Front-Door Famine

In the midst of Britain's unparalleled prosperity, many thousands of low-income families have never had it so bad. These are the "decent, ordinary people," in the words of one social worker, "whose only problem is that they can't find a front door."

In London alone, seven families each day become officially homeless, and the rate is rising. Most often the victims are young couples with several children. Landlords can rent single rooms most profitably to childless tenants, and even for a dingy, three-room basement apartment without private bath or kitchen can usually get far more than a working-class family can afford: up to $20 a week in a country where the average weekly wage is $42. For a London scrap-metal dealer and his pregnant wife, "home" after working hours is a three-ton truck. A common racket for landlords is to charge $200 or $300 key money for "fixtures" that seldom amount to more than a broken-down chair. Worst results of the housing shortage: thousands of split families, and the reappearance of something close to the Dickensian workhouse.

Heartbreak Houses. In London, homeless mothers and children are boarded at their own expense (from $14 a week) at one of five London County Council centers, where husbands are allowed to visit only in the evenings until 9:30, and for a few hours at weekends. One of the biggest is South London's Newington Lodge, a grim, high-walled pile of sooty red brick. Known in welfare-state parlance as "suitable alternative accommodation"--though it lacks a sick bay, nursery, playroom and adequate toilets--Newington Lodge last week held 266 women and children from 72 fragmented families.

In some institutionalized heartbreak houses, officials conduct a midnight bed check to make sure that husbands have not climbed back in over the walls. Many marriages do not survive the ordeal. "Once you lose your home," says a harassed welfare worker, "you stand to lose your husband, then your children as well." At one L.C.C. hostel the inmates strap their valuables to their bodies at night. Families are allowed to stay at such hostels only for three months. After that, if they are still homeless, they are often forced to put their children in public boarding homes. London County Council alone has custody of 1,000 such "orphans." In scores of cases, children from the same family are placed in different homes.

Crookery. "The scandal of prosperity," as the Daily Mail calls Britain's housing shortage, stems from years of shortsighted planning and faulty economics. In big industrial cities, factories and office buildings have been allowed to gobble up scarce land in residential areas--and tighten the squeeze by funneling in millions of new citizens. Already overbuilt London, where postwar planners predicted a drop in population, has gained 1,400,000 new residents (total: 8,100,000) in 15 years. More than 100,000 London families are waiting for subsidized low-income housing, which, ironically, is "under-occupied," since a family cannot be evicted even if children have grown up and earnings have soared far beyond the need for subsidy.

Private enterprise building has long been hobbled by a web of government controls--until recently, rents for 4,000,000 of Britain's 16,250,000 houses were pegged at 1914 levels. When the Tories gradually lifted controls in 1957, the unforeseen result was a chain reaction of rent boosts that often trebled the cost of a house or apartment but did little to provide new housing. Even today, Britain is building only 290,000 new housing units a year, half as many as West Germany.

Last week the L.C.C. pointed the way to a short-term local solution by asking the government for powers to requisition vacant housing. Long-term proposals range from 100%, state-guaranteed mortgages to a Labor Party program to nationalize urban land in what would be the most sweeping government takeover ever attempted in a democracy. But even this would make little difference for the foreseeable future. With nearly 4,000,000 pre-1875 houses to replace and 100,000 new households to accommodate yearly, Britain will be short of front doors for years. The most worrisome aspect of the problem is what one expert calls its "frightening and complex" effect on society. A homeless young house painter put it more simply: "Rather than put the kiddies in a home, I'll turn to crookery."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.