Five months ago, my parents – like the other 69 households on their Leeds estate – received a pamphlet through the letterbox. Some families threw it out; others dumped it on the kitchen table to sort out later. Little did they know it was an invitation from the landlord to discuss plans to demolish our estate.



Those of us who turned up quickly realised that this event would be less of a “consultation” and more of a presentation. The investment company Pemberstone informed us of its plans to knock down our homes – all 70 of the low-rent, long-term tenancy houses – and redevelop them into modern, mortgageable properties. Pemberstone has, unsurprisingly, packaged this as a positive move: a replacement of 1950s prefab houses with modern constructions, of which 14% will be “affordable”. But, of course, for this redevelopment to happen, we will all have to be evicted.

Wordsworth Drive and Sugar Hill Close, where we live, are the untold story of England’s housing crisis: generation renters who aren’t millennials but have failed to get on the housing ladder, families that have been living in low-rent, long-term tenancies for decades.

Many families, including pensioners, have lived on the estate for a long time. Some of them were miners who moved there when the homes were built by the Coal Board in the 1950s. My “auntie”, a close friend of my parents, lives down the road, and I’ve known another of my mum’s friends, who lives around the corner, for over 15 years. It’s a community where few would be eligible for the mortgages or rent agreements the new development will offer. Many ended up there in the first place because there were no social housing options when they needed them.

With this eviction, like other mass social-housing evictions, my family and their neighbours will face few options: emergency council accommodation (with its lack of quality and security), seeking cheap rents elsewhere, or couch-surfing to keep jobs or their children in the same schools. But unlike stories of council evictions across the country, my family’s experience is unlikely to galvanise national outrage. After all, people expect markets to be cruel, and for private landlords to do what they like with their property. And the national conversation around social housing still centres on the assumption that the state will provide housing for poorer families.

But this assumption no longer bears truth. Poorer people are more likely than ever to be private renters, especially as social housing options decline. The private rental sector has more than doubled (pdf) since 2002, and will soon account for a quarter of all households.

My community has a right to exist. Just because our estate is made up of private renters doesn’t mean we are transient and can settle easily in another private let. We have no power: no rent caps to guarantee that we’ll be able to afford our homes tomorrow; and our only refuge from homelessness being a two-month notice period, after which we will be at the mercy of the market again. It’s no wonder homelessness is soaring.

Pemberstone has framed the redevelopment of my family’s estate as a necessary intervention to update houses that are no longer fit for purpose. The obvious implication is that it will not have much of an impact on a so-called transient rental population. This displays both a wilful misunderstanding of prefab architectural history, and a callous disregard for the reality of losing your right to community and home.

Mass evictions of low-income families are not the preserve of cash-strapped local authorities, they are the norm for profit-minded private landlords, too. Without some kind of intervention, in as little as a few months, Pemberstone could be demolishing my estate. And my parents, with 69 other families, will lose a home and a community.



Jessica Field is a resident on the Oulton estate in Leeds campaigning against eviction

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