Construction is not the cure for the housing crisis, no matter what election promises claim

As UK house prices continue to soar out of reach, swathes of flimsy and inexplicably expensive new-builds fail to bring any hope of accessibility to urban residents. The time has come to turn inward, to look at what we already have.

The housing crisis has left homeless people sleeping in the doorways of luxury apartments, while hundreds of thousands of homes lie empty. Vacant homes are reaching record numbers, while distribution of housing has never been more unequal. The community asset transfer, however, offers a solution, a liberation of these spaces. To rethink what it means to be a landlord, to own a property, and to share in a community, is to see the route to anarchist housing through this, a decentralised and communally organised system of living, far removed from the faceless letting agency and the corporate landlord.

Out of sight, out of mind

With the ebbing and flowing of the housing market, countless flats, houses, offices, warehouses, are held empty by developers and speculators biting their nails as they wait for prices to rise by another 1000th of a percent, before they sell. A community is rarely trusted with such decisions over its own housing stock – social issues arising from the market go ignored as long as profits and stock prices go up. Developers are even incentivised to build from scratch instead of repairing or refurbishing existing buildings, with tax cuts going exclusively to new-build homes.

Statistics for vacant homes are always an approximation. The census surveyor is not the most qualified to identify an empty property that could be used by a family in need; often that is the community itself, the locals. But research shows that capitalist distribution of housing has left 313,000 vacant homes in Britain, with almost 20,000 of these standing empty for over 10 years.

Studies by Habitat for Humanity GB show that 165,000 private commercial properties are left vacant, with another 7,000 owned by local Councils – the sheer scale of the abandoned buildings in Britain is enormous. Yet growth, demolition, and construction, dominate our housing policies. 30-50% of the carbon emissions of the entire lifetime of a building are already produced by the end of the construction stage, and our inefficient and highly centralised construction industry proves unable to meet the needs of climate adaptation.

New constructions are rarely public, accessible, spaces. It is much more common to see glass office buildings and private student accommodation instead. When issues around holiday and short-term lets are considered, the issues around community autonomy are made even more palpable. Temporary residents with no emotional investment in the area, no desire to support it, and second-homeowners (around 170,000 in England and Wales) holding a flat hostage out of the hands of desperate locals, exploit a space for their personal gain – the absence of any input from the community itself is evident.

Out of reach

The housing crisis is focused on redistribution, on limiting supply for the working class, and maximising ownership for the rich. Tunstall’s analysis of household composition finds that while overcrowding (more than one person per room) has fallen from 49% of the population in 1911 to 4% in 2011, inequality in access to space has risen dramatically. Over the same period, the most generously housed 10% of the population rose from an average of almost two rooms per person to five.  Conversely, the 10% of the population with the least space in 1911 “only achieved one room per person as late as 1991”, with no increase in space consumption recorded since. Living space is being built exclusively for a certain class, while the housing crisis is focused directly on the most vulnerable in society. The construction and housing allocation system is refusing to help those who need it most. It must be at a community level that we do this.

The market centralises ownership and funnels it towards exploitation, far away from communities themselves – taking the construction and demolition figures for 2023 together, that single year saw the net loss of 12,000 social homes. The state has neglected the housing needs of the poor for years. ‘Right to Buy’ handed over 40% of our social housing stock to private landlords, and proved the dangers of giving ownership to individuals pressured by short-term capitalist market demands. When ownership instead is taken by the community however, operating outside of market forces and in a more human perspective, the effects can be transformational.

The way out?

The community asset transfer is a powerful and underused tool that has the potential to radically alter the landscape of housing in Britain. The process is long, but in both temporary and permanent asset transfers, the concept of shifting ownership entirely to a group of residents, users, the community itself, in which the building plays its role, offers incredible potential for rectifying these inequalities. While currently, the power dynamic in transfer negotiations is weighted in favour of the state and the local Council, the opportunity still exists for tenants and homeowners to take full ownership of their own building. When the unit of organisation is shifted directly to the community, the potential for local needs to be met and local skills to be trained is radically increased.

A street has the capacity to come together to take over a vacant house, and while the pressures of maintenance and refurbishment are high, with time we can expect more systems in place to support these initiatives, to create meaningful work for locals and to bring homes into use that can be used for people who need them, not for whoever has a £1200 deposit.

Incredible work is being done in this field – Habitat for Humanity are working to bring abandoned commercial properties into use for care leavers, and Action on Empty Homes support communities taking over abandoned houses in their area, strong steps towards a rebalancing of access. But extrapolating into the future, we could see entire tower blocks coming together to manage their property, opening up empty apartments to people who need them.

In London, a housing estate of 760 homes is undergoing the process of community transfer, with the support of Architects for Social Housing, and much more prominence should be given to this option. There are issues to be resolved – the potential vulnerability of this model in the future to allow for exclusive, almost gated communities with prejudiced decisions of who they allow to enter, for example. Transfer of property is also transfer of responsibility and of risk – under capitalism, resource-poor and time-poor residents should not be forced to take on more burdens. But the more we see examples of housing co-operatives and community asset transfers, paying and working collectively for the care of a property, the brighter the future looks.

When service provision shifts from private and corporate landlords to a community, then people who know the area, the history of that neighbourhood, are trusted and respected with that knowledge. A community has the “first right of refusal” when community assets are put up for private sale – what if they had first right of purchase? While vacant properties are a logical choice to start with, the foundation of an anarchist housing is house by house, street by street, block by block, communities coming together to take care of their buildings and of their neighbours, a decentralised and humane form of housing.

~ Isaac Bell Holmström