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

Climate

Comment

Politics

22 September 2024

5 min read

Climate meets politics at UN summits, so who will save us?

It's that time of year when commitments to change are sought. Is there a different way to power the energy transition?

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A fallen statute with tyre tracks over it lies on the steps to a government building, in a form of protest.

Climate protest, Berlin.

Nico Roicke on Unsplash.

We’re coming up to a tipping point: the autumn equinox, when the balance of light and dark shifts. For some, this season change still carries the possibility of September – new term, fresh notebook; for others, myself included, there’s more a feeling of ‘here we go again’ with the nights closing in and the hurtle to the end of another year.

On the global scale, it also kicks off the pattern of international summits and negotiations to drive progress on making this world, our world, a bit fairer, safer, and more hopeful. World leaders gather in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly; then it won’t be long until the next UN Climate Summit (COP29) in Baku, swiftly followed by discussions in Busan to create a new UN Treaty to end plastic pollution. Perhaps that draws another sigh; here we go again.

But there’s something new this time on the agenda in New York: the UN’s Summit of the Future on 22-23 September. It is being touted as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to forge a better way forward. Will this be the moment that saves not just us, but future generations and the natural world too?

A few years ago, I was involved in organising an event that brought together experts in sustainable development from science, government and civil society. To get the conversation going, we wrote this question on a flipchart: What will save us over the next decade? We asked people to cast their vote with a sticker, giving them just three options: government; society; technology.

As people gathered around, we noticed a general pattern emerging:

the scientists voted for government
the civil servants voted for society
people from civil society voted for technology

There seemed to be subtext to all this:

‘Who will save us?

Not me.’

I wonder if in that moment, the people voting – knowledgeable and connected, experts in their industries – were feeling the limits of their power.

When we brush up against our own limitations, it can be tempting to look elsewhere for reassurance. I find hope in a too-little-known story of change, a kind of David and Goliath story , that cuts across government, society and technology. A story that has seen leaders held to account, voices heard and literally billions of dollars shifted out of fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence.

People said it was impossible, because no one had ever done it before. For decades, the UK and other wealthy nations provided billions in taxpayers’ money for fossil fuel projects in other countries around the world. People’s taxes were spent on a gas plant in Mozambique, oil fields in Brazil, thereby fuelling the climate crisis and risking locking low-income countries into using fossil fuels for decades to come instead of investing in the clean energy transition.

This is a transition that has begun. In most places around the world, solar and wind are cheaper and more easily accessible than oil, gas or coal. Power is transformational; it fuels homes, schools and hospitals, it unlocks jobs, education and healthcare. And it’s getting to the point where there’s little reason it can’t be renewable.

With the technology getting there, it became time for the political will to shift too. So, a few years ago, a small group of campaigners came together to push for an end to this funding in the UK. They built relationships with MPs and civil servants, they got the media interested in this fairly niche issue, and they worked with the communities affected by UK-funded projects, coming with a straight-forward message that got to the heart of the injustice: stop funding fossil fuels overseas.

And it worked. In December 2020, the UK announced an end to all taxpayer support for overseas fossil fuel projects, the first high-income country to do this. But not the last. In the run up to the 2021 UN Climate Summit, campaigners and civil servants worked to get 38 more countries and large banks to make the same commitment to end funding for fossil fuels and shift it into renewable energy projects. With Norway and Australia joining at COP28 last year, that group now numbers 41, and represents over $28 billion a year that could be shifted from fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It’s not been plain sailing, and it’s not fully in the bag. For a few years, I got work alongside the incredible advocates at the frontline of this work. A few weeks ago, some of them published a new report which found good progress on the fossil fuels part of the pledge but much more work needed from governments on getting that money into the renewable energy projects that could be transformative for the 685 million people who currently don’t have access to electricity.

This story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years.

One of the hot topics at the Summit for the Future, is whether the leaders can agree to transition away from fossil fuels in a new ‘Pact for the Future’, echoing language that was fought for, weakened, then mostly put back into the final commitment made at COP28 last year. (This counts as a high stakes drama in the climate policy world). It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence. For nearly 80 years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been protecting people – or showing the gap when their rights are being violated.

And really, this isn’t just about words, it’s about power.

Part of the problem with our question on that flipchart was that it divorced people and opportunities, rather than bringing them together. The best way of driving change is to build collective power, holding each other and our decision-makers to account.

Perhaps thinking of the future brings more fear than hope. But this story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years. And lived out with God. This is a partnership that he invites us into: to join in his work of seeing a world full of potential being nurtured and restored. We might not see the whole change we hope for, but sometimes we’ll get to see the scales tip.

The energy transition has begun – but it’ll take the collective influence of a movement of people to ensure that it’s fast, fair and serves those who need it most. With a big gap remaining between the finance needed and the finance pledged, all eyes are on this year's COP29 in Baku to see tangible progress.

Here we go again.