
As apartments get sold for millions, thousands more people are being pushed into homelessness every year.
The charity crisis estimates that by 2041, there’ll be more than 500,000 homeless people in the UK.
For most of us, homelessness is most tangibly represented by the sight of people in sleeping bags taking refuge in shop doorways in town and city centres.
That too is on the rise, the Welsh Government estimating rough sleeping in Wales going up by 30% between 2015 and 2016.
The causes are “complex”, writes Jennie Bibbings, Shelter Cymru’s campaigns manager on the charity’s website.
She goes on: “Austerity and benefits cuts have certainly been contributing factors, along with a severe lack of affordable housing.
“We have very little Housing First accommodation in Wales, which is often a better option for people with long-term mental health and substance misuse problems.”
Every day the evidence that the system simply isn’t working grows.
While thousands wait for the right to live in a place they call a home, a select band of others can afford to spend £51m on a single flat in London. Imagine what that sort of money could do to help fix the housing crisis in Wales.
From blinkered local development plans swallowing up green belt land in overcrowded spaces; to a chronic lack of affordability where it’s most needed – this is a broken system in desperate need of something more radical than just a few converted shipping containers, as brilliant as that idea might be.
We need more homes, new garden towns and cities, social housing developments that won’t turn into sink estates in 20 years time – and public transport links that are truly modern, integrated and affordable to use.
There’s plenty of room for all this and the technological solutions to help – the prefabricated housing which met the needs of communities so well for decades after the war can surely be resurrected in 21st century form?
Councils are being empowered and encouraged to build homes again – but so much more needs to happen, and a more strategic approach to planning needs in Wales ought to be taken at a national level.
We need governments to be brave and radical, interventionist and idealistic when it comes to housing – for too long an ignored issue in Britain’s dysfunctional economy.