Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(46)
The same year, Haringey Council planned to build 1,900 homes in Tottenham by 2018. This was promised to be part of a ￡131 million regeneration programme, with funding secured from the city’s most senior administrative body, the Greater London Authority. On the face of it, this seemed like a positive contribution to meeting the high level of demand for housing in the borough of Haringey. In mid-2015, its housing waiting list had over 4,500 people looking for somewhere to live. The council decided that half the homes built would be affordable, two-thirds of which would be affordable rent, and one-third would be shared ownership. As a response to the housing crisis, it couldn’t have been more timely.
But when I looked deeper into the borough’s regeneration plans, I found a different picture. An intriguing coalition of people had aligned to question exactly who the new housing in Tottenham would benefit, and they made convincing claims about race, class, wealth and access. One activist told me: ‘We’re not opposed to regeneration. This is a community and an area that needs regeneration and investment for the existing residents.’ His view was echoed by another housing activist, who said: ‘People would like to see improvements. But what kind of improvements, and who for?’
The question was whether low-income local residents in most need – who were mostly black – would benefit from the new housing at all. The crux of criticism against Haringey’s housing plans surrounded the council’s decision to ‘place a high priority on affordable home ownership’. The council’s own equality impact assessment (EQIA) of its housing strategy read: ‘There is a possibility that, over time, black residents in Haringey may not benefit from the plans to build more homes in the borough through promoting affordable home ownership in east Haringey. White households may benefit more easily.’ The 250 homes available at affordable social rent that Haringey planned to build by the year 2018 accounted for just 5 per cent of the number of people waiting to be homed, the EQIA concluded. It was damning. But at the time, Haringey Council argued that they needed to sell some homes privately because the funding available from central government wasn’t enough for the whole project.
To truly understand what happened here, you need to think about these housing plans in the context of Tottenham’s history of race and class. In 2015 the average Haringey resident earned around ￡24,000 a year. That figure is above the national average of ￡22,044, but below the inner-London average salary of ￡34,473. However, Haringey’s average earnings were skewed by the vast income inequalities in the borough.
The council calls this the ‘east–west divide’. In east Haringey’s Tottenham Hale, where the new housing was proposed, the highest amount of residents work in jobs like sales and services, cleaning, delivering goods, collecting the bins. That’s in comparison to 23.9 per cent of Haringey’s overall residents working in professional occupations. This is a clear class divide. Home ownership is high in the affluent west of the borough – areas like Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Highgate – while residents in the east of the borough – areas like Seven Sisters, White Hart Lane and Tottenham Hale – live mostly in social housing. Similarly, high salaries can be found in west Haringey, while low pay is found in east Haringey. These fault lines are compounded by race, with white people disproportionately represented in the west of the borough, and black people disproportionately represented in the east. In the west Haringey wards of Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Highgate, more than 80 per cent of residents are white, in comparison to around 40 per cent of residents in the east Haringey wards of Northumberland Park and Tottenham Hale.
A report from the Runnymede Trust and Manchester University declared Haringey one of the most unequal places in England and Wales.6 And according to the council’s equalities impact assessment on its own housing strategy, it is single mothers in the borough who are most likely to be homeless. The numbers of single mothers registering as homeless in 2015 was increasing. It was fair to conclude that it was women – almost certainly the majority black, almost certainly mothers – who were being pushed into precarious living situations. Their council responded by ignoring their needs in its housing plans.
In March of 2015, dissent at the council’s regeneration plans had spilled over into local government. The general committee of Tottenham Constituency Labour Party, an organisation of local party members, unanimously passed an emergency resolution noting its concern that the council’s housing plans had ‘placed the onus on black residents to increase their income to be able to afford the new homes on offer, and not required or considered what the council should be doing to enable equality of opportunity and eliminate discrimination’. The resolution wasn’t the policy of Tottenham CLP’s councillors, but it did an effective job of displaying the general feeling of discontent.
When I pressed Haringey Council for an explanation on the racially exclusive nature of the housing plans, Alan Strickland, Haringey Council’s cabinet member for housing and regeneration, told me: ‘Where people are struggling to access different types of homes because of their incomes, clearly what has to be done is address their incomes. That must come through skills and jobs and training and employment. Through our economic development and jobs work, we want to make absolutely sure that we’re improving life chances so that everybody can access these new homes.’ It seemed like an unrealistically ambitious cop-out answer in the context of systematic racial economic disadvantage. If we were yet to solve the problem nationally, how on earth was one council going to achieve it? But they’ve pressed on with their plans. In mid-2016, a source close to Haringey Council told me that they had no intention to make a U-turn, despite the solid evidence that the plans could lead to black racial displacement.