Thought this on the ethnic make-up of social housing in London was an interesting and well-put point:

Being born overseas doesn’t stop you or your children being British. If having a foreign-born parent makes you a migrant, that includes Charles III. If having a foreign-born person in your household makes you a family of migrants, then that includes, erm, Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage. 

Will post the whole thing below as it's paywalled

by she_wrote

22 comments

  1. To most British politicians, the name Millbank conjures a trip to Millbank Studios – a neoclassical wedding cake of a building down the road from Big Ben, where broadcasters run their parliamentary coverage. A ten-minute walk away, however, is a site of greater significance to politics today. The Millbank Estate, one of Britain’s earliest council estates, is a collection of Edwardian redbrick mansion blocks of 562 homes, around half of which are still council flats. If you buy a house in Westminster, you’ll pay on average £1.4m. If you pay social rent in a Westminster Council flat, it costs you £113 a week.

    This is unusual. In London, unlike Paris or Rome, social housing blocks are jigsawed around some of the most desirable postcodes in the capital – with the poorest residents living in the heart of the city, rather than shoved out to banlieues. To clear slums and make room for a rising urban population, social housing began transforming the topography of British cities in the late-19th century, and boomed after the Second World War. This was a “golden age”, as the journalist Vicky Spratt wrote in her book *Tenants*, when council houses were “deliberately aspirational”.

  2. I just don’t think the country should have accepted so many immigrants that rely on council housing to live in London after gaining residency. I’m an immigrant myself and it makes no sense to me from a fiscal, ethical or social lens.

  3. It doesn’t say – and it Really should – that councils were handcuffed and blocked from replenishing the housing stock they were forced to sell. They were forbidden to take loans for that purpose. So they are forced to use third party landlords who rinse them, crippling the councils

  4. I remember when Brits were complaining about Croatians stealing their jobs, lol…

  6. Well, they’ve not helped the situation, have they.

  7. What a ridiculous argument .Also comparing defendants of Huguenots to post Blair wave migrants is pretty funny.

  8. This is separate to social housing. But the big problem with housing is that a lot of it is marketed to and sold off to overseas buyers, with no interest in local sales.

  11. Must be that absolutely huge birth rate Britons have ….

  12. It’s basically starting off with the premise that is Charles the third was from immigrant (European) decent then all immigrants afterwards whether from Africa or Middle East or wherever are now considered ethnicity British, the fact of the matter is we’ve inorganically increased our population massively and it’s had an effect on everything.

  13. That can’t be right. The meme some angry boomer shared on Facebook said it was the boat people who are taking all the new houses…

  14. Yes they did. Your pretense that they didnt is just ignorant delusion. Its basic supply and demand. Mass immigration has caused mass continuous growth in the demand for houses.

  15. In london population growth in the last 25 years comes from immigration. Lower waged labour people movement to the city is largely migrant. We are now trying to house too many people in a too small place. It’s all driven by availability of jobs in the M25, it pulls people in. Let’s look at developing the manchester-liverpool conurbation and birmingham more rather trying to build over every last piece of space in the M25.

  16. While I’m sure that some people are misunderstanding this stat as “people without British *passports* are occupying a big % of social housing”, there is also a more nuanced objection. Immigration is often sold as (essentially) bringing “net contributors” to the UK, who will be working and paying taxes and generally improving the country for everyone. Win win.

    You might therefore take the view that if immigration policy is correctly calibrated, immigrants should on average, need social housing at significantly *lower* rates than the general population, and that if that isn’t the case, our immigration policy is not correctly selecting for the “right” kind of immigrants. Or at least you need to update the argument that immigration is good because immigrants contribute more to the economy than Brits who were born here.

  17. But 52% of all council housing is occupied by non-White British – I don’t think anyone who hasn’t paid in to the system (or who wasn’t born here + with a parent born here) should be allowed to claim any benefits. Why are we uplifting foreigners and non-Whites at our own expense? Get it fucking together England!

  18. https://preview.redd.it/730ixb206vbf1.png?width=795&format=png&auto=webp&s=adf493c7442ecdc402d70c50cda8a86ca1954600

    The Thatcher Government is responsible for the housing crisis. Right To Buy sold off most council houses meaning there wasn’t a baseline of price/quality to compete with the private sector, the functional-ending of construction of council houses meant that supply of housing failed to keep up with demand causing prices to go up, and the deregulation of renting (most notably no-fault evictions) meant that landlords are now much more free to do shitty things in order to raise prices, make money, and provide 2.5cm^(2) as a “home”.

    The UK doesn’t have a crisis in social housing because the wrong people are taking them all. We don’t have enough social housing because we stopped freaking building it! And now everyone in the country, regardless of where they’re from, is worse off for it.

    The housing situation in the UK was arguably at it’s best between the end of reconstruction from WWII until the Thatcher administration, when social housing was intended for everyone who wanted it of whatever income level, and enough was built to accommodate that. Vienna sticks to a similar policy to this day and is one of the cities in Europe least effected by the housing crisis. To me, this demonstrates that the housing situation in the UK is not fixed by stricter and stricted means-testing on social housing and letting less and less people in, making it only for people “poor enough” or “poor and white enough”, but going with the already-proven path of building enough for everyone and accepting that the government may need a more major role in society.

    For a more detailed look at the history of the UK’s housing situation, I reccommend [this video by Tom Nicholas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZpLiJdIGbs), which is where I pulled a lot of stuff for this comment from

    (And yes, I know social housing and council housing are slightly different, but the point applies anyway)

  19. What was that statistic from London, something like 40+% of social housing being occupied by immigrants or foreign persons?

    You cant ignore supply and demand figures.

  20. We will steal back everything you took from the colonies. One council flat at a time. 😂

  21. They’re missing what a lot of these people are implying. They don’t see those children as British. It’s an uncomfortable truth but it’s the only deduction I can reach especially when you consider some of the other narratives running around.

  22. They have sure as Hell exacerbated it though. Mass migration, starting in the early noughties and since, had put untold pressure on social housing. It was bad enough that the Tories in the 80s/90s slammed the brakes on council housing, now it’s under pressure from increasing volumes of migrants from the Eastern bloc to start with, then Arab countries, S. Asia, and Africa. It’s no good arguing about what caused it, we need to stop the flood of people who come from abroad.

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