Category Archives: Housing

Good thing for small packages: tiny homes movement wins big in New Zealand

Posted on by

Owner of a home that measures just 8m by 3m wins high profile three-year legal battle with government over rates and regulations

Yachts and caravans have all served as home for Alan Dall but it is his tiny house in Canterbury that has finally claimed his heart and where he’s firmly put down roots after 25 years of transient living.

Measuring just eight metres long and three metres wide, Dall’s tiny home has become something of an inspiration for the movement, with his fight to retain its status potentially having lasting ramifications around the country.

Continue reading...

‘I’m a stranger in my own city’: Prague takes on Airbnb to dam flood of tourists

Posted on by

Joining a battle already being waged by many other cities, the Czech capital’s mayor wants new laws to limit the lettings website

For decades, its mesmerising blend of baroque and gothic beauty was closed to mass tourism by the iron curtain that divided the communist east from the capitalist west during the cold war.

Now Prague, which has gained an unenviable reputation as a destination for stag nights and pub crawls, has become the latest European city to propose a radical assault on Airbnb and other short-term letting platforms as over-tourism threatens to overwhelm it and drive out residents.

Continue reading...

‘It’s incredible what they see’: housing associations take on county lines crime

Posted on by

Housing officers are using their local knowledge to spot abuse and exploitation, particularly ‘cuckooing’ of vulnerable residents by drug gangs

Housing associations are playing a growing role in tackling county lines crimes, using their knowledge of local communities to spot early signs of abuse and exploitation.

In the north west of England, the exploitation of young people by drug gangs – known as “county lines” crime – is a serious problem, not just in poorer areas but in York, Harrogate and places with good transport links. Now lawyers, housing associations and police are building networks of support to try and provide innovative solutions to the crisis.

Continue reading...

‘Bring our people home’: the bold new plan for an Indigenous-led district in Canada

Posted on by

The Senakw development aims to ease the city’s chronic housing crisis – and to challenge the mindset that indigeneity and urbanity are incompatible

The scrubby, vacant patch beneath the Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver looks at first glance like a typical example of the type of derelict nook common to all cities: 11.7 acres of former railway lands, over which tens of thousands of people drive every day.

This is not any old swath of underused space, however. It’s one of Canada’s smallest First Nations reserves, where dozens of Squamish families once lived. The village was destroyed by provincial authorities more than a century ago.

Continue reading...

A cinema, a pool, a bar: inside the post-apocalyptic underground future

Posted on by

A missile silo converted into a 15-storey luxury subterranean apartment complex could be a taste of what lies in store in cities around the world

Tucked away among cornfields in the midwestern United States, a military-grade chainlink fence surrounds a verdant berm on an otherwise empty plot of land. It is guarded by a camouflaged lookout with an assault rifle. Underneath this unassuming hill is a 15-storey inverted luxury tower block called the Survival Condo – and it could be a portend of future private underground developments in cities the world over.

Stretching 60 metres below the surface, the Kansas silo was one of 72 “hardened” missile structures built during the cold war to protect a ballistic missile with a nuclear payload one hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Continue reading...

Coats for homeless removed from Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge

Posted on by

Action by city authority for ‘public safety’ reasons provokes social media outcry

The idea was simple: ask Dubliners to hang warm coats on the Ha’penny footbridge for the city’s burgeoning homeless population.

Shortly after #warmforwinter notices appeared on lampposts near the popular landmark last week, an array of anoraks, parkas and fleeces started to line the railings.

Continue reading...

Half of all homeless people may have had traumatic brain injury

Posted on by

Experts say TBI could be consequence or cause of homelessness

Half of all homeless people may have suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in their life, according to new research – which experts say could be either a consequence or even the cause of their homelessness.

Traumatic brain injury is sudden damage caused by a blow or jolt to the head, which can be caused by a motor accident, a fall or an assault. Sometimes it can cause long-term damage to the brain, leading to neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Continue reading...

