It's Time For Unions To Become Landlords

Lisa McKenzie articulates something that I have been broadly thinking for years:

It’s a good idea, even though Chief Executive Matt Downie said the charity is making the move because they have no other choice in the face of a “catastrophic” situation.

I’m not surprised. In the fifteen years I have been writing and campaigning around the UK’s housing crisis, it seems neither government nor local councils are willing or able to provide solutions.

The housing crisis is destabilising our communities and our country. Children cannot thrive, and families cannot function, when they have nowhere to live or when the place they live is of poor quality or eats up most of their budget.

Poor housing also affects our productivity, and the way we see ourselves as a nation: in decline, regressing, hanging on and unstable.

Charities stepping in to address our housing crisis is nothing new. Subpar housing is a disease we Brits have been living with for generations.

The Guinness Partnership and Peabody began life as charitable organisations, while Victorian reformers like Octavia Hill and the Toynbees campaigned for good-quality housing for the poor.

In 1945, the Beveridge Report, the blueprint for our Welfare State, noted that ‘squalor’ was one of the five evils Government should conquer.

I have long wondered why trade unions are not involved in providing housing for workers. After all, the British housing crisis is and has always been a working-class issue.

This has been tried and tested previously in the United States in the 1930s, and in one of the most expensive real estate markets on the globe, no less.

On the Lower East Side in New York City stands the Hillman Cooperatives, a housing coop named after Sidney Hillman, who was the founder and first president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

The Lower East Side was filled with factories and slums, and the trade union believed its finances could be best used to build homes for working-class people to live in dignity. The housing is still there, providing affordable housing for Manhattan’s working class.

So why haven’t our trade unions in the UK helped out their members by providing the most basic of needs – a roof?

Unite the Union had the funds to do something similar. Instead, the organisation is under investigation after using £112m of its members’ money to build a Hotel and Conference Centre in Birmingham. The building has since been valued at just £29m, suggesting £83m has been wasted.

Working-class people are struggling to find safe, affordable homes, and the state appears to have run out of ideas. Charities and the trade unions must step up - otherwise what are they for?