Our major new report with @qurbanist of @sheffielduni and @sse_data recommends policy changes to boost rural and coastal housing access. Inc proposals on '2nd homes', Airbnb licensing, planning, social housing, local tax retention & responsible lending: shorturl.at/kHLR5

For 'cost of living' read 'cost of housing' .. its time we stopped building #TheWrongHousing and boosted genuinely affordable rent-controlled social supply - we need affordable options not ultra rationing and endless over-priced towers of flats with sky high service charges.

Bang on @Victoria_Spratt The needs of developers that built our#HousingCrisis are not what our housing system or economy needs - which is a rebalancing in favour of affordability - that requires a wider range of genuinely affordable choices and greater access to social housing.

Its time to stop selling social homes.. '3 were bought by property companies – 2 more went to individual buyers with addresses in China. .“I worked in homelessness for 10 years we were continually told ‘there’s no housing for people in Camden’ so how can there be excess stock?"'

We dont need another #HelpToBuy scheme it raised house prices, increased unaffordability and built #TheWrongHousing to meet our needs. Widening access to genuinely affordable homes means improving access to social housing and controlled rents, not investingni in increasing them.

Poorly paid jobs mean Universal Credit is shifting from an out of work benefit to an insecure work benefit. There's much debate about how we get people into work - not enough about how we build a labour market where people don't need constant subsidy to stay afloat.

Tim O'Sullivan died alone in his bed on Beecher Street, Mallow in Cork sometime in January 2001.Nobody found him for 22 years. His house stood on an ordinary residential areaboarded up and decaying. Mr O'Sullivan was born in Cahersiveen, Kerry, in 1939. He emigrated to England with his family and trained as a compositor in the printing trade. Relatives say was a capable worker and well liked. When his marriage broke down in the late 1980s, he bought the small terraced gaff at 9 Beecher Street in Cork and moved back to Ireland alone. He lived quietly, coping first with his new life after marriage, and kept to himself. When his sister Maureen stopped hearing from him, she went looking. In 2003 she called to the house and got no answer. Locals had already decided he'd gone back to England, so nobody filed a missing person report. The home sat decaying in full view for another decade. In December 2014, a local councillor noticed a broken window and emailed Cork County Council asking who owned it. By then O'Sullivan had already been dead almost fourteen years. The email went nowhere.Later, council contractors boarded up the front without checking inside. It was meant to tidy up an eyesore. Instead it sealed a tomb. The sad truth only surfaced on 13 January 2023, when council workers went in over a rat problem before calling pest control. Under a duvet, fully clothed, they found what was left of Tim O'Sullivan. A skeleton, partially mummified, undisturbed since 2001. Gardaí confirmed his identity through dental records. The pathologist found no trauma, just a man who died quietly in his sleep. A Tesco receipt, diary entries and the date his welfare payments stopped narrowed his death to between 9 and 23 January. The coroner recorded an open verdict, noting that a man had lain dead in a busy town for two decades, that a councillor had flagged the house a decade too late, and that even then, nobody ever knocked to check. His family called for a review of Ireland's derelict sites laws. Despite an unprecedented housing crisis, Ireland has over 20,000 registered derelict properties, and vacancy figures running into the hundreds of thousands once every empty home is counted. God knows how many are hiding a story like this. May he rest in peace. If you are lonely, regardless of your age, please reach out to your GP or local community centres. I'm involved volunteering in my own local one, and there are so many groups where isolated people meet up together to chat and do activities and it can be an absolute lifesaver. Humans aren't meant to be alone. Two Irish charities that tackle exactly what let Mr O'Sullivan slip through the cracks, isolation and housing are: alone.ie ALONE supports older people ageing at home, tackles loneliness. National Support & Referral Line 0818 222 024 threshold.ie Threshold gives housing rights advice, works to bring derelict homes back into use. 1800454454 My own local resource centre were we run men's and women's groups and older people's outreach mountviewfrc.com/

For at least a decade we've been building #TheWrongHousing in London - a lost opportunity to address our housing crisis- its no surprise long-term vacancy has more than doubled, homelessness risen and Temporary Accommodation costs push councils to the brink and wreck lives

Building homes as empty investment boxes, towering upwards doesn't solve anything. Too tall, too expensive and badly built. No wonder they can't sell them

"Embattled South East Water abandons bond issue as investors flee sector." The message is getting though, the vulture capitalists and fat cats have finally worked it out, the days of fleecing water customers is over, water companies are no longer a cash cow but a massive lability. Even more reason that we nationalise the lot of them, starting with South East Water and Thames Water, today. news.sky.com/story/embattled…

MORE! On the Vienna housing model! The Vienna Housing Model. The decisive tool was already in place: wartime rent control, imposed so soldiers’ wives would not be thrown into the street. Rent control was never repealed. Combined with postwar inflation, that made private rental construction unprofitable and opened a window of opportunity for non market housing development. Rent control took private landlords out of the land market. Land prices fell. Rent control did not merely protect tenants. It cut the flow of labor and capital value into land Rent. Vienna’s leaders knew of Henry George’s case for a single tax on land but found a better way. They taxed apartment units instead, on a progressive scale, and kept rent control. The city then used that same tax revenue to buy the land whose price the taxes had just depressed — the result was that the city was the only serious buyer in the market when urban land became available. Vienna also invented a better way to build affordable housing. The city buys the land, sets the housing goals and publishes the subsidy. Competing nonprofit teams — architect, builder, developer, manager — submit schemes. Stakeholder juries pick the smartest one. The result is architecturally varied housing, not the barracks other anglophone countries call “public housing”. Design quality is not a luxury. It is how you keep the middle class inside the non-market system. One-fifth was social housing for the poor and disabled. The rest was for wage-earners, owned and run by co-ops and limited-profit housing associations. Those associations operate like ordinary companies except they may charge only cost-covering rents, must recycle surplus into more land or more buildings, and may pay only a capped return to shareholders. The city did not socialize production. It socialized the land under it in line with the Henry George Principle. Copying the Vienna model in cities that still worship the free market for housing would surely be contentious; but the crisis Vienna faced and the results it got are not in dispute. Jobs-rich global cities are now approaching the same level of housing precarity faced by Vienna. Rent control protects tenants, but it also makes a city’s land less appetizing to international real estate investment trusts (REITs).

“Arconic, whose flammable cladding encased the tower, has done more to compensate its shareholders than the survivors and the bereaved”. Our report on corporate accountability after Grenfell — Unpunished and Undeterred — covered in @prospect_uk prospectmagazine.co.uk/polit…

SHAC Article: I Thought I Was Just Checking My Service Charges shaction.org/2026/09/05/i-th… Olivia started out checking figures on a service charge letters and ended up building tenant and resident power across her neighbourhood. It was a journey she never expected to take, but her experience will be familiar to many. #EndServiceChargeAbuse

Residents on a south London estate face eviction and rent hikes, as a small property firm who purchased the homes from a housing associations looks to get a return Dig into the story and a cautionary tale about who housing policy now serves emerges: peteapps.substack.com/p/our-…

It doesn't- especially when used non-residentially as whole home all-year Airbnbs, wealth storage or additional 'homes' for those with several in various jurisdictions. Lux tower development is expensive to build and run, inflates land values, pricing out affordable homes we need

🚨 Million pound mansions sit empty in London, and in some cases for years! 🇬🇧💷 Billionaires’ Row London📍

Say that to @AngelaRayner