Fairytale housing is building up new problems

Solve one social problem but don't cause another crisis.

Imogen Ball

Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest on a new housing development in the South-West of England.

A CGI of a new housing estate viewed from above.

Home Builders Federation.

This time last year Labour promised 1.5 million new homes as part of its election campaign. Now plans are afoot to get these houses well and truly off the ground. New housing is seen as the salvific answer to one of Britain’s greatest social problems. The housing crisis sees rent-avoiding sofa surfers, impossibly high interest rates (except from the bank of mum and dad), and a scarcity of social housing.

New builds are to the housing crisis what the fairy godmother was to Cinderella. Adequate and safe housing is an essential infrastructure for any society and is a fundamental human right. With an influx of new properties on the market, prices fall, social and affordable housing increases, and people are able to buy before their inheritance arrives. Families on housing waiting lists can live in a home somewhere they know. New housing offers Britons opportunities to find, purchase, and live in their forever, fairytale homes. In theory.

It could turn out to be a nightmare. We are instead sentencing them to social and spiritual isolation. By focusing on building houses, we fail to meet the essential human need for community, social interaction, and connection. (Wo)man is not, and never will be an island. Building homes is not enough. We must also build communities.

As we build community we safeguard against the epidemic of loneliness, segregation, and isolation

On new housing developments, organic community creation is challenging. Momentum is required to create communities. The government’s house building target does recognise the need for infrastructures such as doctor’s surgeries and schools. But these are not developers’ priorities. And they are also not enough to embed community into those new developments.

Can you imagine your fairytale home without the corner shop for an emergency pint of milk? Or without the café for bleary eyed mums and babes? Or without the play park, pub, poo bin, and postbox? Can you imagine your happily ever after will be without a local hall for big birthday celebrations, for scout groups, and for Pilates? What about a church, with bells ringing out the universal soundtrack of Sunday mornings, offering a space to breathe, to pray, and to explore your own spiritual journey?

We have recently moved onto a new housing development and have seen firsthand the need for community amongst these supposedly dream homes. We are also part of a new church here, writing a different story and weaving community throughout the development. Knowing our neighbours’ names and giving and receiving help are part of embracing social interaction. Our pop-up coffee bike is a place where people can gather and get to know one another around a nearly-expertly brewed beverage. This is the beginning of human connection within a community.

But the church also offers a place for spiritual connection. New housing without the opportunities for human and spiritual connection leave residents on a cliffhanger. The church offers people another ending to their fairytale. Because the dream-like show-home does not become our own and we are left with the disappointment of reality. The story of Jesus speaks of miracles not magic wands, redemption not Red Riding Hood, the Prince of Peace not Prince Charming. In the void left by developers, Jesus can speak, the Spirit can move, and the church can show up to offer human and spiritual connection and meaningful community.

Though these new builds may solve the housing crisis, they may also contribute to a crisis of community across our nation. But as we build community we safeguard against the epidemic of loneliness, segregation, and isolation. We imagine spaces into being so that community can flourish. Perhaps then we can look forward together to a different kind of happily ever after.

Article

Comment

Gaza

Middle East

1 October 2024

5 min read

The human cost of the Israel-Gaza war

A veteran volunteer surgeon laments a well lived life.

Tim Goodacre

Tim Goodacre is a reconstructive plastic surgeon, and volunteer at a hospital in Gaza.

AbdulRahman at work.

Tim Goodacre.

The Israel-Gaza war rages on. Every few days a new tragedy hits our dulled senses. The West Bank and now Lebanon are getting dragged into the conflict. Palestinians and hostages continue to die, and hunger and disease threaten Gaza's displaced people as autumn and winter approach.

Yet what is often lost is the human face of this conflict. This is the story of one such life.

AbdulRahman was an intelligent, gentle and diligent young third year medical student in his early twenties, with judgement well beyond his peers. Towards the end of 2023, as the war spread more viciously towards southern Gaza, he was one a group of around 10 students who volunteered to join the team of health care workers at the European Gaza Hospital (EGH). I was volunteering there as a reconstructive plastic surgeon and and met him in the hospital.

