The housing charity, Crisis, estimates there will be 300,000 homeless people in the UK every night this year. Millions more are struggling to keep up with the rising cost of housing whether that's rents, mortgages or energy bills.
At the same time our planet is being made uninhabitable by an escalating climate crisis. The UN reports that 21.5 million people are now being forced to leave their homes every year because of floods, wildfires and extreme temperatures.
The housing developers who are demolishing our social housing and building unaffordable luxury flats; the energy companies pushing up the cost of powering our homes; the builders putting dangerous materials on flats like Grenfell; these are the same companies generating the carbon emissions that are pushing us towards ecological and societal collapse.
One of our key demands is ‘Refurbish Don’t Demolish’
Across the UK, but particularly in inner cities where land is at premium prices, social housing estates are being demolished as part of regeneration schemes to replace them with unaffordable, and predominantly private, housing.
Estate demolition leads to social cleansing of working class communities and loss of affordable homes. It also involves the wasteful destruction of the ‘embodied carbon’ in existing buildings and huge amounts of further carbon emissions for new buildings. (New construction accounts for 10% of UK GHG emissions.)
We are campaigning for the protection and upgrading of social housing to high environmental standards as part of a democratic and just transition to a post- fossil fuel economy.
Politicians often want us to focus on the environmental standards of new housing but we know that 80% of the properties that will be in use in 2050 are already built, so the priority for reducing emissions from the built environment (which accounts for 40% of all our emissions!) should really be about retrofitting the homes we have now.
We need to expose the greenwash behind net-zero claims about regeneration schemes - these claims often do not include the carbon cost of the materials in the new buildings, only the projected savings in emissions in using the buildings over the next 50 years, which could often also be achieved by retrofitting existing buildings.
Crucially, new houses that become investment properties for holiday lets or second homes simply add to our overall energy usage without addressing the shortage of affordable homes. So the tenure of housing, as well as building standards, are key to cutting carbon.
When they are not denying the real environmental impact of construction, politicians often justify development schemes on the grounds that this is the only way to get more homes to deal with the housing shortage. We need to counter these false claims. The truth is that new housing developments do not have any effect on homelessness or the cost of housing unless they are genuinely affordable, i.e. council housing!
There’s a massive shortage of affordable housing in almost every area of the country so there are opportunities everywhere to build alliances between climate and housing campaigners and take action -
Key targets for protest could be:
Property Developers - Companies like Lendlease, Barratts, or Delancey who demolish and build the new developments, either on their own or in partnership with councils and housing associations.
Real Estate agents - particularly national companies like Savills who lobby the government on pro-developer housing policy and work as consultants to a number of councils and housing associations on regeneration projects in order to open up prime public land to private developers.
Architects - who profit from major contracts on new build projects and promote demolition rather than refurbishment.
Housing Associations - Big HAs such as Peabody or Notting Hill Genesis who are operating more and more like big developers demolishing their existing stock and building for private sale and renting at market rates while enjoying tax-free charitable status.
Political Decision makers - councils who initiate destructive regeneration schemes or grant planning permission for them. The London Mayor who approves planning permission and promotes demolition through grant funding and development incentives.
In addition to the demands against demolition and against environmentally unsustainable new developments, we could highlight additional themes for specific local targets including:
Empty Homes - Regeneration schemes often involve leaving hundreds of properties empty for years, but more widely there are hundreds of thousands of empty homes (and second homes and holiday lets) which could be used to address the shortage of affordable housing in a more environmentally sustainable way than building new glass, steel and concrete towers.
Lack of democracy in planning decisions and the corruption of the political process by political donations (developers are some of the highest donors to Tory party) and the revolving door of councillors working with developers when in office and working for the same developers when they leave office. This links to the demand for Citizen Assemblies to decide planning issues democratically.
Social Cleansing where demolition of social housing, or cheap housing being bought up as holiday homes, leads to working class and ethnic minority communities being broken up and priced out.
Fuel Poverty - refurbishment and insulation of existing properties is a life and death issue for elderly and disabled people hit by the rocketing cost of energy.
Fire Safety and building standards - Grenfell exposed the lack of integrity of private developers who put profit ahead of safety or any other consideration including environmental standards. A lot of new developments are very low quality and poor performing in energy use because the developers rely on carbon offset payments to meet net-zero targets instead of genuinely innovative building techniques or clean energy. They are still putting in gas boilers!
Flooding and other climate risks - Some developers are building on flood plains or with huge glass facades without regard to the increasing risks of floods or heatwaves because they have no responsibility for the buildings after they are built and sold.
Outreach action - identify a key housing and environmental issue in your area such as too many holiday homes pushing up prices or a new luxury development destroying green space that is not affordable for local people. Use the HR template to create your own local leaflet, set up a stall and build up support for a campaign!
Raise awareness - Create an exhibition about your local housing issues in a public venue or even outdoors in a town centre (inspired by the recent exhibition in Aylesbury estate https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/aylesbury-estate-exhibition-demolition-southwark-council-regeneration/)
Protest - Identify a local target for protest, build local alliances and promote your protest as part of the national day of action
NVDA - There are many possibilities for direct action depending on the issue you are highlighting -
- Survey action (Dress as building surveyors with hard hats and hi-vis, bring your housing & climate emergency survey clipboards, and go into the offices of your target company and get some answers! )
- Protest occupation (occupy an empty property which could be used to house people in need such as the occupation recently in Wyndford estate in Glasgow https://novaramedia.com/2023/01/20/iconic-glasgow-council-flats-occupied-in-protest-against-demolition/)
- Block the bulldozers (set up a picket line on the entrance to a building site, set up camp in a tree, or use any other tactics to try to physically stop a destructive development)
Every action by Housing Rebellion must have housing justice AND climate justice at the forefront of our demands. We don’t accept that we need to sacrifice our environment for the sake of building housing. But neither do we accept that anyone should be left homeless or struggling with high rents, overcrowding, or poor quality homes. Overdevelopment is not the solution to the housing shortage - there would be enough housing for everyone if new housing was built sustainably and if existing housing was retrofitted and shared fairly!
C02 absorbed by 1 mature tree in 1 year = 32 bricks
1 brick = 690g C02e http://www.emccement.com/pdf/Full-BSRIA-ICE-guide.pdf
1 mature tree = 22kg C02 /yr https://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/forests-health-and-climate-change/key-facts
The People’s Housing Charter - https://www.radicalhousingnetwork.uk/home/sign-the-peoples-housing-charter
Information on retrofitting -
https://www.architectscan.org/
Information on empty homes -
https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/
Examples of estate campaigns against demolition -