Housing Entitlement Day

Shelter's annual affordability index, published earlier this month, shows how disastrous the house price increases have been for most people in the UK. It indicates that the price of a first home has risen from £52,674 to £159,494 over the past ten years, with house price to income ratios rising from 1.72 to 3.4. Mortgage repayments now represent 21 per cent of household income compared with 12 per cent a decade ago. This cash is returned as interest payments to wealthier home-owners and bank shareholders - another redistribution of wealth from poor to rich.


Many years ago, Spencer Fitzgibbon, a former external communications supremo for the Green Party who has now retired to write novels, came up with a brilliant policy which he called 'housing entitlement'. The idea was they we chose a day and made it law that, wherever people were living on that day became theirs.

This was a brilliant stroke - a thought experiment that requires you to question what home ownership means, and whether something as fundamental as the need for a roof over your head should ever be subject to the vagaries of the market.

So what would it mean for different groups in society? Those with mortgages would lose them instantly - no need for the stress of working to pay for housing. Those who were renting would suddenly gain home security and an asset to allow them onto an equal footing with the more prosperous members of society. These would be the winners.

And what about the losers? Mutual building societies would no longer own assets and would have to begin again by taking deposits from savers before they could lend. Private banks would also lose their assets - which would impact severely on the indirect absentee landlords who make up their shareholders. Landlords and landladies would also lose assets - the more they owned the more they would lose.

The great thing about this thought experiment is that your reaction depends entirely on where you find yourself in the present housing hierarchy, but the reality is that the majority of this people would, on average, find their well-being improved by such a policy. The overall losers would be quite a small number of very rich people.

Every now and then the government could name a new housing entitlement day. It could be about every 40 years or so - like biblical jubilees - about the amount of time it takes the greedy and unscrupulous to distort the ownership system enough for goodly citizens to really be suffering. Tweet

Habitat and yoghurt culture

In the ethereal realms of academic discussion the buzzphrase of the moment is ‘ecological modernisation’. This phrase relates to the idea that, now that we have won the argument that the ecological crisis is real, there is a struggle going on about how to respond to it. This struggle boils down to a choice between business-as-usual with a few green tweaks, or a wholesale reorganization of society and economy. The question being asked is whether it is possible to have a sustainable world without fundamental social and economic change.

In the field of habitat the ecological modernizers would like to expropriate and commodify the learning that has been developed in low-impact communities, wipe it clean of its radical overtones, and make it profitable business. They are seeking to divorce the technological wisdom from the social wisdom that gave it birth. They are ignoring the lessons of holism that are the most important lessons of the sustainable vision. Knowledge based on practical experience cannot be reduced to information to be written into technical manuals.

Much of the knowledge about how sustainable communities might look has been garnered within the Ecovillages network, co-ordinated by Jonathan Dawson of the Findhorn Foundation. He recently published a book sharing some of this experience. The communities he studied are found in rich and poor societies and offer an experience of creative living. He likes to think of them as ‘yoghurt culture . . . small, dense and rich concentrations of activity whose aim is to transform the nature of that which surrounds them’.

Most of the ecovillages are success stories, but many ‘collapse’ because of the difficulty of building new relationships and social structures. It is vital that we do not see these shorter-lived projects as ‘failures’. The learning and positive experiences generated by experimental living are not lost when the people move on and the structures decay. Learning to live experimentally requires learning to accept that the natural life-span of some of these ventures may be short.

Is it possible to build sustainable communities without asking questions about ownership, equality and hierarchy? In my view, not only can we not ‘solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’; we also cannot save the planet without asking questions about who owns it. The message of ecovillages the world over is that these issues are intrinsically linked to the building, physically and metaphorically, of a sustainable future. Tweet