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Grim times surely lay ahead for us tenants!

Mike Lane | 09.02.2004 10:31 | Liverpool

Grim times surely lay ahead for us tenants. We are slowly moving back into a Victorian age when tenants paid over half of their salary on rent alone. Housing Associations or registered Social Landlords, as they are know known, are taking over council properties and becoming property developers. It wont be long before they start selling their old stock off as they move into new builds for sale.

This short storey shows how Liverpool City Council officers and the huge housing association Riverside (22,000 properties in Merseyside) manipulate and oppress a community. None of us working class residents, homeowners and tenants, are safe here in the Kensington New Deal community. We are all quite aware of the fact that the above-mentioned people want to get shut of us so as to gentrify the area. Such is the repressive, manipulative, ambiguous behaviour of the above people it is almost impossible for working class people like myself to describe what they do in writing. In my opinion the only people who can really describe in detail what these people get up to are highly experienced political journalists. There is no end to the treachery of the above mentioned. Then there are the New Deal for Communities administrators (37 New Deal administrators who now outnumber the community activists) who have flooded into our community. The New Deal project has been in operation for over five years and the above-mentioned are now quite blazon about the undemocratic way in which they operate, their arrogance knows no bounds and they are accountable to no one. In effect they have gone so far down the road of despicable deceptive behaviour that they care nothing about what people think.

You don’t have to be a prophet to make this prediction: Within the next ten years RSL rents will be somewhere in the region of £100 per week. Already RSL tenants in new builds are paying £75 per week rent. The rent will be so high that people who are working in low paid jobs will be paying more than half of their wages on rent. Rents are now higher then what they were in Victorian times. People who are on benefits will be further pauperised, because the housing benefits will not pay the full amount of rent thus forcing claimants to pay the difference out of their meagre living income. Dire times surely lay ahead for many working class people in this country.

These new builds for rent will have water meters attached to the front of the house and they will also have a weak tenancy agreement which will give the highly paid middleclass RSL housing officers the ability to evict tenants for even minor infringements of their tenancy agreement.

All of the agencies mention above care nothing about working class communities and how long it takes for a community to evolve and become cohesive. They only care about money and building new houses for sale. Like most large RSL’s in the UK Riverside Housing have deviated from their original purpose, which was to provide houses for the most vulnerable in our society, they are now rapidly becoming fully-fledged property developers. They are so powerful that they can actually influence government legislation. The government body that these people are supposed to be accountable to are the Housing Corporation, but the Housing Corporation is part of and promotes what the RSL’s are up to. The people at the top of the Housing Corporation are similar to the senior civil servants in Government Office for the Regions. These people are part of the dominant culture that exists at central and local government level and as far as they are concerned what they say and advocate is absolute. These are the very people who are responsible for building the soul-destroying prison like council and RSL estates that they herd us socially deprived working class people into. All the structures of the above agencies have evolved in such a way as to make them unapproachable and a culture of silence exists amongst their senior and subordinate staff.

Recently a meeting was held somewhere in the Gilead-Quorn Street area of the £62m Kensington New Deal initiative zone. The meeting concerned the building of 179 new houses for sale and rent. The New Deal initiative encompasses approximately 4,000 houses and shops. Only ten people attended this meeting and nine of them were homeowners. The New Deal for Communities area is comprised of 40 per cent homeowners and 60 per tenants. The homeowners have a stronger sense of civic responsibility because they have a vested interest in the area. The tenants, who are presently in the majority, don’t care as much, because if they get their house knocked down they know they will be rehoused somewhere else. But still there is a level of concern and anxiety amongst many tenants as to where they will be moved to. Tenants will be given three offers of another property which could be anywhere on Merseyside and if they refuse all three they will be evicted.

What central government and the City Council want to do is turn the situation of tenure around in the New Deal community to 70 per cent homeowners (preferably middle class) and 30 per cent tenants. They claim that if a community is comprised of mixed social housing with the majority being homeowners the community will be more stable and that antisocial behaviour will be considerably reduced. They are going to do this through mass demolition of the area. They will then build hundreds if not thousands of houses for sale. Many areas in Merseyside, similar to Kensington and some council estates, have been earmarked for demolition. Many of the new estates that are built in rough working class areas will have a wall built around them and will resemble an enclaves. These private segregated walled estates are now a common feature in many of Merseyside socially deprived working class areas.

