Landshare – Promises to Clean Up the Estates

There’s a problem that’s been bugging me for as long as I’ve been involved in local politics, and I think I’ve finally found the answer.

The problem is the way that the estates in east London look so scruffy, due to the gardens on the ground floor of blocks being untended and often overgrown with weeds. When I first became involved with labour campaigning I thought this indicated that the demand model of social housing was a failure. People who buy their homes or pay private rent wouldn’t pay for a garden if they didn’t want it, but in social housing they just get given a garden when they have no interest in tending it. However, I was corrected by the fact that people with mobility issues are housed on the ground floor. It’s not the allocation that causes the problem, but the aging population.