Fighting rent exploitation and empowering tenants through Bristol’s
community union
Will Quick 14 February 2016 Fighting rent exploitation and empowering tenants through
Bristol’s community union2016-02-14T09:48:49+00:00Comment, England
& Wales, Society 1 Comment
The housing crisis so blighting
Britain is one the biggest social justice problems we face. Bristol has been
one of the cities most acutely affected outside of London. Short sighted
housing policy (particularly Right to Buy, which has reduced Bristol’s nearly
50,000 council homes of the 1970s to less than 30,000 today) and a lack of
investment have left affordable homes in short supply.
Between
2011 and 2014 annual rents in Bristol
increased by £1272, while wages fell by £1730 in real terms (in
that same time landlords in Bristol made 2857 repossession orders). Average
rents reportedly rose another 18% last
year.
These
extreme rents are pricing people and entire communities out of areas of our
city, and has contributed to a massive explosion in homelessness. Many of the
homes we do have are of extremely poor quality. Over 1/3 have unacceptable
levels of damp and mould, and our housing stock is the least insulated in
Europe –nationally leading to
over 20,000 deaths a year and wasting huge amounts of energy
(and massively contributing to fuel poverty).
As well as paying increasingly
exorbitant rents for damp and cold homes, tenants face rip off letting fees and
insecure tenancies with contracts often lasting only 6 months or a year. This
forces renters (increasingly families with children who need to go to school)
to keep moving and paying hundreds of pounds for the privilege via letting
fees.
In early 2014, ACORN the community
union started organising in East Bristol. Holding stalls and knocking on
hundreds of doors our first organisers started to spread the word about
building a community union to protect our interests in our neighbourhoods. In
May 2014, over 100 Easton residents came together to found ACORN UK’s first
branch, voting to focus on housing and committing us to fighting to end
evictions, rip-off tenancy fees, and unhealthy housing. Since then we’ve
mobilised over 13,000 people in our campaigns, where we’ve tackled
slum-landlords, won tens of thousands of pounds in repairs and rent reductions,
and moved local politicians, the City Council, landlords, letting agents,
charities and student organisations to back our Ethical Lettings charter to
regulate renting in the city.
Our campaigns are led by our members,
and embedded in the tradition of solidarity. When one of our members has a
problem with their landlord or letting agent, we do whatever we can to support
them. Be it advice on the law and their rights, support and company to see a
landlord or agent, lobbying local authorities, petitioning, and (most
effectively) taking direct action.
We’ve held pickets and demonstrations
outside some of the worst slum landlords (who were forcing our members to live
in unsanitary poorly maintained homes that were damaging to their health), and
time and again got results. Many of these landlords are also local business
owners and you don’t need to stand outside their premises for long, telling
(and showing with pictures) their customers about the terrible conditions
they’re making tenants live in, before said landlord gives in and agrees to
make the repairs.
We’ve also demonstrated against the
unscrupulous practices of particular letting agents. For example, in an attempt
to further profiteer off of the housing crisis C J Hole in Southville sent out
a letter to local landlords, asking them ‘are you getting enough rent?’ saying
‘with rents increasing every week in Bristol, it is highly likely your property
is due a rent increase’ and encourages landlords to sign up with C J Hole to
raise their rent. Attempts to aggressively raise the rent by estate agents like
C J Hole contributes to the spiralling cost of housing, the gentrification of
our communities and the social misery of Bristol renters.
We teamed up with 38 Degrees to build
a petition against C J Hole’s terrible practice that got over 11,000
signatures, we marched down to their premises to hand it in, and held a lively
demonstration outside attended by hundreds of people. This action dominated the
local press (and
We’ve just started expanding into
South Bristol (as well as into cities across the UK), and as part of setting up
a new branch we’ve been ringing round local estate agents to get the low down
on their policies. Within the first week of running this campaign one of our
members was told by Bedminster Taylor’s estate agents that they didn’t accept
people on benefits because ‘Landlords don’t want people on the dole with their
pitbulls when they could be getting doctors and lawyers’. Another member posing
as an estate agent was advised not to rent to ‘those people’ (people on
benefits) as they would ruin her house.
The stereotype contained in what
their estate agent said on its own is disgusting. But the bigger problem is the
fairly widespread discrimination against benefit claimants by estate agents and
landlords. Where do they expect people to live? We’re going to campaigning to
raise awareness to these disturbing and discriminatory practices, and against
the exploitative unethical letting in general that characterises much of
Bristol’s rental sector. You can do one small thing to help us by signing the
petition against Taylor’s below. Everyone has the right to a home, regardless
of what profit hungry estate agent’s like Bedminster Taylor’s thinks.
By bringing local residents together,
and empowering them to take the direct action they need ACORN has made a
difference to hundreds of individual people in Bristol, and is continually
putting housing back on the agenda. The housing crisis won’t be solved by the
politicians who have created it and who profit off it. Its only by tenants
coming together in unions like ACORN and standing up for themselves that we
have any chance.
As Nick Ballard, our lead organiser,
says:
As an organisation from and of
the communities we work in, our campaigns reflect the realities and priorities
of those communities – communities of interest and geography. What began as a
local response to exploitative rental conditions in a particular Bristol
neighbourhood quickly spread across the city and we are now working on a
national scale. Our housing crisis is national in scope and a grassroots
response from those directly affected is a crucial part of the solution.
Whether the problem is access to services, dignified housing or a living wage
the answer necessarily lies in daily engagement in our communities; building
power, confidence, resilience and crucially, the sense that we are entitled to
a decent life. Action from the base is the lifeblood of any democracy. In the
words of the original ACORN slogan: the people shall rule.
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