More people without home

Living in a city, you might have noticed the increasing number ofhomeless people on the streets. Many of this country’s homeless however, are not the men and women you see sleeping rough, but families in B&Bs and other peoples houses. Last year the number of people officially classed as homeless  jumped by 14%. Repossesion and rising unemployment see an increasing number of people with no home to call their own.Some end up on the streets.  Others are lucky enough to get a roof over their heads- but only for a short amount of time.

In certain areas you’ll find empty, boarded-up houses scattered round the neighbourhoods, whilst the families that once lived there now sleep on friends’ sofas, are holed up in B&Bs or live in some other form of temporary accomodation. There is not enough demand for these houses because the people who would need them can’t afford them anymore. Currently, there is limited affordable housing and people are being turfed from their homes; so what happens when more and more people can’t even find temporary accomodation? Take America for example: the situation is so bad that “Hoovervilles” (the name for the tent towns and encampments made in public spaces inhabited by the homeless, first cropping up during the Great Depression) are appearing across the country. If nothing is done to stem this rise in homelessness, could we see a similar development in the UK?

Of the homeless families, there are 4 million children living in poverty after housing costs have been paid, 1 million in overcrowded spaces and 90,000 in temporary accomodation. Not only do they no longer have anywhere of their own to spend their childhood years, they also become affected by physical and mental health problems. It has been proven that homeless children suffer from insecurity, asthma, poor education and many other problems. All this happens despite the government’s pledge in 1999 to end child poverty by 2020. Instead of ending child poverty, the current housing benefit cuts could push more children into poverty.

The inherent greed in the current system is being increasingly laid bare for all to see. The government has placed importance on profits over people. With less homeless people than there are empty houses (720,000 homes in November 2011) we should question why the empty houses can’t simply be given to those without a home? The answer is that the capitalists would rather see people on the streets than give a house away for free. Not only are there thousands of empty homes, but there are plenty of acres available for building homes on the large estates and second homes of the capitalists. Again, the capitalists would rather see people on the streets than give up their excess land and their second homes. Perhaps we should start taking some advice from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Resolution of the Communards”:

Considering that here houses are standing,
While you leave us without a place to stay,
We decided to install us now there,
Because in our holes, it doesn't suit us any more.