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In the week leading up to my 30th birthday I had some strange dreams. One stood out above all the rest. It was twilight and I was leaning over the gate to my granddad’s old garden. In the dream, the garden was just as it used to be – an acre of so planted with vegetables, with waist-length nettles in one corner, a little hillock in another, and a sparse line of trees on the long side adjacent to a paddock where a dun pony lived. Even while I was dreaming, I knew that the garden – and indeed the paddock – were no longer like this. I knew I was looking at something that, like just about every ‘vacant’ green space around here, now has houses built on top of it.
During my lifetime, there have been houses upon houses built at each extremity of the village. The last couple of years have been particularly busy: it has been like a perpetual building site. The horses no longer spook at the skips and cement bags: they are a fact of life.
I have mixed feelings about all of this building work. I detest the disappearance of places I knew, places I played; yet I know that villages must grow. But the thing that annoys me about all of this building is that most of those new homes are not affordable housing for local people; they’re too expensive for that. Rather they’re retirement and holiday homes for the better off.
I had been ‘lucky’ to get the flat of the phantom, floods and pestilence - or so everybody kept telling me. I suppose I was, because affordable, rented accommodation isn’t that easy to come by where I live.
When I rang the local council to say I was being made homeless in three months and to ask whether they would help, I could almost hear the suppressed laughter humming down the wires. As I was not pregnant, did not have a drug or alcohol problem, or a child, I was not considered a priority.
When I was put through to the housing officer, he fairly snorted with mirth. “Ms M&M,” he said, “we don’t let houses where you live, we sell them.” “So what do you expect me to do?” I asked. “Pitch a tent in the garden?” His advice? Change the locks, then the landlord would require a court order to remove me and that would buy me a further six months. It was not a route I was prepared to follow.
Let’s face it, lots of local people can’t afford to get on that hallowed property ladder in a rural community that’s full of ‘desirable’ (at least in the summer) houses. If you’re not in a position to buy, you need to rent. But finding somewhere to rent can be equally competitive and ultimately heartbreaking.
I can quite understand why someone would prefer to let out a house to tourists for £350 a week in the summer instead of £350 a month all year round. It makes perfect economic sense. But it also makes me want to stamp my feet with frustration and do my Violet Elizabeth impression.
When plans were put forward for housing association, affordable property for rent, the NIMBYs circulated a petition. They didn’t want rented houses near them; heaven forbid, it would bring down the value of their homes. The council ignored them, the houses were built and filled in a flash. The waiting list is now so long, the housing association is refusing to add any more names to it.
Vacant council houses are as rare as rocking horse poo. As the housing officer says, they’ve mainly been sold. Quite a few are with their second generation of owners …as second homes for affluent folk who fancy a weekend on the coast.