The new Deal administrators, the City Council and Riverside are experiencing major set backs because the homeowners in the Kensington New Deal area are not conforming. One area of the New Deal zone known as the Triangle (the Triangle consists of about 300 houses) was earmarked for demolition, but the residents of this area threatened the New Deal administrators and Riverside with civil disobedience if they tried to demolish their houses, as a result the New Deal administrators and Riverside backed off. When they knock homeowners old houses in the New Deal zone down the new houses that they build will cost about £40,000 more than what they are going to pay the homeowners for their old houses. To counteract this the major developer Riverside have offered the homeowners what is called shared ownership. This means that the hated Riverside will own over half of the homeowner’s house. These new houses will be much smaller than the houses that are going to be demolished and naturally the homeowners don’t want this deal neither do they want to move into a smaller featureless house. Many of the homeowners in the Kensington New Deal area are in their late fifties and early sixties and have paid their mortgage off. They just won’t to be left alone in peace. They most certainly do not wont to move into a house that that they only part own.

More about the truth of the issue of mixed housing can be viewed on IWCA web site:  http://www.hackneyiwca.fsnet.co.uk/ Go to and double click mixed social housing does not work.

There is one part of the New Deal zone known as Edge Hill where 640 houses have been earmarked for demolition. The situation of tenure was about 400 tenant and 240 homeowners. Over 100 tenants have already been moved out of this area, but there are still about 300 left. Most of these tenants will be moved out of the New Deal area altogether and ghettoised in areas which are not important to the city centre regeneration. This is disgraceful behaviour by the service providers because these people are supposed to be stakeholders in the New Deal initiative, in other words the £62m New Deal funding belongs to them, yet the service providers, with the full support of Government Office, intend to move hundreds if not thousands of these people out of the New Deal area thus disenfranchising them from the initiative.

Riverside’s subsidiary Community 7, who are really Riverside masquerading as another RSL, have made agreements with the seven other RSL’s in the New Deal area to take over their properties so that community 7 will own all the RSL properties in the New Deal area. Community 7 have already taken over 300 or so council properties in the New Deal zone. A vote was taken amongst the council tenant and the few that bothered to vote voted to transfer to Community 7. Community 7 bombarded the council tenant with information supporting a yes vote for transfer. Literature promoting a no vote was non-excitant, even thought the Liverpool Council Tenants Association knew what was happening.

The Gilead-Quorn Street area also known as the Holt Road area of Kensington runs from Kensington to Edge Lane, from Edge Lane up to Beech St, up Beech St to Kensington again and down Prescott Rd and back to Gilead St. This area is also known as the Holt Road area encompasses over 1,000 houses with a smattering of shops. Concerned community residents now fear that all of these properties will be demolished, even thought the RSL Riverside and their subsidiary Community 7 have said the whole area may not be, but some of it may be, especially the parts near to Edge Lane to facilitate road widening. The New Deal regeneration administrators and the RSL’s always use this ambiguous language when they are lying to the community. They may not be, they may be, some of them could be, there are proposals to, it’s a kind of double speak. When they, the New Deal administrators and the ruthless RSL housing officers, use this deceptive language, nine times out of ten what you feared they would do they do and even worse.

