Paul Smith and Vicky Spratt: How Do We Solve the Housing Crisis? (Bristol Ideas)

Paul Smith and Vicky Spratt talk about rent controls and homes for all through new council housing, and about creating better lives and places for people.
We face a housing crisis and this crisis has been present for many decades. We all need a roof over our heads and a community to live and prosper in. Too many people don’t have this: 22 million people (including children) don’t have a safe, secure, stable home. Many people are homeless and living on the street. We’re not building enough houses, and not enough of the ones we build are affordable. We used to build hundreds of thousands of council houses and now build very few. No fault evictions are back. And it’s all been made worse by the pandemic.
Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency, joins Paul Smith, former Bristol City councillor and Cabinet Member for Homes and Communities. They discuss the facts of the crisis, Bristol housing, council housing, the importance of being established in a place, what councils can - and can’t - do, what national government needs to do, rent controls, and the need for a politics of possibility.
In conversation with Andrew Kelly, Bristol Ideas.
This recording was made before the prime minister’s announcement about home ownership and right to buy.
Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt: www.waterstones.com/book/tena...
Presented by Bristol Ideas. Find out more: www.bristolideas.co.uk/
Image credits: Paul Smith - Ocean Media; Vicky Spratt - Poppy Thorpe

[@Teddokrato]

Hate say it but mass migration won't help the crisis.
Not a fascist or knuckle dragger, just saying a fact

[@silentmentor5888]

You have managed to put up millions of illegal migrants in lovely hotels. Why can’t you do the same for your actual English citizens?

[@iampennochio]

"We know how to solve it, social housing and rental regulation". So here are the problems of this type of thinking.
Essentially restrict landlords from exercising their rights on the properties they have built (price cap) thereby decreasing their want to invest in housing which exasperates the rental problem because you just terminated the main source of rental properties. Alternatively tax every working individual indefinitely more, (but not the unproductive) to cover the material and labour building costs for social housing and the corrupt bureaucratic gouging that will follow.
Then you have the problems of green policies inflating costs dramatically, immigration and globalism. You cant put the toothpaste back in the tube.
You are more likely to be a man and homeless than a woman with a child, black or marginalised, it is the primary defining characteristic. Who's off track here?
Why does she think the possibilities are endless but that nobody has any of these ideas or is engaged in any of these endeavours presently? Ideology anyone?
So how exactly are we "just going to give everyone a home?" While we are at it why not just make everyone a millionaire? So easy right? Nope!