The scandal of empty homes when others are homeless

Why should building companies be taken into public control, should all food shops be taken into public control because some for different reasons cannot afford to buy food, why should churches be closed to those who wish to worship, get married, baptised, have a funeral service ?

I definitely didn't mention churches!

The food situation is a slightly different thing. Food banks are also a national disgrace in a wealthy country.

Huge multinationals are buying up land - and some of it for their kind of intensive farming. They are pushing small farmers out of business, because that's what multinationals have to do. The food they cultivate is grown with pesticides, antibiotics (for meat) and artificial fertilisers - thus contaminating the land.

There is some evidence that these products are also less nutritious.

And for the multinationals their shareholders are their priority not consumers or the environment. So, yes, they most likely do need to be nationalised too.

But there is no need to impact on the corner shops (already closing through competition from the superstores). They need support not threats!

A property we purchased had been empty for many years and the week we purchased it a letter from the council arrived at the property saying it was to be subject to compulsory purchase so councils do have the power to do so. Before our purchase the property had its letter box boarded up so we do not know whether other correspondence had been sent. In our case a simple phone call stopped the process but the powers do exist and are used in some circumstances. This was a house on an ordinary residential street.

I don't think many know the full extent of this problem.
I worked with a (very well off!) Thai man who moved round various luxury properties belonging to friends in Central London for years. He had houses & apartments of his own he rented out but all the places he stayed in were permanently empty having been bought as investments. I saw photos of these places & they were amazing. He paid no rent. I estimate in the years we worked together he went through at least 40 different properties
. He saw nothing wrong with this as it was an easy way of making money for his friends.
I thought after Grenfell that if they just took over some of the empty properties in London all those poor people could have been housed immediately. It can't be that hard to pass a bill to stop properties sitting empty just waiting for inflation to make it profitable for these very rich foreign buyers to make even more money. It's a disgrace.

craftycat
Would your suggestion mean that homeless people are accommodated in amazing luxury properties beyond the means and dreams of us who pay our way?

I believe that the homeless were given the same chances as us all and i think they wasted time. They didn't use those chances.

Lots of people were given an appalling start in life but didn't consider going further downhill as an adult.

We all make a success or a failure of our lives and when misfortune calls we soldier on.

The homeless people who came to be on the strrets because of mental health problems have fallen through the net. Their problems are deeper than lacking a roof over their head and they should be offered help.

It seems to be acceptable on this site to suggest foreign nationals should be prevented from buying property. I know if I went to live abroad permanently I would prefer to buy otherwise I wouldn't be able to make the place feel like my own but the issue of foreign nationals renting privately or living in council properties in this country seems to have been skipped over.

My own council is now saying ( rightly so ) that you have to have a ten year connection to the area to get on the council house waiting list, more stringent rules are in place if the area is very rural. The problem in this country is not that there is not enough housing, it is that they are too many people.

Urban renewal has had much success in the US. Old neighborhoods fit for demolition or otherwise deteriorated are instead 'refurbished'. Would be buyers are screened by the municipality or selected by lottery. Homes are sold for a nominal fee and then fixed up and maintained by the new homeowner. It's a win-win for everyone involved.

Well the "too many people" aren't going to go away.
So, yes, the problem is housing us all.

When people complain about big business, builders or whatever they don't realise they are probably shareholders of such companies. If you have a savings account, insurance or whatever, you almost certainly are gaining from shares in large companies.

50 years ago we were told we had no chance of being offered social housing. We had to have been on the list for many years and have 3 children before we would have enough 'points' to qualify. I worked with someone who was divorced and in SH because her divorce had been a 'problem'. Despite now having a good job there was no way she was going to give up her home because it was so cheap.

Someone upthread said a 1 bedroom flat in London was over £300,000 but I saw a 2 bedroom one online yesterday for £215,000. I think it depends on where you choose to live. I don't think it was a bad area just south of the river.

Anniebach Did I mention closing churches? No of course not. I said why couldn't parts of churches be made available to the homeless. If that idea is not feasible then how about setting up camp beds in churches at night. If every church in every village and town helped there would be no need for anyone to sleep in the open during the winter months. To suggest that weddings and baptisms are more important than people is ridiculous. As for funerals – don’t we need to look after the living before the dead?

GrannyPauline - well said! But there doesn’t seem to be the political will to make anything like this happen. It’s all tinkering round the edges. I despair.

Bobdoesit, do you know what it costs to heat a church ?