‘Bulging at the seams’: Auckland, a super city struggling with its own success

Posted on by

The government dreamed of a metropolis that is a beacon to all but the pace of change has left some behind and others disillusioned

Tāmaki Makaurau, the Māori name for Auckland which can be translated as “the place desired by many”, is living up to its billing. The city’s population has swelled rapidly to 1.7 million and is estimated to be adding 40,000 people a year. By 2048 it could host nearly half of New Zealand’s current population.

In the 1980s only a couple of thousand people lived in the central city. Now some 57,000 people call it home, a figure that was not expected to be reached until 2032.

Continue reading...

‘Future relics’: the painter capturing the beauty of council houses

Posted on by

Frank Laws’s Hopperesque watercolours depict the individual character of east London’s most impressive – and everyday – buildings, as gentrification threatens their very existence

From Mike Leigh’s film Meantime to the TV show Top Boy, the social housing estates of east London have provided rich subject matter for writers and artists exploring the human stories intertwining in their communities. In the paintings of east Londoner Frank Laws, however, there isn’t a person in sight. The only signs of life are curtains flapping at open windows and the luminescent glow emanating from inside a home. Blocks of flats that teem with life in, say, Plan B’s film and album Ill Manors, stand eerily quiet and vacant in Laws’s images.

Laws was born in a village in Norfolk but hated the rural quiet. “I was always scared of the dark in the countryside,” says the 37-year-old. “I’m still scared of it.” It’s this fear, and Laws’ love of film noir, that informs the dramatic, Edward Hopperesque lighting in Laws’ meticulously detailed watercolour and acrylic paintings.

Continue reading...

Sardine tins for the poor?: Barcelona’s shipping container homes

Posted on by

Just a stone’s throw from La Rambla, the Spanish city is building 12 shipping container flats to help tackle its social housing crisis

Barcelona has begun installing its first shipping container homes just a stone’s throw from La Rambla, the famous thoroughfare in the city centre, in a bid to provide emergency housing for people who have been evicted or otherwise driven out of the neighbourhood by gentrification.

Work commenced last week on the 12 small apartments, which are being installed on Carrer Nou de Sant Francesc, a narrow street in the densely populated Ciutat Vella (“old city”) district.

Continue reading...

Athens police poised to evict refugees from squatted housing projects

Posted on by

A self-governing community in central Athens which has helped house refugees is threatened by a government crackdown

It’s just after 5am in the central Athens neighbourhood of Exarcheia. A group of Afghans and Iranians are sitting down together for breakfast in the middle of the street, with a banner that reads “No Pasaran” (“They shall not pass”) strung between the buildings above their heads. They laugh and joke as they help themselves to bread and cheese pies from the communal table.

The public breakfast is outside Notara 26, a self-organised refugee accommodation squat. Since opening in September 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis, it has provided shelter to over 9,000 people. These ‘‘Breakfasts of Resistance” – held in the early hours when police-led evictions are most likely – have become daily events since Greece’s New Democracy government assumed office in July.

Continue reading...

Homeless children put up in shipping containers, report says

Posted on by

Children’s commissioner for England condemns ‘scandal’ of family homelessness

Thousands of homeless children are growing up in cheaply converted shipping containers and cramped rooms in former office blocks, putting their health and wellbeing at serious risk, according to the children’s commissioner for England.

Anne Longfield said it was scandal that at least 210,000 young people in homeless families in England were put up by councils in temporary housing and bed and breakfasts or forced to “sofa surf” with friends, often for long periods.

Continue reading...

Homeless woman says Centrelink took entire $3,500 tax return for disputed robodebt

Posted on by

Couch surfing 50-year-old says welfare agency told her she wasn’t in financial hardship

A Melbourne woman battling homelessness says her entire $3,500 tax return was swiped by Centrelink last month, despite the fact she disputes the alleged robodebt.

But when Sue Prgic, 50, complained to the agency that the money had been taken without her knowledge, she said staff had asked to know what she would do with the cash if it were returned.

Continue reading...

Are artificial islands the answer to Hong Kong’s housing crisis?

Posted on by

Will a $60bn development to house 1.1 million people help to ease the world’s most unaffordable property market or is it simply ‘pouring money into the sea’?

