If the all-party Parliamentary Housing Sub-Committee were to embark on a week-long fact-finding tour of Barbados, it would create a tabloid scandal. Yet it might be a good idea all the same. For among the palm trees they will find remnants of a fascinating housing experiment which began almost 200 years ago, yet which affords a useful lesson for housing policy today.
In 1838, when slavery was abolished on the island, plantation owners suddenly found themselves obliged to pay wages to their workers. In an effort to recoup this cost, they churlishly began charging those workers rent for houses they had previously occupied for free. Rents in some cases were so high that emancipated slaves were scarcely better off than before.
The slaves were, in other words, in a similar position to present-day Londoners, especially those under the age of 35: any increase in prosperity was largely neutralised by the ever-rising cost of renting or owning property. The Bajans’ answer to this problem was the ‘chattel house’, a form of housing still seen on the island today. This is a wooden hut large enough — just — to house two people. The best of these are built to the same elegant proportions found in larger homes of the same period, with jalousie windows and verandas shaded by fretwork awnings. But they have one fabulous extra quality. If necessary, four or five people can pick one up and move it in an afternoon.
This was how the landlords were outsmarted. In 1838, if your current plantation owner demanded too much money for you to live on his land, you simply spoke to his neighbour — who was only too pleased for you to re-site your chattel house on his land for a fraction of the price.
What is important about this idea is that it separates home ownership from land ownership. Unless you become a new-age traveller or, as two of my colleagues have done, buy a houseboat, your home is an immovable asset. So we treat the housing market and the property market as though they were the same thing, confusing an investment class with a living cost. Absurdly, property price rises are generally announced as ‘good news stories’, even though for most people a rise in house prices increases the cost of living. Housing costs are bizarrely not included in inflation indices.
A property bubble is a particularly unpleasant kind of bubble — precisely because it is so inescapable. Had you lived in 17th-century Amsterdam, there was no obligation to buy tulips. Parents did not warn you that it ‘was time to get on the tulip ladder’. Opting out of the property market is difficult. But not quite impossible. There are several modern equivalents of the chattel house, among the most interesting of which is ‘cargotecture’ — the conversion of shipping containers into stackable housing. It is worth looking for images of these online since the results are surprisingly pleasant.
Cargotecture only works for the childless, I suspect. But it may kill off the assumption that a house must be tied to one place. This may be essential if the young are to find liveable homes, especially now that London property is bought more as an offshore safe haven for foreign money than for habitation.
One sensible intervention would be to tax the owners of expensive properties who do not pay (or who have not previously paid in the past) a commensurate amount of UK income tax. The mansion tax could thus be renamed the oligarch tax, increasing its appeal to voters.
But the other solution is more innovative housing. Cargotecture, the chattel house and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house may all be ideas whose time has come.
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