Do People Matter Most Or Does Property?

As you’ve probably read, there was a terrible fire in Britain, and hundreds of people were left homeless.

They were living in a council hi-rise building, Grenfell Tower. It had no sprinkler system, and the cladding which had been put on it, to make it look nicer, because rich people live nearby, was combustible. The incombustible version of the cladding would have cost, total, about five thousand pounds more than the flammable version, and the council is the richest council in Britain, with a huge budget surplus.

So the fire went thru the building like a gasoline fire on cardboard, and at least 58 people died.

Clearly, very unimportant people.

What has happened since the fire is fascinating, however.

Corbyn suggested requisitioning unoccupied flats nearby and housing these homeless people in them. This is the richest part of London, despite having a poor area in it, and as you’re probably aware, rich London has a lot of unoccupied homes. Almost 20,000 that authorities are aware of.

While a majority of British, to their credit support Corbyn’s idea, there’s been a great deal of resistance, and, of course, the Tory government is making no effort to follow his suggestion.

And Corbyn points out, further, that not helping these new homeless people is deliberate helplessness:

“It cannot be acceptable that in London you have luxury buildings and luxury flats kept as land banking for the future while the homeless and the poor look for somewhere to live.” And in an interview on ITV on Sunday, Mr Corbyn said the flats could be requisitioned by the government or bought using compulsory purchase orders. “Occupy it, compulsory purchase it, requisition it – there’s a lot of things you can do. “But can’t we as a society just think, it’s all very well putting our arms around people during the crisis but homelessness is rising, the housing crisis is getting worse and my point was quite a simple one. “In an emergency, you have to bring all assets to the table in order to deal with that crisis and that’s what I think we should be doing in this case.” …. “Every day at Heathrow, planes get delayed. Hundreds of people get stranded at airports all over the world,” he said. “Hotels are found for them immediately, they are sorted out. Four-hundred-or-so people, still most of them have not got somewhere decent, safe or secure to stay in. “Somehow or other, it seems to be beyond the wit of the public services to deal with the crisis facing a relatively small number of people in a country of 65 million.”

What is irritating is just this, that so many problems we have are easily solved and we choose not to solve them. There are plenty of empty houses, requisition them.

Some years back I saw a statistic that Europe had twice as many empty homes as homeless people, and America had five times as many.

And yet there are homeless people?

As for the housing crisis in many cities, well, at the least rent wouldn’t be rising so fast if we had kept rent control in place; and prices wouldn’t be rising so fast if we didn’t allow homes to stay empty for long periods or to be owned by foreigners who don’t live in them. As for increasing the housing supply, we could just build more housing, but don’t.

Oh yes, public housing is often terrible, but that, again, is because we don’t prioritize it: we underfund it, don’t repair it, etc… You can’t credibly say it’s all on the poors when you don’t even put in a sprinkler system; when you won’t spend 5k to put on inflammable vs. flammable cladding.

Every time public housing or co-ops open up in most major cities there are huge line ups and waiting lists for them. There’s demand, but no supply.

Our society runs on a simple ethic: nothing can be allowed to happen if someone important doesn’t get rich doing it. Having the government build housing isn’t nearly as profitable as building hi rises for Chinese ex-pats who pay millions per apartment and then, half the time, don’t even live there.

Is profit more important than people? Are property rights more important than whether people are sleeping outside?

The answer to both these questions, as we all know, is “yes, profits and property rights matter more than people’s welfare.”

But should they?

That’s the question that the British are in the middle of answering. And, to their credit, it seems like there’s a good chance that for the first time since Margaret Thatcher was elected, they’re considering changing their answer back to “human welfare comes first.”

(Also, check out the pictures of Corbyn in this article. His personal warmth, if combined with policy that works, means he will own Britain when he is Prime Minister. Because he actually does care.)

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