“Reclamation is unavoidable,” Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, told journalists in a Q&A session on land supply last year. “In the long term, many developing cities have to adopt this choice.”

Hong Kong suffers from chronic overcrowding and housing shortages – a situation made worse by the 150 residence permits a day that have been issued to mainland Chinese citizens since 1997. Additionally, 62% of land is “locked up” or “semi-locked up” by law or regulatory constraints due to environmental reasons in terms of land development, according to the thinktank Our Hong Kong Foundation.

Continue reading...

We built this city: the 90-year-olds who made a metropolis

Posted on by

In 1947, 50,000 volunteers helped create Dimitrovgrad, a new city that symbolised the brave new world of communist Bulgaria. Many still live there

In her flat overlooking the main square of Dimitrovgrad, 90-year-old Maria Oteva casts her mind back more than seven decades to the foundation of the town in the early years of Bulgaria’s communist era.

“Back then, 50,000 volunteers built this city because they believed in something,” she says. “Nowadays, you wouldn’t find 50 people to come and clean up the dirty streets.”

Continue reading...

Uber co-founder buys record-breaking LA mansion for $72.5m as drivers fight for wages

Posted on by

Los Angeles sees a spike in the homelessness population while homes the size of football fields are selling for more than $100m

Two massive luxury real estate deals in Los Angeles have shone a harsh light on the wealth gap in a region where tens of thousands of people live on the streets while mansions the size of football fields sell for more than $100m.

On Monday, Variety reported that the Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and his partner Eliza Nguyen have purchased a Beverly Hills mansion for a record-breaking $72.5m, in what is believed to be the largest-ever sale of a home in the neighborhood.

Continue reading...

Humans v the city: the staggering scale of Chongqing – in pictures

Posted on by

Chongqing’s population is estimated at just below 10 million but that rises to more than 31 million if the built-up surroundings are included. Belgian photographer Kris Provoost finds that in a city so large, individuals can get lost

Continue reading...

‘This is everyone’s problem’: protests fail to save Taipei veterans’ village

Posted on by

Fewer than 30 of 879 villages built to house nationalist KMT soldiers and their families remain in Taiwan. After a lengthy battle, Daguan is to be demolished this week

At 22, Cynthia Tang was one-third the average age of the other people crowded into the abandoned Taipei storefront that served as the office of the Daguan Anti-Eviction Movement.

Looking fervently through the frames of her large round glasses, Tang, a student at the prestigious National Taiwan University, addressed the small crowd. “Two of our student activists have been arrested,” she said. “Now the government is suing them. This is not only their problem – this is everyone’s problem.”

Continue reading...

Cracked up: how can apartment buyers guard against a defective purchase?

Posted on by

The Owners Corporation Network’s advice is blunt: ‘Don’t buy a new apartment over three storeys’

With faults and cracks discovered over the weekend in Sydney’s Mascot Towers apartment complex – and similar cracks in Opal Tower six months ago – the spotlight is back on the quality of New South Wales apartment buildings.

Research from the University of NSW in 2015 found that 85% of new apartment buildings had defects at completion – mostly with waterproofing and fire detection systems – and the certification system had “broken down”.

Continue reading...

The story of Grenfell United – podcast

Posted on by

Natasha Elcock and Ed Daffarn escaped from Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017. Karim Mussilhy’s uncle died in the fire. Together with other survivors and bereaved people, they formed Grenfell United. They talk about their work over the past two years, while the Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Rob Booth, discusses government inaction

In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire broke out at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, west London. It killed 72 people, including 18 children. In the chaos that followed, survivors and the bereaved felt abandoned by local authorities and the government, and began to organise into a community group, which became known as Grenfell United.

Today, on the second anniversary of the fire, Natasha Elcock, Ed Daffarn and Karim Mussilhy discuss the work the group has been doing and their attempts to tackle what they see as one of the most devastating aspects of the fire: government inaction. The Guardian’s social affairs correspondent, Rob Booth, has been covering the story of Grenfell since the blaze. He talks to Anushka Asthana about why more progress has not been made.

Continue reading...