EMPTY HOUSES

Opposite the flat where I live there is a large empty room, whose windows are protected by an iron grate. It is a clean room with a tiled floor; I peer through the grate to double-check that there is no furniture to disturb the calm, no sign of human habitation.

Beneath my feet there is another empty room; no neighbour below to be disturbed by late-night jams, temper tantrums or sexual encounters. Maybe I should be glad. The neighbours on the right hand side are less than pleasant. As Sartre states ‘Hell is other people,’ or as a less well known philosopher (my Grandad, a retired electrician) also remarked,

‘What’s the hardest commandment to keep? ‘Love thy neighbour.’’

In spite of all this, something is nagging at my brain and finger-tips: people need houses. The recent proposal by British P.M. David Cameron to abolish housing benefits for the under 25s has stirred quite a reaction. I am writing from several thousand miles of physical distance, but his words still echo in my ears. I have lapped up indignant comments on The Guardian, lamenting the plight of the ‘feckless poor’ and read my friends’ thoughts on Fakebook. Cameron’s statements are shocking, and whilst I share the condemnation of the left-leaning press, I feel they are not looking at the bigger, more taboo issue at the centre of the debate; the existence of private property.

Wooooh! Steady on old boy! Before I get thrown onto the pile of looney-leftist cranks, allow a moment’s thought. One of my friends said that, in the light of the economic crisis, cutting benefits to the youth is ‘a good place to start’. Hmmmm. Let’s reflect on this idea of where something starts…

Animals need shelter. We, as I have to keep reminding myself and other people, are animals. Before losing ourselves in yields, bonds, bail-outs and crises, let’s not forget this simple truth. As animals we need somewhere to sleep, shit, make-love, make music, make a racket and make food. At least that’s what I’m mostly interested in doing in my house. Great, so as I found out after leaving uni and no-longer having the privilege of my folks paying my rent whilst I studied, I quickly realised that accommodation is both very expensive and necessary. Yikes!!! How did this become the case? Where did this begin?

If you ask Rousseau, he’d explain to you in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that this is the result of a very stupid moment in human history. He states the most stupid man ever wasn’t the fella who moved into a cave, cut down some trees and put a fence around the scrub of land that surrounded it and said ‘This is mine!’. No, it wasn’t him, but it was the other fella, maybe a slightly hung-over caveman who’d been making-love, making music and making a racket the night before who believed him.

Now then, this is where I have to bring this all up to date. People who need houses the most are young people, those taking their first step to leave the nest. The importance of this metaphor shouldn’t be underestimated, because in age-to-life-expectancy terms, humans ‘leave the nest’ at a relatively advanced age compared to most other animals. The idea then that people aged 16-25 are somehow indulging themselves by (how dare they) wanting to move out in this ‘culture of entitlement’, is a crock of shit. This is the first battle that needs to be won; young people are not spoilt, they simply want their material needs to be met, as all young members of a species do.

So the state is not going to help people leave the nest. Why? There are ample empty houses in the UK – 930,000 according to the charity Empty Homes, who base their statistics on council tax databases. Now I’m not one for statistics, but check out this little beauty from the government’s own website, parliament.uk. ‘In the period February-April 2012, 1.01 million young people aged 16-24 were unemployed.’ Right, so we could almost provide not just a single room but an entire house to each young person who is unemployed. I’m sure that a few of them wouldn’t mind sharing as well; let’s be honest, whilst you might like having a house to yourself so you can avoid that awkward moment of opening the unlocked bathroom door to find your new flat-mate taking a juicy number two, most of us enjoy the company of our peers.

So, why isn’t there the political will to find inhabitants for all these empty homes? The answer is that at the heart of this entire system lies the concept of private property. Unlike the Native American saying ‘The only piece of land you own is the land under your mat when you go to sleep at night’, some people in the West think that they have some God-given right to own vast areas of land and property. Notice that I haven’t once mentioned the word money. This argument is simply not about how much or how little money we have; it’s about the natural resources available to us and our ability to control them – agency. Now, agency is in the hands of private individuals and corporations, backed to the hilt by the public relations department of big business (the government) and their henchmen (the police and armed forces). So, unfortunately for the likes of you and me who despite all this madness still need a place to shit, sing and shower, we have little choice but to comply.

Or do we? We don’t own the houses, and the people who are supposed to represent us don’t want us to live in the empty ones unless someone else makes a profit. Tricky situation. One of the answers, to go back to ‘the start’ of the problem, would be to make that radical, historically unprecedented decision to no longer believe that these things are owned by others in the first place. As the poem/prayer Desiderata states, ‘You are a child of the universe; no less then the trees and the stars you have a right to be here.’ Continuing with our scatological imagery, we could just as well say ‘you have a right to poo here.’

And you do! We do! If private rents are too high and the state isn’t going to provide for our basic needs, then we as citizens, as ‘children of the universe’, have a RIGHT to make our own homes or use the empty ones literally lying around us. That’s why I give my full support to the squatting movement that exists at the periphery of our society. Hats off to the people who occupied a totally empty block of flats in a suburb of Seville after being kicked out of their homes because they didn’t keep up on mortgage payments. ‘Outrageous and unfair’ some may say, but they have done more than just provide for their material needs: they have brought into question the whole idea of private property, which even the liberal press is unwilling to contemplate, and started to readdress the most stupid moment of human history.