HASHI MOHAMED
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Somali parents, Hashi Mohamed came to the UK aged nine alongside his siblings as unaccompanied refugees; they lived with an aunt in Brent before being eventually reunited with their mother. He attended some of the UK’s worst comprehensive schools before going on to the University of Hertfordshire and then Oxford. After training as a barrister, he became one of the UK’s most high-profile planning lawyers, as well as working as a broadcaster and author. His second book, the slim polemic A Home of One’s Own (Profile Books, 2022), details how his experience in insecure housing has informed his career in planning law, and how the housing crisis continues to distort the lives of people in the UK and around the world who have no access to a safe and permanent home in which to live.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait courtesy of Hashi Mohamed
NELL WHITTAKER The book begins with you describing the interminable journeys you and your family took to the council offices when you were a child. Why start there?
HASHI MOHAMED The purpose of the story was to try to bring to life our own personal experience, which began with going to a Brent Council building called Mahatma Gandhi House, where you would end up if you were trying to be housed by the council. We were living in a very precarious set of circumstances – in squalor and crowded accommodation, alongside multigenerational families fleeing war and poverty, coming together in an environment where we were trying to desperately start a new life and learn a new language, a new culture, all the while trying to have a sustainable roof over our heads. I go on to talk about my work as a planning lawyer and what I’ve learned over the years about the housing crisis – how it’s come to this, and how what I’ve learned has influenced my personal and professional outlook. That’s the precis of the book as a whole.
NW What has led to the state that we’re in currently?
HM The housing crisis as we currently know it is not something that happened overnight. This is a problem 30 years in the making, involving multiple governments of all colours. It’s a combination of both failure in policy and the movement of global capital around the world. To unpack it, we should start with the post-war period when there was an unprecedented amount of housing built for an economy recovering from a horrendous war. Then if we follow it through to the late 1960s, early 1970s, that growth starts to stagnate a little, before we go through a period of major strikes and the standoff between the Conservative government and the unions. It culminated in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power, when one of the things that she did in order to gain votes was to allow people to buy their own council houses. At that time, 40-something percent of people were being housed in some sort of local government-council-owned properties. Here we have a policy, which was originally a Labour policymaker’s idea: why don’t you let these people own their own homes, giving them maximum autonomy? This took out a huge amount of housing stock that was never really replaced. When this was followed by a huge liberalisation of our economic system in the 1980s and 1990s, housing was left predominantly to the private sector to provide, so the markets essentially took over. In that period there was a mind shift, where people moved from seeing their houses as places to live and grow up and build memories in to seeing them as investments in which to put their money, partly because pensions were not really working. This all carried on for another decade and a half when Labour came into power. They concentrated predominantly on child poverty, public services, the NHS, education, but never really grappled with the issue of housing. It all culminates in the situation we’re in now, where we have six major house builders on which we rely, a completely depleted housing stock in terms of social housing, a significant increase in immigration and huge under-occupation of properties. We have something like 60 million spare bedrooms in this country: we have lots and lots of people living in houses that they really don’t need, and lots and lots of people living in houses that are way too overcrowded. Then, of course, the market in London and the southeast is open to the world, so people in Hong Kong and Singapore and the Middle East and Russia are parking their cash in London because they know it’s a safe bet: the demand will never be met by the supply.
NW You note, also, that we’ve had 12 housing ministers since 2010…
HM Exactly. No one wants to touch the problem.
NW Something that marks your approach to housing is your treating it as a humanitarian issue, and one in which individuals need to take responsibility. You write, “As a homeowner myself, I can understand the trepidation around seeing all you’ve known transformed in an instant. But I also think to myself, where is the intergenerational solidarity in all this?” I’m interested in that approach, of marrying policy to empathy.
HM No one can deny that people who bought their houses in the 1970s and 1980s worked very hard to be able to do that – they saved up and sacrificed and so on – but they just don’t understand the challenges that a person in their 20s or 30s faces today. It’s incomparable to the challenges they faced, when a couple in their twenties could get a mortgage three times their salary, for which they needed to put down a five-percent deposit, for a house that would probably take them another ten years to do up bit by bit. Today, if you look at the average salary in London or the southeast and the average salary of a person trying to get on the property ladder, they’re on completely different planets. Yet instead of having some sort of intergenerational solidarity, we get a caricaturing of young people spending their money on Netflix and avocados. It’s just so crass. It’s not that these young people are any less hardworking, it’s that the market in which we are asking them to participate is completely out of kilter. It was really important for me not to generalise in a way that pits the older generation against the younger, but to try and hold the mirror up to those different parts of society with a view to saying, “Look, this is your problem, this is our problem, and this is how we might be able to resolve it.”
