We Are Fucking Angry

Kill the Housing Bill

CODED GEOMETRY - We Are Fucking Angry

London is experiencing a major wave of class clearances brought about through the invisible logic of neo-liberal economics and the Tory governments attacks on the inner city working class through the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, the ban on residential squatting and now the Housing Bill.

Working class people are being forced out of their homes and areas to make way for the rich. The Housing Bill is an unprecedented attack on working class people with the ultimate aim of social cleansing London’s inner zone, creating a sanitized ‘safe space’ for the incumbent wealthy through the demolition of working class housing and their replacement with luxury flats constructed not for living but for the temporary storage of surplus value.

The Housing Bill is designed to destroy social housing, speed up the clearance of working class private renters by making it easier for landlords to evict their tenants, and force out travellers by removing the requirement for local authorities to assess their specific housing provision.

The Housing Bill proposes to:

  • Designate all existing housing estates as ‘Brown Field’ sites (a term used for formerly industrial land that needs to be cleaned up before it can be redeveloped) and put up for sale, redevelopment or demolition.
  • Sell off ‘high value’ council homes directly on the private market.
  • Introduce a ‘pay to stay’ tax by raising the rents of council properties to market levels for social tenants with a combined income of £30,000 (£40,000 in London). Effectively forcing them out of many inner-city areas.
  • End lifetime Secure Tenancies and replace them with tenancies as short as 2 years.
  • Introduce Means Testing for Council and housing association tenants, which will lead to many working people been evicted from social housing.
  • End the obligation to build council homes replacing it with an obligation to build ‘starter homes’ that only the rich can afford.
  • Make it easier for private landlords to evict renters, and do nothing to control rapidly rising private rents. One of the key tools of the class clearances.
  • Force cash-strapped councils to hand over millions of pounds to housing associations to allow them to sell their properties cheaply.
  • Remove the provision to assess the specific need of Gypsies and Travellers in accommodation assessments. This will lead to inequality of access to suitable accommodation for these minority groups.

Failure to stop the Housing Bill and the wider process of inner city class clearances will lead to an historic shift in the nature of our Cities. They will become  zoned spaces divided by class, with the rich residing in the cleansed inner zones and the working poor forced to the ghettoised periphery.

Only Working Class Direct Action can Stop the Class Clearances

Coded Geometry - Estate Agent

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