Imagination and sacrifice: why our housing vision needs both

I arrived in Britain in 1980 as a refugee aged 13, following the impact of the Islamic Revolution in my home country of Iran. Having left with no more than a suitcase each, my family were welcomed here and were offered housing by the Church of England. That early stability gave us the base from which we were able to rebuild our lives.

Forty years later I was asked to be the first Bishop for Housing, responsible for taking forward the recommendations of ‘Coming Home’, the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing, Church and Community. The Commission was tasked with thinking through how the Church of England should respond to the housing crisis in which eight million people in England were living in overcrowded, unaffordable or unsuitable housing.

The Coming Home report sets out a theological vision for housing and community, although it doesn’t assume that readers will be people of faith. It begins there, however, because the Commission was convinced that any vision for housing and long-term strategy should be anchored in something that can transcend the flawed workings of markets and the shifting sands of government policy, which are the dominant forces shaping the housing system we have now.

As a Bishop, I believe that if we ground our vision for housing in the Christian understanding that every human being is created in God’s image and possesses an inherent dignity and value, it follows that every man, woman and child, every older or disabled person, deserves to have a decent, affordable house to call home – irrespective of their income, social class, or ethnic identity.

This conviction led people of faith in earlier generations to work towards providing homes for those in greatest need. The almshouse movement is a prime example, dating back to medieval times, when parishes and religious orders cared for people who were poor, elderly or infirm and provided hospitality to travellers. They built houses of such good quality that many are still occupied today.

Then in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Church played a significant role in forming many voluntary housing societies. Some of today’s largest housing associations were originally started by people motivated by their faith to address the visible poverty and need around them.

An outstanding example is Octavia Hill (1828–1912), co-founder of the National Trust and a lifelong social reformer, who initiated the provision of good, well maintained and well-designed social housing in Victorian London. By 1874, she held over 3,000 tenancies, and instead of the overcrowding and 12% return on the investment that many landlords expected, Octavia settled for a more modest 5% return, ensuring that some of the money was used to keep the buildings in good repair and to improve the community.

A decade after she died, a young priest called Basil Jellicoe arrived in Somerstown, near Euston station in London. He quickly discovered the dire state of housing in his parish and denounced this as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace’, for it revealed the ‘callous indifference of those with power and influence’. He went on to set up the St Pancras House Improvement Society, and although he died at just 36 years of age, the re-housing schemes started by his society had by then provided many good quality flats, with gardens, trees, ponds, swings for the children, and other amenities. The rents charged were no more than what the tenants paid for their old slums, yet their lives were transformed.

These stories of overcoming numerous challenges to provide housing which honours the innate human dignity of every individual – especially people at the margins of society – teach us two fundamental lessons.

The first is that we must be clear what housing is for. The book ‘Reimagining Britain,’ which underpinned the Archbishops’ Commission, states, ‘We must… reimagine housing. The first form of reimagining is to reclaim the purpose of housing. Housing exists as a basis for community and community exists for human flourishing.’ This needs to be strong enough to counterbalance the powerful undercurrent, the tacit narrative which says that owning housing is the best way to grow your capital, increase your personal wealth, and provide for your future.

While those are legitimate ambitions, they should be tempered by the moral imperative of ensuring that people in housing poverty have the opportunity to live in decent, affordable homes. That cannot happen without a willingness to make sacrifices: landlords accepting a lower rent than the market allows (markets are a-moral - they only reveal what is, not what ought to be); homeowners not fighting tooth and nail to oppose some new housing nearby, providing it has been well designed and thought through; landowners sacrificing the maximum ‘hope value’ of their undeveloped land for a more modest return. This is the second lesson: without sacrifices by those with broader shoulders, we will perpetuate the status quo in which people on lower incomes and at the margins of society are the ones who must keep making sacrifices, for they have no alternative but to live in unsafe, inadequate, unaffordable and unstable housing.

A long-term housing strategy needs to hold fast to the vision of homes for all that are comfortable, safe and secure. It needs to win over all the stakeholders in the housing system to work together towards providing decent, affordable homes – both new and refurbished – set in neighbourhoods where residents can find a sense of belonging and purpose.

Alongside the planners, engineers, investors and builders who can tackle the momentous task of delivering 300,000 houses a year, we also need leaders who will champion the cause year in, year out, who when it’s really difficult remind us what our destination is, our vision for good housing. Leaders who will say, let’s create relational communities not just build houses; let’s design beautiful homes that are adaptable for different generations; let’s make inclusive neighbourhoods where there’s a home for everyone which reflects their innate human dignity; let’s keep making the sacrifices necessary for dignity and justice to prevail; let’s be architects of place, where our children and grandchildren can put down roots, experience belonging, and create streets, neighbourhoods and towns where individuals and communities can flourish.