The whole issue is the creation of a (false) shortage of housing for no other reason than to create over priced housing. This is how capitalism works. Just like diamonds. If the released all the diamonds available on to the market you would be picking them up for pennies.
This is part of the Tory agenda. Asset stripping the state to line the pockets of exploitative capitalist. Think of the amount of HB going into private pockets and SOLELY because this country chose NOT TO INVEST in housing.
And so many people have now grown up totally ignorant of the real role of social housing. The era of "never had it so good" was not because a tiny % of the population was becoming filthy rich but because society chose to create a system that allowed more people to have a better standard of living.
Prefabs had nothing to do with the 60s. They were a well thought out solution to the real housing crisis at the end of WWII. They were family homes. They had gardens (partly assuming people would grow their own vegetables) and were so well built that they exceeded by decades their original short term purpose. www.prefabmuseum.uk/content/history/design-and-architecture
On top of everything else as a society we seem to have totally lost the ability to do any job where people are invested in their work. There used to be standards that meant you couldn't claim a house had a double bedroom unless it could fit certain items of furniture. But guess what - the tories abolished it because they said people would be prepared to live in rabbit hutches if it was their own. So all this aspiration to buy is actually a con because most modern housing is not only shoddy, but the space provided is actually what was previously illegal. But we have become so dumb that if tv life style programmes tell us we should aspire to that we do.
I honestly despair at how passively we are driven by misleading advertising and reactionary news outlets.
And all this talk about a container could be okay. Of course it isn't okay. And even if it was for say a month, the problem is it is always longer than that in a hostile anti social environment. And no I dont mean the people but living on an industrial estate.
And why are these loathsome speculators able to do this? Because the Tories have said that you dont have to get planning permission to convert offices into accommodation.
And then there are those malicious stories about pensioners. There has just been a report that pensioners are now poorer than they were in the 1980s. And guess what, the UK is the worst in Europe.
Look at this story of a single woman who at the age of 61 ended up sleeping in a phone box even though she was in work. www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/woman-full-time-job-slept-2534028
We need a government that will enforce higher rates of pay, and bring down the cost of housing. As someone said up thread. We should nationalise all the houses and flats unoccupied and make them available to people who dont have a home.
We need towns and cities that are made up of people with a range of backgrounds and jobs. If London just becomes somewhere for the super rich no one will be around to do the shit work, because even if they wanted to do the work by commuting in from some remote area they couldn't afford the fares.
What we are living in is the consequences of letting market forces set the standard.