Miscellaneous -
Homelessness
By Alexander Garrett
Around
84,000 family units and individuals are
officially designated homeless in England, while
countless others on low incomes struggle to find
a place of their own. Yet at the latest count,
England had 729,770 empty homes, and the picture
is not dissimilar in other parts of the United
Kingdom. Nor are the 'empties' restricted to
run-down towns in the north of England: 183,000
are in London and the South East, the region
where demand is highest and shortage of housing
for key workers has reached crisis levels. This
paradox will be highlighted during national Empty
Homes Week, starting tomorrow, when local
authorities will be hosting a range of
initiatives aimed at getting uninhabited
properties back into use.
The Government is already attacking the empty
homes problem: in February Deputy Prime Minister
John Prescott set out plans for compulsory
leasing powers to allow local authorities to take
over and lease out privately owned properties
that are left empty. In addition, from next
April, authorities will no longer have to offer a
50 per cent discount on council tax to those
whose property is empty for more than six months.
Empty homes can also be bad news for neighbours
and can depress property prices. The Empty Homes
Agency claims a long-term vacant property next
door can knock 10 per cent off the value of your
own property, and encourages people to report
such properties to their local authority. Estate
agent Jeremy Leaf, housing spokesman for the
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, says:
'It can certainly have a detrimental effect on
neighbouring properties if it is empty long term;
it may become a haven for drug dealing or vermin,
and there may be structural implications such as
damp, which can spread next door.'
So why are so many properties empty? Some are
between tenants, and some are being sold. It is
the longer-term empties which are the cause of
concern. Rosie May, of the Empty Homes Agency,
explains, "There are people who have been
left a property and don't know what to do with
it, and there are others who own a property which
needs refurbishment, but they can't afford
it." Or there are owners in prison, in
hospital, caring for relatives or working abroad.
"We came across a case in Eastbourne,"
says May, "where a guy had kept a house
empty because his wife had left 10 years earlier
and he was still hoping she would come
back."
Then, of course, there are the private landlords
who hold property as investments - 'landbanking',
May says - and choose to keep it empty. It may
seem strange that anybody would choose to keep a
property empty rather than have a tenant paying
rent, but with prices rising as quickly as they
have in the past few years, capital returns have
dwarfed rental income in many cases. Leaf says
there may be various reasons for keeping a
property empty: 'There are investment companies
who don't want to spend the money on
refurbishing, and there are people who own
property but don't want to sell because that
would crystallise a gain or a loss.'
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