Black mold, cockroaches – at the epicenter of the housing shortage

Only a cardboard box separates the man from the cold asphalt floor. His face is barely recognizable, he is so deeply buried in his sleeping bag, his hoodie pulled down over his face. A desperate attempt to protect himself from the cold that descends on the London district of Wandsworth as darkness falls.

“Are you OK? Can we help you?” Queenslla asks Arthur. The young woman is standing a meter away from the man who has set up camp for the night in the lee of a warehouse. He mumbles that he doesn’t need any help. After a few more attempts to get him to talk, she gives up.

“He’s deteriorated,” she says a little later in the car in a sad voice as she makes notes on a clipboard. The 33-year-old knows the man. She has been working as a social worker for the Spear homeless charity for three years. She has often encountered him on her nightly patrols of doorways, bridges and illuminated main roads.

This evening, WELT accompanies her and two colleagues on their rounds of inspections. The organization is the first point of contact for the homeless, helps them obtain identification papers, provides them with sleeping bags, and places them in residential homes. The latter is particularly difficult at the moment.

London is the epicenter of a crisis that is shaking the whole of Great Britain: homelessness. In England alone, around 4,000 people slept on the streets every night in 2023 – an increase of 27 percent within a year. What is particularly alarming is that more and more families are losing their homes. The social system usually intervenes before they end up on the streets. However, due to the lack of social housing, municipalities are often forced to house them long-term in cramped and unsuitable emergency accommodation such as hostels or bed and breakfasts.

In England, 109,000 households lived in such institutions last summer, including 142,490 children – an increase of ten percent. Aid organizations, which assume much higher numbers, speak of a “national scandal”. Just a few weeks before the general election on July 4, the crisis is putting the Conservative government party, which is far behind in the polls, under further pressure.

The need is particularly great in the popular, densely populated and expensive capital of London. The number of homeless people is far above the national average. The causes of homelessness are varied, explains social worker Arthur. She looks after migrants with uncertain residency status and people with mental health problems and drug addiction.

Currently, a previously subconscious reason is gaining importance: the increasing housing shortage and rising living costs. A perception that is consistent with studies.

In the UK, persistent inflation is hitting a historically undersupplied housing market. Demand is diametrically opposed to supply, driving up prices. According to the Economic Observatory think tank, house prices in the UK rose by 441 percent in real terms between 1970 and 2022, while the number of homes built each year fell by 46 percent, from 378,300 to 205,300.

According to the real estate website Rightmove, the average monthly rent outside London is £1,290 (€1,525) and in the capital it is £2,630 (€3,110). In 2019, these figures were just under £800 (€945) and £2,090 (€2,470) respectively.

Neither the main opposition party, Labour, nor the Conservatives, who have been in power for 14 years and are known for their rigorous austerity policies, have been able to change this dynamic in recent decades. The situation is currently difficult anyway because the state coffers are empty due to the consequences of Brexit, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

In addition, the problem does not seem to be a priority for the Conservatives: the commitment to build 300,000 homes a year by the “mid-2020s” has been missed for years. Most recently, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak even distanced himself from the promise.

This gap is being filled by private property developers who can charge high prices for their properties largely unregulated. The government is also lagging behind in strengthening tenants’ rights. The abolition of the right for property owners to evict their tenants within two months without giving a reason, promised five years ago, is on hold. Between 2019 and 2023, around 26,300 households were evicted as a result.

For more and more Britons, the only option is the welfare state. But that is also underfunded. The condition of social housing is often miserable, sometimes life-threatening. In 2020, a two-year-old boy died as a result of mold in a social housing unit in Rochdale, England. When all places are taken, the municipalities have to resort to temporary accommodation such as hostels, where those affected have to wait several months or even years for permanent housing in the worst case. Here, too, the living conditions are precarious.

People like Katie Mirabita and her eight-year-old daughter Scarlett are the victims of this broken system. WELT meets the small family in their apartment in Bermondsey, a London district with a historically high density of social housing.

The living room looks like rooms where children grow up: colorful toys are scattered on the floor, clothes are drying on a clothes rack, and a picture frame with a photo of mother and daughter is on the radiator.

The two have been living here for over a year. “When I got the call that they had found an apartment for us, I cried with joy,” remembers 29-year-old Katie Mirabita. They are lucky: their social housing is in a new building – unlike many others in the area.

During a tour of Bermondsey, a local politician tells WELT about apartments in which black mold is creeping up the walls and about a building complex that had to be evacuated because of asbestos.

But it was a long road for Mirabita to get that call. At the age of 21, Scarlett had just been born, her parents kicked her out. As the young mother could not afford her own apartment, she turned to the city council, which put mother and daughter in a hostel due to a lack of available social housing.

The temporary solution turned into 13 months. The accommodation was run down, says Mirabita. And the worst thing: “The hostel was crawling with cockroaches. It was terrible, they were everywhere in our room,” she says today, shaking her head.

Eventually they ended up – again temporarily – in a one-room apartment that was “okay” but in a dodgy neighborhood. So she preferred to do her shopping before dark. They never really managed to settle in there. “I thought we were going to move soon.”

Five years later, she received the call that moved her to tears. Mirabita is grateful that she now has a long-term apartment subsidized by the city. Given the exploding prices, the single mother, who works part-time, could not afford a private apartment even today.

The housing shortage is now so serious that many aid organizations are hoping for radical government intervention. Whether this will happen will become clear after the elections on July 4. The Labour Party, which is around 20 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, has announced that it will build 1.5 million homes in the first five years of a possible term in government. This will be difficult given the dire budget situation.