Funeral services mean much to the bereaved who are ‘the living ‘, Christians for whom baptisms are important are ‘the living’ .

Putting up camp beds at night ? Ever heard of squatters rights?

Regarding shareholders - it is possible that we own shares indirectly through pensions, savings etc. I don't think we have much control over that. But as private people we are not majorly involved.

I haven't been able to find stats for the building or food sectors individually, but the Office for National Statistics states that the major investors in the UK businesses are foreign. Around 55% are Americans - not of course ordinary Americans.

Individuals in the UK own around 12% of shares. So....who are we afraid of upsetting through nationalising major businesses and producing the things we need in an efficient way without harming the environment? Of course we would compensate those who needed support but the rest can go hang (not literally of course!)

Anniebach, I am well aware of the cost of heating churches as are most sensible people. I also understand how much a funeral services means to those of us left behind when a beloved member of our family or a friend dies.

None of that, however, helps the plight of the men and women sleeping outside. It’s not an ideal solution and may not be a solution at all, but we can no longer go around closing our eyes to the plight of so many people.

I for one am ashamed to walk through our towns and cities and witness the sight of someone's son, daughter, mother or father ‘living’ on the street.

Churches are there for everyone - not just those of us privileged enough to be baptised, married or buried in one.

Correction - around 54% of shareholders in UK businesses are foreign. Just under half is owned by Americans, making them the majority foreign holders..

Bobdoesit, it isn’t a solution. Why not make every who parks their car in a garage give up their garage, everyone with a conservatory take in people to sleep for the night? How many have spare bedrooms, let the homeless sleep there ?

So easy to say give over Churches,

And being baptised , marrying, in church is not a privilege, available to all

While I think your idea about churches is a good one, Bobdoesit, the churches that are unused for most of the time are usually in rural areas, where there are less homeless people than in towns and cities.

Nobody is suggesting than houses should not be built for profit, but building houses and not letting anybody live in them seems rather morally reprehensible.

Grannypauline, I am afraid you sound more left wing than Corbyn. I do not agree everything should be taken back into public control. We live in a democracy where private ownership flourishes.

Churches in Portsmouth opened their doors to rough sleepers in January and February this year. Different churches were open on different days of the week.

"The idea is that each church opens its doors on a different day of the week. So volunteers from one church would feed and host homeless people overnight on a Monday, another church would open on a Tuesday and so on."

So it looks like some churches are willing to show some Christian compassion.

quiz queen, I and others were making an observation about foreign nationals who buy property in the UK for speculative purposes only and have no intention of living in that home. I don't think anyone has suggested that settled migrants should be precluded from buying property, that wasn't the implication.

All this need for rented accommodation and government making it harder for private landlords to trade. If all private landlords sold up tomorrow LA could not find enough B&B to accommodate families. If these houses came back on market homeless could not afford deposit.

Anniebach, once again I didn’t suggest ‘giving over’ churches. I suggested sharing them. Is that really so hard? Do we 'the haves' continue to ignore the have-nots? Much like grannypauline , I despair.

It's not just the state of empty homes when so many are homeless that annoys, angers, and upsets me but the amount of time council tower blocks of flats are left empty and standing prior to demolition when they should be occupied that really angers me and their eventual destruction of course, when so many people need to be housed. In my immediate area four tower blocks have been demolished over the past ten years, with a fifth still standing after years of being emptied, ready to go, but at the end of the estate there's a huge amount of very unkempt overgrown land empty of any property except for an electric grid. Strangely there's some sort of paving and tarmac road structure in the ground, so it appears that the council wanted to build on the land but there's nothing there except for trees rubbish, and bushes and weeds it's a complete mess and waste of the land. The land at the end of my road either side where two of the tower blocks used to stand is now waste ground, grassed over, same goes for the land at the end of the adjacent road where the other tower block used to be. So imagine five prominent tower blocks each up to 19 stories, four flats on each, that's an awful lot of housing demolished and so it's very hard to house people and find council accommodation if you want to move. There's also talk of many more tower blocks being demolished too.

Ilovecheese, I agree with you re more homeless people being in towns and cities. I live in a rural community where there are at most four homeless people, but it doesn’t make it any the less awful. One young man spends all his time sitting or sleeping in the doorway of a shop that closed down years ago. It’s still habitable, but he is sitting outside. In our village, we have a post office, two pubs, a village hall and a church the homeless are not welcome in any of them.