Both medical schools in Gaza before the war began were in the north alongside their parent universities. They had been destroyed during the onslaught in the early months of fighting. In the southern town of Khan Younis, the EGH was the sole surviving operational facility to which the wounded could be transferred. It was overwhelmed by the vast numbers of families also taking refuge in what was deemed a safer space than most of the surrounding war zone.

Many of the senior medical staff and surgeons had retreated to scattered parts of the strip, displaced frequently by the ever-moving conflict and driven by the need to support their families and stay together. ‘Live together-die together’ is an understandable feature in the horror show of war. Students, frequently left with no money or resources, started to volunteer to serve in hospitals in exchange for a little food and a sense of worth in the work they could offer. Any functioning hospital, if briefly ‘deconflicted’ so they could provide relatively safe care, found itself staffed by a disparate crew of local staff, displaced students, and an indeterminate number of more senior surgeons from both Gaza and humanitarian agencies.

His desire to learn all that could be learnt, and to try to become the best surgeon possible, was palpable.

It was into this chaotic mix that young AbdulRahman walked having fled his family home in the east of Khan Younis in November 2023. A bright young man, with great aspirations to qualify as a surgeon and serve his community, he had spent the first six weeks of the war at home, unable to attend his medical school in Gaza City to the north, but working hard at his studies regardless, using every online and library resource available to him.

At some point in late November, the battle zone moved south, and his family home was shelled along with many dwellings in the vicinity. Caught in crossfire, he sheltered in his neighbouring relative’s house after his parents and other close family had escaped to Rafah.

Abdulrahman told me the dramatic story of his escape into the house in which he survived for a week alongside his relative’s family when I spoke to him in late January 2024. This young man not only survived an ordeal of indescribable fear and potential slaughter, but he was then arrested and interrogated in brutal fashion by IDF forces.

On his release after a harrowing week, he made his way barefoot to the nearest hospital, which happened to be the EGH. In that place of safety, he was given food and water and after recuperation, volunteered to work alongside a reconstructive plastic and burns surgeon who had recently returned to Gaza after training in the UK.

Although his family were still all alive in Rafah in displaced makeshift shelters, he opted to stay and throw his weight into whatever he could do to support the hospital whilst continuing to learn his profession as a doctor. Travelling occasionally at great personal risk to see and support his family, he devoted all his waking hours to surgical work in EGH operating theatres and wards. His excellent command of English made him immensely valuable to any visiting surgeons who managed to access Gaza during the war months. He was always cheerful, always willing to respond to requests for his time, however stressful the surrounding clamour from desperate patients and relatives might become.

When his working day was done, in the middle of the night he would arrange for his fellow students to have informal teaching seminars from whoever he could cajole to deliver them, and would absorb knowledge and ideas about best practice like a sponge. His desire to learn all that could be learnt, and to try to become the best surgeon possible, was palpable.

I had every intention of supporting this fine young man in achieving his professional aspirations by whatever means I could once a ceasefire arose and he could be brought safely to Europe to continue his training.

In the last week of August, AbdulRahman was sheltering in a relative’s house in Khan Younis. In the small hours of the morning an Israeli attack was launched on the neighbourhood and the house took a direct hit. AbdulRahman was killed instantly.

He knew, as does every Gazan in these troubled times, that nowhere was safe, and all lives in that tragic zone are at risk. His is a story of a life tragically cut short, of the randomness and destructiveness of war. His death strikes right at the heart of my hopes for the remnant of the fine young population of such a desperately sad nation state. He, and those like him, could have been at the heart of the re-building of Gaza, able to live in what now feels a far-off peace. I cannot translate this into anger, as AbdulRahman himself had a passionate concern for peace and reconciliation, and never once spoke to me in many conversations of support for Hamas, or of hatred for those who had destroyed his country.

What can be done however, is to honour his life and commitment with similar tenacity in supporting the pursuit of peace, justice for his people, learning and education for the remnant of the nation, and reconstruction of a Palestine that can proudly and honourably reflect the finest values it possesses. AbdulRahman was a great Palestinian, and his all too short life was one which I want to celebrate as one of the finest I have seen in many students of the next generation of doctors. May he rest in peace, and may a lasting peace come quickly to Gaza, to all of Palestine and the whole of the Middle East.