Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

New kinds of housing

issue 15 September 2012

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.

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