I received this email today from a concerned homeowner, who like me, lives in the Liverpool Kensington New Deal for Communities area. The £62m New Deal area encapsulates 4,000 houses where 13,000 residents live and 60% of those residents. It is now becoming quite apparent that the service providers are going to use this money to gentrify the area through massive demolition and this will involve the social cleansing of tenants. Below the email is my reply to the homeowners email.

Friday, October 15, 2004 12:40 AM
Subject: New home for old masterplan
HOUSEHOLDERS living in an area of south Liverpool undergoing extensive redevelopment are being given the chance to swap their current home for a brand new one.
 http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100regionalnews/tm_objectid=14754387%26method=full%26siteid=50061%26headline=new%2dhome%2dfor%2dold%2dmasterplan-name_page.html

So homeowners in Toxteth, L8 are being given the chance to swap their current home for a brand new one whilst homeowners in Kensington, L7 are being forced to sell their properties to Liverpool Land Development Company for a pittance.

Kensington resident

Ps Seems it not just the tenants in Kensington that are getting a poor deal.

Dear Homeowner,

If the Housing Corporation and the housing associations had their way they would bring back the Workhouse. There is an interesting poem about the workhouses at the end of this email. Also, attached is a picture of the Liverpool workhouse, which stood on Brownlow Hill. In its height this workhouse had between two to three thousand people living in its dreadful confines. Children were separated from their parents and husbands were separated from their wives.

The houses that the Echo says are going to be refurbished to give to homeowners under threat of demolition are former housing association houses. When tenants move on these houses are left empty with the soul intention of doing them up. The Liverpool Echo, as it often does, is not telling the whole truth about what is going on here, the journalist has ignored the fact that these houses belong to housing associations. Look, try to see things from were us tenants are coming from, try to understand that if the housing associations give our houses away to home owners we are going to see a large increase in homelessness. They are not building enough new houses for tenants and they don't intend to because they want more people to buy than to rent, but the stupid government never expected the massive rise in house prices. This rise in house prices has knocked them right off their feet because it means they will have to build more houses for rent because first time buyers who are on poor wages can not afford a massive mortgage. What does the stupid government's Housing Corporation do to address this issue? Nothing, they just march ahead blindly with their stupid "Heartlands" project and as a result thousands of young and middle aged people are going to find themselves homeless or paying extortionate rents to money grabbing private landlords. But the problems don't stop with the private landlord because, private landlords do not want to take on people who are unemployed because the incompetent Housing Benefits department, which is run by the useless council officer administration, as well as not paying on time, will only pay a maximum of £68 per week for a claimants rent and most, if not all, money grabbing private landlords charge £100 per week rent. This means that the already pauperised unemployed tenant has to pay £32 per week out of his meagre living allowance towards his rent. Many keep the money because if they don't they will face early death through trying to survive on a starvation diet. The landlord then has to go through months and sometimes even years to try and evict the tenant. This is why private landlords don't want people who are unemployed. This situation is intolerable and something has to be done to address this issue and all the other social injustice that the Housing Corporation and the housing associations are perpetrating against us tenants and homeless people. This is why we have started the Tenants Action Group. We have now reached a situation in civic society which is intolerable and the only why to address it is through taking direct action. The only way the media will take any notice to us is through excising our rights to freedom of speech and direct action campaigns.

I am 50 years old and I can't afford to take on a mortgage because of the steep rise in house prices. Surely you cant blame me for fighting to save the roof over my head? At present I live in a crappy little housing association flat in a three storey house on Botanic Road. My housing association is called Venture Housing and like all the other housing associations in the New Deal zone it intends to transfer us people over to the terrible Community 7, which as you know is a subsidiary of the insidious Riverside Housing. The council and the housing associations decided to demolish most of their three storey large family houses. Riverside, who own Community 7, and some other housing associations, had about thirty of these large family houses in Lomand Road, which is in the New Deal area. All of these houses where in good shape, but still they decided to demolish them claiming that they were beyond repair when they weren't. They moved some families out and regetoised them in other socially deprived areas, but on the main they patiently waited over a couple of years for the families to move and when the families moved out through natural migration, i.e. bought a house or moved on somewhere else, the housing associations just boarded the houses up and waited for the others to leave because the boarded up ones were now in the process of being vandalised. They also made sure they put antisocial tenants in to speed up the process of further encouraging the stalwart tenants, along with home owners to leave.

