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Taken By Storm

House prices, and the value and meaning we assign to a home, have changed over time much like our climate. But when a storm comes, it rips everything up for us to start over.

By Katy PreenPublished 6 years ago 13 min read
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Nothing a lick of paint can't sort out.

As winter develops, we are getting our fair share of shitty weather here in the UK. A couple of months ago, we had warnings for Ireland & Scotland as Hurricane Ophelia advanced. It was the first storm of its magnitude to hit the UK in three decades — in fact, it was 30 years to the day since the last one. I remember that very well. It turned out that Ophelia wasn’t as hell-bent on destruction as the 1987 storm; it by-passed most of Great Britain without so much as a wheelie bin knocked over (Ireland was not quite as lucky — three people sadly died as a result of the high winds).

I don’t remember that much about my early childhood, but some things stand out: being sick all the time, a few significant news events (Zeebrugge disaster, Suzy Lamplugh disappearance), and storms. There were a number of occasions where I stayed indoors, a little bit scared and a little bit excited about the fierce turmoil outside. One time, it was around Halloween in my first year of primary school and we had the dressing-up box out. The sky outside was black and streaked with the occasional glow of lightning. I was wearing a long black dress made of sparkly thread, probably pretending to be a witch. I loved the drama of the situation — outside was so wild and dangerous, and there was the added excitement of teachers contacting parents to check that we could all be picked up in the inclement weather. We only got sent home when it was really bad, so this was something different.

Something else that I recall from my younger days was how soul-crushingly deprived the neighbourhood and my childhood was. I lived in the South-East of England, today a marker of wealth and status, yet thirty years ago it was a very different place. Britain as a whole was struggling financially, but getting by. A little like my family, I suppose. This was reflected in the landscape — we did what we could, but some things we had to let slide. We could paper over the cracks, but we weren’t able to rebuild again if anything too dramatic happened. Those problems could wait for later – right now, we just needed to keep our heads above water.

The great storm of 1987 was just one of the many times that Mother Nature imposed her will upon our existence, and that of the utility grid. So many times in the 1980s and 1990s we relied on candlelight, not because it’s pretty and atmospheric, but because the overhead power lines were down all the bloody time. Only since moving to a city do I realise that it’s not normal to have power outages so frequently, and for so long. Even so, I still keep a supply of candles — just in case.

It's not just Mother Nature’s whimsy that affects our landscape. The political machine drives where and when we invest in our infrastructure, and how much revenue we are able to raise and allocate to maintaining our surroundings.

The one thing that everyone remembers about the “hurricane of '87” — BTW, it wasn’t technically a hurricane anymore by the time it hit our shores — was that Michael Fish, the weather forecaster, stated absolutely categorically that we were in no way getting a hurricane. And then we did get a hurricane. The truth, however, isn't that simple. Read this article from the Met Office (click here) for an explanation of why Michael Fish was technically correct but still wrong about the overall prediction. It’s a little like political manifesto pledges. Promises are made, kept, broken, and wriggled out of on a technicality. There have been certain policy pledges that we do all remember as having been total disasters, and yet, technically, our elected representatives were able to get away with it.

The storm hit in the middle of the night, and mainly affected South-East England. As remains typical for me into adulthood, I slept through the whole damn thing. I don’t know if I would have been excited or terrified, really. But the next day, all was chaos outside. I’d never seen before, or since, the damage a really bad storm can cause. It was incredible – houses with the whole roof gone, and not a single window intact. Enormous trees completely uprooted and tossed into the road as if they were twigs. The power and telephone lines were all down, and so we were in candlelight for the next six days.

The clean-up operation was huge, and focused on restoring power and clearing the transport routes. In total, the Great Storm of 1987 caused over £1 billion of damage, not to mention the changes in policy and severe weather reporting that had to be costed after the event. But something that was definitely a relic of the past was the way in which there was still work leftover to do. Because we only had so much money available, we allocated funds to do “just enough.” We ensured the country could keep functioning, and averted a humanitarian disaster. We fixed the roads, rails, and utilities, and made sure that nobody was left homeless. But the cosmetic damage, well, that was a side issue. These assets just didn’t hold the same value that they do now. Real estate owners today would jump straight to the task to fix up their properties in the event of such a crisis, and the government would make more funds available.