NW The rental market is also incredibly dysfunctional. Statistics suggest that, in the UK, there have never been more people searching for rooms and so few rooms available, and which cost so much.
HM Then on top of that, you have to have to pay at least one month’s deposit and one month upfront. Sometimes people are competing and pitted against each other, or forced to pay six months up front. It’s greed, right? Many of the properties in London being rented out by landlords are mortgage-free. Even if they are paying £400 a month for their mortgage, they will probably be renting that place for two grand, so everything else is more or less a profit. I find that unconscionable.
NW You focus mostly on the UK, but you also note there’s not a city in the world that’s growing and in which people want to live that’s not suffering from a massive housing crisis. Why is this a worldwide phenomenon?
HM Over the last 20 or 25 years, the lucrative and highly sought-after jobs have become concentrated in the Global North – though not exclusively, because places like Lagos or Nairobi or Cape Town are also suffering. When the job market is concentrated in certain areas, you have a huge amount of migration. This is in turn supported by the service sector – the young Spaniard or Portuguese guy who comes to London to work in Caffè Nero, or the Filipina woman working in the NHS; they aren’t coming here for a well-paid job, though it might be well-paid in comparison to where they’re from. Yet whether you’ve come to London for the well-paid job or the service job, you’re competing for a finite number of houses – whether you’re four or five nurses living in a crowded twobedroom apartment or a banker who’s come over from France or Hong Kong living in prime real estate in Belgravia. In places which see huge immigration – Hong Kong, Toronto, Vancouver, New York, California, London, Paris – there are people who I would consider to be indigenous in the sense that they were born and bred there, not based on race, who are competing with that global world. They’re becoming increasingly poor in their own communities in their own cities, because of the fact that somebody from Toronto can relocate to London and buy a flat that they could never afford even though they’ve lived there all their life, and vice versa. That is probably the most perverse part of this analysis, just how much that globalised world severely and disproportionately impacts people who are struggling to engage with the market.
NW You stop short of calling to redistribute housing, of taking back housing from private landlords, but anti-landlord sentiment is getting more and more widespread as anger at the private-ownership system rises. What are your thoughts on that?
HM I’ve had a few landlords write to me saying that I’m demonising them. One of them said to me, “If it wasn’t for me and my properties there’d be so many more people homeless.” My reply is, look, this is just one property that you have in your portfolio – you have deprived five or six other people the opportunity to own one of those properties. I’m not saying that’s criminal behaviour; I’m just saying that a market that allows you to have ten properties while a young person can’t buy one until they’re forty is scandalous. The sentiment that is growing against the landlord system is, I think, justified. However, it doesn’t just sit at the feet of the landlords themselves. It’s at the feet of governments, the way our markets are working, our attitudes to properties, our views on how we see homes and all of that. But the fact that so many people have been able to profit from it in the most egregious and grotesque way while so many other people are struggling to have a home of their own is a real stain on our collective conscience.
NW You’re clear on the consequences of this, that people lose faith en masse in the social contract itself. How far along that journey are we?
HM I think we are probably very close. Or I might go even further and say that we are already beyond that tipping point. If you think about a young person today who’s just come out of university with around £45,000 worth of debt, they have no real chance of getting a job that will pay them enough to be able to live comfortably in London, or be able to get on the property ladder before they’re 40, or pay off that debt before they are 60. They are much more likely to work for longer and for a lot less money, and they’re much more likely to move around and change jobs multiple times, and generally go through life precariously. They’re hit with that triple whammy – a very expensive education, the unlikelihood of getting on the property ladder until much later, and a poor pension and late retirement. If you’re a young person coming to the table, you’re thinking, you people have been having a wonderful party, you have feasted beyond belief, and you’ve left us the scraps. That, for me, is the social contract crashing right before our eyes.
NW You identify three solutions to the problem: we need better leadership, to build more council homes, and reform the banking and mortgage systems. Easily done! Which one is the most important?
HM If we don’t have better leadership, then we’re not going to be able to build more homes. We need people to be able to forge ahead, to say, “This is what society could look like, and this is how we might do it.” It’s leadership that allows us to be able to reform the markets and build more housing.
NW Are you hopeful?
HM I’m always hopeful! As long as I’m healthy and breathing and laughing. I’m an optimist. ◉