To cut a long storey short, housing is a massive issue. The few large families that are still living in Lomand Road and other Roads like Lomand Road, have to be rehoused, you can't just throw a large family onto the streets can you, I mean there would be a public outcry, especially if people like me got wind of it. So what do Community 7 and their bosses at Riverside do? They simply earmark three storey houses (just like the one I live in on Botanic Road) wait patiently for the tenants to leave through natural migration, board each flat up when it goes empty and when the last tenant is left, and that will be me, they simply harass me and threaten me with bailiffs until I move and do you think they are going to move me to somewhere nice? They will put me into one of the worse places possible, because that is the way these unaccountable housing association officers operate. As I have stated on my leaflets, these housing officers are vindictive and heartless. They are not interested in humane misery. Working for a housing association is now a top career job. As I have already stated in my leaflets, the chief exec of Riverside earns over £125,000 per year. As I have already mentioned, the flat that I am living in isn't much, but it overlooks Botanic Park and as such there is hardly any trouble in the area, except for the usual antisocial tenants that Riverside have deliberately put in to try and encourage us to leave. I have lived here for nearly 20 years and Riverside's Community 7 want to get us flat dwellers out, do the houses up into a large one family house so as to put the large families in. You see, the Housing Corporation, who are supposed to monitor the housing associations are the real perpetrators behind all the misery and homelessness. The Housing Corporation is a central government organisation which has offices in every region of the country. These people are truly oppressive and take joy in oppressing us tenants. These people are now stealing thousands of acres of public land where council houses stand. They simply order all the councils to devise corrupt council tenant consultation, spin the tenants a load of lies and force them to vote yes to transferring over to a housing association like the dreadful Community 7, which as we already know is Riverside Housing in disguise. You see, Riverside is hated so much by tenants and homeowners alike, that if council tenants were asked to vote yes to transferring to Riverside they would probably vote no. Riverside and other large oppressive housing associations like Riverside know this, so they simply create subsidiaries to try and kid the tenants and the rest of the community that they are someone else. When they have taken over the council houses the land that the houses are built on ceases to be public land ( public land means what it says: Land that is owned by the public, which is you and me. So you see the council houses are owned by the tenants who live in them because council houses are public houses owned by the public and the council tenants are the public. Do you get it? The housing associations main aim is to demolish thousands of the former council houses so as to get their hands on the ground) and becomes the property of the housing associations who work in partnership with the dreadful Housing Corporation civil servants. When the housing associations take over the land they earmark large swathes of the former council houses to be unfit to live in and demolish them. When they are demolished they build more houses for sale than for rent on the former public land. This means that in the future there will be more homelessness because less social housing is being built. They are also trying to make people have smaller families by reducing the number of large houses for sale and for rent. As you can see the issue of housing is massive. They, that is the government, are even using housing as a tool to create social engineering, meaning, they can safely manipulate the housing situation to make the population even more passive and this passivity further domesticates the population so that the population of the country becomes a totally automaton population of people who never ask questions and just go along with everything that central and local government perpetrates against them.

Getting back to the issue of antisocial tenants. The housing officers didn't hand pick the antisocial tenants, they simply never put any structures in to place to address the issue of antisocial tenants. Do you think that as a homeowner you are the only one who is worn out by the behaviour of these antisocial tenants? We, that is us decent tenants, also have to put up with the behaviour of these people. The truth is, if you visit the Eldonian estate, which is off Vauxhall Road, and speak with the tenants who live there they will tell you that there is never any trouble with antisocial tenants, this is because one of the main issues on the agenda when these houses where built was the issue of these bloody awful antisocial tenants. Toney Megan immediately put simple effective structures in to place to address the issue and as a result in its 16 year existence there has never been one house burglary. You see it is as simple as this. If us tenants got shut of these useless middle class overpaid housing association housing officers we could design our own simple methodology to address the issue of antisocial tenants and everything else. But this will never happen while there are middle class bureaucrats, who represent the agendas of outside vested interests and the dominant culture that exists at local and central government levels. We except that as tenants we need people to manage the house, but these housing officers are now acting like oppressors and going ahead with plans and projects that us tenants haven't go a clue about.

Have you also ever wondered why the council is allowed to simply give the council house to the housing associations? Why if they can do this can't they give the houses to the council tenants, many of whom have paid for the houses ten times over in rent. It's obvious even to the most idiot observer that they don't do this becouse they want to get their hands on the land so as to build houses for sale. You want to count yourself lucky that you own your own house. Being a tenant in this day and age is not very advantages to say the least.

Mike Lane
Tenants Action Group
Chairman Mike Lane
Vice Chair Tom Mackey
Secretary Stephen Smyth
Te 07770-478756

THE WORKHOUSE
Theirs is yon house that holds the parish~poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;
There, children dwell who know no parents' care;
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Dejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood fears;
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot and the madman gay.
Here too the sick their final doom receive
Here brought, amid the scenes of grief, to grieve,

The Village George Crabbe