The meeting covered the issue of proposals to build 179 houses and flats. If these proposals go ahead most of these properties will be for sale, only 45 of them will be for rent, which gives further authenticity to the fact that many tenants will be completely moved out of the New Deal zone. The conniving City Council and RSL officers claim that most of the existing tenants are on benefits and as such do not contribute much to the areas prosperity. The flats will be in three and two storey building, which will line part of one side of the main Kensington furafair; obviously they will be on the side adjacent to Gilead St. The houses will be built behind the flats on public ground, which was used by the community as a football pitch. Some of the houses will be built in other parts of the immediate area. This piece of public ground, about some two or three acres, was given to the community because a public park was once behind the Kensington Liberary and many years ago the Water Board wanted to build a reservoir on the parkland. Of course there was a public outcry and as a result the council gave the community the football pitch and surrounding land off Gilead St. But the storey never ended there. There have been numerous attempts to grab the land back from the community. First in the 1970,s the Liverpool City Council tried to grab it from the community to build council houses, but the council was sent packing by a handful of community stalwarts headed by a homeowner and community leader called Ken Dolt. Then there were other agencies who wanted to develop the land but the same people sent them packing. But as time passed these community stalwarts got old and recently the respected Ken Dolt died in his early 60’s. Many people who know the history of the area feel that Ken was worn out with the stress of fighting the council and other money grabbing developers.

The powers that be within the City Council never gave up. Using their insidious skills of gradualism and stealth they let the football pitch and surrounding ground fall into disrepair until in the end it was impossible for the local children to play on it. On and on it went until one evening a couple of years ago the City Council working with the ruthless Riverside Housing, now joined by the New Deal administrators, many of whom were on secondment from the City Council and Riverside Housing, held a regeneration meeting at which fifty or sixty concerned weary community members (mostly homeowners) turned up. It was put to the meeting, in the most devious and conniving language, that the football pitch and surrounding grass verges should be used to build houses on. A fast vote was taken (a vast vote means conning residents into having a vote immediately after explaining to them what is intended. This does not give them time to go away and consider the issues in more depth) to have the football pitch and adjacent land developed by building new houses on it. The weary residents, obviously off guard and not having time to weigh up the prose and cons, voted for the development to take place This time, though, it was a different ball game, because as was previously mentioned, when the City Council first tried to build houses on the land they intended to build a small council estate adjacent to a cluster of council houses, which had been there for some years. But the homeowners did not want another council estate or RSL estate within their midst that would invariably contain antisocial tenants. Never did the homeowners even consider the fact the majority of tenants are no different than the homeowners in the way they behave. Neither did they consider the fact that Riverside owned more than half of the houses in the Holt Road area and had long ago decided to move antisocial stooge tenants in. You see, these RSL officers don’t think like us ordinary working class folk, they think in the long term. Conniving Riverside housing officers know that if they put stooge tenants, i.e. antisocial tenants, into an area it will only be a matter of time before that same area starts to decline and the homeowner’s houses will fall into negative equity and the decent tenants will move out to get away from the stooge tenants. Riverside says it is impossible to tell an antisocial tenant from a normal tenant. The truth is that Riverside has never worked with its tenants and homeowners to develop and put structures and methodology into place to address the issue of antisocial tenants and the adverse effect just a few of these tenants can have on a community. On close scrutiny the critical observer soon realises that the antisocial tenants are just another tool used by the ruthless Riverside and the City Council to help them force their agenda onto the largely unsuspecting law abiding community. To further authenticate the latter statement one only has to visit the Eldonian estate were simple structures have been put into place by the residents to address the issue of antisocial tenants and as a result there are no antisocial tenants on the 300 house estate.

The RSL’s and the City Council are experts at using every negative aspect of the community’s cultural perspective as weapons to subjugate and domesticate the community with. Central and local government have used this fictitious fear of antisocial tenants to promote mixed social housing and to take peoples attention away from the fact that RSL’s, with the full backing of the Housing Corporation, are becoming property developers. It will only be a matter of time before major RSL’s, such as Riverside, will build more houses for sale than for rent. As already mentioned out of the 179 houses which will be built on the Gilead Street site only 45 of them will be for rent and the rent will be at least £75 per week with each house having a water metre attached to it.

Tenant democracy, although promoted by central government, is non-existent within these RSL’s. The RSL officers do not consider tenants hopes and aspirations. Everything is imposed onto the tenants. There are hardly any tenants on the RSL boards and the ones who do sit on the boards are hand picked by the RSL officers because of their extreme moderate views and their inability to critically observe the actions of the RSL’s.









Mike Lane
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Comments

Display the following 2 comments

  1. Good report... — Kai Andersen
  2. When good people do nothing evil triumphs! — Kai Andersen