28/09/2024
In a superb article for lesbian and queer women's magazine DIVA, Ray Cooper discusses the contributions made by LGBTQIA+ people to solving Britain's dreadful housing problems, characterised by homelessness in cities, unaffordable rents and sky high mortgages. Ray writes "One of the most vivid images that comes to mind when I think of past elections is of a politician in a suit and a hard hat, on a construction site, promising to “rebuild Britain”. As a queer trans person in the process of setting up a housing co-operative, this type of politics couldn’t resonate with me less.... As a result, while the Conservatives are busy regurgitating Thatcherisms about a “home-owning democracy” as the solution to the housing crisis, many of the queer community are entirely reimagining what home means. Queer people have a long history of centring community care in our lives to fill the void left by forms of active discrimination or politicians’ simple lack of imagination. Queers have been leading the way with alternative models of support and care through non-traditional cohabitation arrangements for many decades. And while communal living is born out of necessity for some, for others it is incredibly desirable. Many of us raise children in non-nuclear families, some of us are polyamorous and have multiple nesting partners, and others have adopted large chosen families. New measures from Labour such as increasing social housing and the Greens talking about rent controls might help – but we need a more significant shift in how we think about housing as a society. I’ve seen first-hand, through networks such as Radical Routes, that it is possible for groups of people to take property out of private hands and into collective ownership through fully mutual housing co-operatives (many of which are queer-centred). Housing co-operatives might seem like some farfetched thing here in the UK, where they currently only make up a fraction of UK housing – just 0.2% live in some form of co-op. But it’s a very different story in other countries – like Sweden, where that figure is a whopping 23%! This is just one of the many possible approaches to housing which is both queer-inclusive and incredibly sustainable. Perhaps if the Political parties were to stop arguing about whether they are going to build 1.6 or 1.5 million homes over the next 4 years and think beyond the cisheteronormative nuclear household, they might discover some other solutions to the housing crisis. Solutions which actually meet people’s needs, redistribute wealth and reduce our consumption as society." Great article, Ray - to read the full version, head on over to the DIVA magazine website.
