Let's build some prefabs and call them "Homes for Heroes" (Boondogglers gonna boondoggle)

Hey, let's build some prefabs

Nothing like a good boondoggle is there!? And right now the best way to get your boondoggle off the ground is to play the "Essential Workers are Heroes" card:

An alliance of housing associations, offsite manufacturing firms and many others across the property sector has launched a call to the private, public and charitable sectors to join together to build low cost Homes for Heroes, to thank our heroic essential workers who’ve kept Britain going during the coronavirus outbreak.

The proposal, from G15 (part of a group of housing associations and construction businesses who plan on solving the housing crisis without changing planning policy), is to build 100,000 prefabricated homes for the "NHS staff...care workers, teachers, refuse collectors, delivery workers and many more" who have helped us through the pandemic. Splendid stuff.

So what's wrong here? Well the first thing is (as wise readers will have spotted), those "essential workers" (we'll use the official boondoggle term from now on - "heroes") are already living somewhere and are in work. These, for all their heroism, are not society's destitute.

So what's going on here? What is this coalition of housing landlords, construction companies and consultants trying to achieve? For sure we need more houses - homes for all sort sof people not just heroes. Since 1997 we've had a planning and housing policy run by NIMBYs with the result that, particularly in London, the sort of professional and managerial folk who 30 years ago stood a fighting chance of buying a house can't do so any more. And let's be clear, this isn't a result of the market failing but entirely down to the stupidity of government.

Between 1997 and 2010 the area of England covered in 'green belt' doubled and, even worse, new national parks, world heritage protections, environmental protections and wildlife desigantions arrived. Couple this with cheap money and governments prepared to pander to relatively wealthy potential buyers and you get the situation where most graduate, professional, hard-working folk look at the housing market and retreat in despair to paying an inflated rent to a private landlord.

Into this space gallop our "Homes for Heroes" champions - "we'll stick lots of prefabs on land owned by local councils and rent them to you cheaper". And that's great until you realise that all this is only possible because the taxpayer is coughing up the subsidy tht allows for cheap social rents. Those heroes get to live in "good quality affordable homes which are well designed, energy efficient and digitally connected". Even better the homes will be "equipped with private outside areas and access to high quality green spaces". Elysium-on-Thames (except for the fact that this all reads like the sales blurb from a park homes company).

This is a boondoggle, a proposal designed by businesses that make money from rents or building homes with the express purpose of securing government grant to secure those rents and that building business. And, to achieve this, the group making the pitch has made a specific appeal to public sympathy for "heroes", those essential workers who've helped us through the coronavirus pandemic. Forgive me for finding this exploitative and unjustified.

If these organisations really want to do something about getting more and better housing, maybe they should ask how we got here in the first place. How the indulgance of suburban NIMBYs by politicians has resulted in one of the world's tightest urban containment tourniquets, the London Green Belt. We hear nothing from these supposed housing campaigners about making it easier for anyone - not just big housing companies with fat government grants - to build houses. I guess we shouldn't be surprised - that would kill the "suck up to government" business model after all.

So forgive me if I don't cheer for these "Homes for Heroes". It's a boondoggle, a bald attempt to exploit the current crisis to extract grant from government made by organisations with an interest in either building or managing the resultant housing.

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