As it was, there were houses and plots that stood derelict and abandoned for years after the storm. It would never happen these days because of that inherent value our buildings hold. Even a broken-down shithole with no roof is worth six figures today, so it’d get snapped up and refurbished in no time. Probably get sold on for a tidy profit, too. But when I was young, there were places in the South-East, and in London, that were unbelievably poor, and no one wanted to live there. We now live in a world where a shed in Bethnal Green, or a cupboard in Kilburn, will cost an obscene amount of money. But in the '80s and '90s, you couldn’t even pay people to live there. Amazing, how the world has changed.

A typical street in Burnley, 2016.

I do see boarded-up houses and old buildings falling into ruin, but these are in the old mill towns and forgotten industrial districts of the North. The wealth emanates from the South though, and reaches the North in waves. In the larger cities, some areas are indistinguishable from Central London. In the outlying towns, it could be 1975, or 1959; so little has changed. But bit-by-bit, parts of the North become as desirable as their Southern neighbours. In increments, we gather the drips of the trickled-down wealth we were promised. In 1990, you could buy an entire street in Burnley for £15,000. Nowadays that would buy you a 2-bed terraced home on that same street. In London, £15,000 wouldn’t even cover your deposit. The wealth trickles down, but agonisingly slowly. Maybe what we need is another storm.

London’s wealth began to increase at disproportionate levels around 1995 and it dragged the rest of the country with it. Increases in property values radiated out from London, with the value of London’s immediate neighbours at the higher end, and those of the North and Scotland increasing to proportionately lower levels. The outlying areas of the UK won’t see redevelopment or rises in property values anything like those of the South-East until London has soared even further into the future.

And how long is it before today’s gentrified utopia becomes tomorrow’s slum housing? Le Corbusier’s modernist dream of the home as a machine for living has now become known as a concrete monstrosity, dividing communities, rather than bringing people together, as was intended. We tire so easily of architectural styles that they become merely a fashion.

The new sometimes fails. If we seek to create a need rather than fulfil an existing one, uptake will be slow. In these cases, we look to meet basic needs through a high standard of utility accommodation. Everything above these base criteria is an optional extra. And with options comes choice; the choice to further drive up standards. If there’s a lack of consumers to take advantage of this array of high-quality choices, the gentrification backfires — it clears an area without replacing anything. One might compare it to a bountiful harvest left to rot in the fields, a missed opportunity, a miscalculated risk. The storm cleared the land, but we neglected to make the best of what it churned up.

The North-South divide in housing values has positives and negatives depending on where you stand on the housing ladder. Homes in London and the South-East are out of financial reach for much of the current working generation. Those of the Baby Boomer generation have a lot of money tied up in property, and so they are keen for it to hold, if not increase, its value. With all this money tied up in real estate, it only circulates within the economy when a property is sold. Although we have seen property values increase at an exponential rate, their effect on the health of the economy is stagnant. Elevated property values have become detached from the other aspects of modern life, leading to a two-tier economy. As we are right now, house prices are buoyant. Yet the pound is faltering, 20 percent of UK households live in poverty, and our public services are in ruins.

It’s a little like comparing the UK’s largest industry, the financial sector, to the more traditional industries that we recognise from the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Those legacy jobs don’t exist anymore, but there’s no easy transition from heavy industry, or farming, say, to international finance and data management. Our financial sector has grown seemingly without limit, while our other sectors have dwindled and become obsolete due to competition from countries that can manufacture goods more efficiently than the UK. The exorbitant wages and luxury lifestyles of successful industries are available only to a minority, yet on average, we seem to be doing ok. It may well be the case that 30 years from now, we are all working in service industries, so that the wealth-making ability “trickles down” to the next generation. But will that simply devalue the work, giving all those who participate a set of glittering aspirations that amount to dull loose change? Those enormous bonuses can’t be payable to everyone, and when the luxury becomes commonplace, it loses its sparkle. It’s gentrification of the jobs market; rich newcomers disrupt the run-down regions of employment, hang new wallpaper and move in. What was once affordable is now too expensive for the masses, yet lacks the character and beauty of the truly extravagant.

