The following article, by Housing Options lead advisor Maurice Harker, is from Community Connecting Magazine (Issue 7).

The Whacky World of Housing

Are there any books on it ?

I would imagine that many of the readers of Community Connecting are unfamiliar with the whacky world of housing. As a student of housing I was quite surprised to find that as far as the public library was concerned there was no such subject. You can find books on architecture and lots of drawings of houses and pictures of houses, front doors, upstairs and roofs but it's not really about the subject of housing.

You can find books on planning and land use which are about the peculiar system run by local and national government that make it on the one hand impossible to build anything the country needs like a power station without 30 years of public enquiries and consultation and on the other hand demolishes large chunks of towns and cities in order to put up something much worse. But this isn't really so much about housing as an odd mix of deciding what's good for us and allowing some well heeled lobbies to prevent land from being built on.

There are books about building which are always interesting. They tell you at least 25 ways to mix cements, renders, finishes and mortars, and which way up a brick goes, what a kite winder is and shakes, shingles and short bored piles. And although it's all very important but still isn't housing.

Then there is housing law which goes back to the Norman Conquest and beyond and is only very interesting to lawyers and landlords who want to keep the peasants in their place.

Why is it important ?

I was interested in housing as it seemed to be very important in peoples' lives. It's Home Sweet Home where you live and leave and come back to and there's no place like it. Where you grew up is home. It's perhaps not the most impressive place 30 years later but at the time it was the best place in the world. It's the place first of family and then of community both very important areas of our lives. Queen or commoner you know every stick and stone of the place. It's full of associations and memories.

When you grow up and have a family it's the great pioneering adventure in life like setting off for America and living off potatoes and turkey. You have to make a whole new civilisation which is you and yours and separate from the old one. You learn independence and grow up. And losing your home is dreadful, or sometimes just moving can be a terrible wrench. Home is your security or lack of it, it gives you a status or confirms you as a bit of a no hoper. The poor people in doss houses and lodgings were to be pitied. There were the homeless and rootless, the destitute, the vagrant.

And housing is what people spend and enormous amount of their money on. The nation of home owners in Britain has grown like nowhere else in the world, where everyone is buying and selling and watching TV all night about other people doing it and getting overexcited or depressed about it.
A missing piece of jigsaw

When you think of it like that it perhaps seems like a subject you should study because it seems to have such an impact on our lives - where and who you live with. That's why, after I'd done exams in housing - (the subject that doesn't really exist) I was so surprised to find that when it came to people with learning disabilities there was stuff in the government paperwork on the need for health, education, care, residential care, assessments, partnerships and lots on values. Lots of overarching principles and fundamental values. (If I were without a home and given a choice of values or a roof over my head I would go for the roof.) I searched for a sign of housing in all sorts of government guidance about learning disabilities and services. But there was none. How could it be so important to everyone except people with disabilities.

At last Valuing People appeared and there in the title for Chapter Seven was Housing in bold print. It's nice to think things have moved on a bit.

After this as an introduction we will look more closely at the world of housing in the next issue and how we can make the most of it.

Maurice Harker
harker@housingoptions.org.uk

Housing Options, Stanelaw House, Sutton Lane, Sutton, Witney, Oxfordshire, OX29 5RY, United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)845 4561497 E-mail: enquiries@housingoptions.org.uk