An incredible 1 in 50 Londoners are homeless - and that’s a figure from August last year so I wouldn’t be amazed if it had increased.
It was also an underestimate of the true problem at the time as the figure included only the roughly 170k people for whom their council had managed to place them into some kind of emergency accommodation. So anyone who is sleeping rough or on their friend’s couch isn’t counted.
Lots of them are children. On average it’d be like one child in every school classroom is homeless.
The driving factors are of course economic.
Councils, always dramatically underfunded in terms of what’s needed to resolve this and so many other issues, are constantly breaking their legal obligations in this sphere. Most of them appear to feel that they have no other option.
Following the catastrophic sell-off of public housing in recent decades, lower income folk - and indeed local authorities - have been increasingly reliant on the private rental market. But this kind of housing supply in London has dropped dramatically. There’s been a 41% reduction in the number of properties available for rent since the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the same time, Local Housing Allowance has been frozen since 2020. Rents have continued to increase - as have so many other prices as part of the current cost of living crisis. The LHA was previously sufficient to allow someone to rent the lowest cost 30% of rentals on the market. Last year a study showed that it’d only cover the cheapest 2.3% of London listings on Rightmove. This really doesn’t work out well when across the UK even in 2022 over 10% of private renters were reliant on LHA.
All this is of course we even consider the condition and suitability of some of this housing.