The wealthy game-changers moving into a run-down neighbourhood claim to value its authenticity and character, and then cover every internal surface with magnolia paint, and demolish the ornate and crumbling structures that drew them in in the first place.

Sometimes, I walk through UK cities looking skywards at the beautiful Victorian & Edwardian storeys above the rows of shops at street level. I imagine how I could make a real difference to the neglected buildings. I’d go in, keep as many period features as I can, converting empty warehouse floors into spacious apartments, and rake in the cash selling my upcycled product to trendy young couples.

But my dream remains just that, a dream. Someone else will probably get in there before me, sitting on a lump of cash, scanning the market, ready to pounce when the conditions are right. I don’t have the head-start that those investors do, and so no matter how hard I try to keep up with the ever-moving financial goalposts, a home of my own remains still out of my grasp. And that career in property development is unlikely when I can't even get my own feet on the property ladder.

England’s North still houses the final remnants of the industry and working-class culture of the 20th Century, but the influences of the spreading property investment, and changing jobs market of the South, are intruding on their space. Soon, today’s lifestyle will become the vintage of the future.

It’s hard to tell where the line is between those who relish their simple existence in the older paradigm, and those who yearn for better, but can’t quite reach it. Events in the economy, or in society, drive stagnation and change. It’s where we can each fit in that determines our ability to participate, or our level of fulfilment. Are you from the metaphorical poorer North, or the richer South? And what if even the North races ahead of you, ever out of your grasp? The march of gentrification goes on.

We see social indicators today that we will forget by tomorrow, and we will express surprise at how newly revamped places could ever have been as impoverished as we remember them in “the good old days.” While we were poorer during the tumultuous 1980s and '90s, wealth was distributed more evenly than today. Overall, we have rebuilt the country after successive economic nosedives, but the effect on individuals is hugely variable. We have city centres packed with architecturally-lit swanky skyscrapers & modern landscaping, littered with the detritus of real-life and real hardship: homeless people living in tent villages, antisocial behaviour, and endless discarded fast-food wrappers. The suburbs are constructed of 19th Century brick, where those homes are permitted to remain. In those places where it has crumbled or been knocked down for “improvements,” carbon-copy estates spring up. A form of housing both lauded and derided, yet reinvented as higher-end replacements for slum housing and tower blocks.

We don’t always need a catastrophe to bring about change. Sometimes it is more the result of a butterfly flapping its wings, than of a tsunami. Steady growth and incremental change go hand-in-hand with a stable, unwavering economy. The problem with this is that the value attached to growth can be overinflated when the economy stutters. The asset still has all the investment embedded within it as in better times, but it cannot be recouped. Yet instead of lowering prices, the developer waits, sitting on their investment until things pick up again. And so we have a landscape littered with unfinished projects, empty plots with planning permission for What Might Be, and a newer form of dereliction that has the same effect as the old: empty streets, unloved neighbourhoods, and an upturn in social problems. The sun has come up, but it is obscured by clouds.

When the sun does eventually break through, we see a flurry of activity, with the construction process accelerated by these new rays of sunshine. A new sum of money to reinvigorate the build, to get things moving again. We see a rapid blossoming, breathing new life into what we had left out to rot.

And when we have changed our surroundings, no matter where the injection of wealth came from, we may feel like our world has been turned upside down. Love or loathe it, the inclement weather of gentrification will come for us all.

politics
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About the Creator

Katy Preen

Research scientist, author & artist based in Manchester, UK. Strident feminist, SJW, proudly working-class.

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