Ah, yes...Friends!

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How is this a problem?

New research has shown that high rents and living costs are forcing London tenants to live in shared homes. The average number of people living in a property in the capital has gone up from 1.5 to 2 in just two years, according to data compiled by HomeLet for its October rental index.

Didn't they watch Friends?

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So we don't need to build more houses, do we?

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Rents in London and the South East are climbing through the roof. Market rents in the City are already beyond the means of most working people and continue to climb:

The cost of renting a property in London has reached a record high, despite the continuing economic slowdown.

 According to research from tenant referencing service HomeLet, the average rental price in the capital went over the £1,200 barrier for the first time ever.

In August, tenants paid an average of £1,202 compared with £1,154 the previous month.

The figures show a 12.2 per cent month-on-month rise in rental prices, while average tenant salary in Greater London rose by just 2.4 per cent.

The South East needs more houses yet the sclerotic planning system, the stolid banks and the idiot government (local and national) conspire to make it ever harder an ever more expensive to develop and ever more difficult to rent.

At the same time rents in the social housing sector (council houses and housing association lets) average about £330 - little more that 25% of the market rent. The scale of subsidy this represents is astonishing and demonstrates the difficulties with getting an effective rental market in a city where over half the properties for rent are in the social sector and in receipt of a massive subsidy determined by the property rather than by the earnings of the person(s) living in the property.

These figures - and a similar picture will be played out across the south east and in cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham - represent a huge challenge. If we fail to realise that subsidy isn't the most efficient way to manage a housing market where a great deal of the tenure is rental, we will find ourselves with an escalating problem of homelessness, default and housing debt from unaffordable rents rather than unaffordable mortgage risk.

And yes we do need to make it a lot easier for developers to build houses - this needs a sensible discussion about how to protect the 'green belt' rather than the "build the houses in the grotty industrial bits where the poor people live" approach pioneered by the CPRE.

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The sadness of Silvertown

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The journey on the Docklands Light Railway from Bank out past Canary Wharf to West Silvertown and Pontoon Dock gives an insight into the continuing challenge of regeneration. The contrast between the shiny skyscrapers and posh apartments that cluster round the DLR and the old communities are stark. And nowhere shows it more starkly than Victoria Dock, London City Airport and their environs.

Silvertown and North Woolwich are run down, deprived, depressing places – poor quality, badly maintained housing, an almost complete absence of real local facilities and a sense that no-one is doing anything to really change these places. Instead – as if in some science fiction novel – a gleaming bright (well concrete) new trainline slices through. And it’s user look down into the depressing streets beyond – streets full of people who have no use for the new railway since they have little or no money to spend and don’t have jobs in the shiny skyscrapers.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this depressing scene is an argument for not building the DLR, for leaving the docks as a sorry memory of a different age or for building only social housing. In their way these developments – along with the airport and the exhibition centre – are helping to transform the area. But we have missed out on the opportunity to make the strong connections with what is already there – the new roads, rail and apartments are built with their backs to the existing communities.

Those old communities now have no decent shops, no pubs and only the institutions of poverty – SureStart, a “learning centre” and a church-based community building – remain. Institutions that may do good but cannot make a place in the way that shops, pubs, eateries and markets might do. And the dwellers in the posh flats? Their time out is either behind the barriers of their gated world or elsewhere – whisked to a brighter place by the shiny new railway.

Policy-makers, planners, architects and developers have failed these places - reinforcing division and creating new barriers. Above all this is the disaster of our technocracy – which specialists, experts and governments dictating to local people. The new meritocratic Labour Party has failed the new East London just as comprehensively as the patriarchal Labour Party failed the old East London.

In stead of fencing in the poor we should be giving them access to these better places. We should be teaching and training their children better, letting them control their own institutions and promoting real local ownership and control. Above all we should worry less about security and more about community.

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