None of this is to say that white people aren’t living in poverty in Britain. Rather, it’s to point out that the working-class people in this country are not all white. In the face of an assumption around class that seems to be hung up solely on the purity of British racial exclusivity, we should ask ourselves who exactly makes up the working class.
Never has the conversation about class and inequality felt more urgent than in the recent discussion about London’s housing crisis – on the lack of available social housing, on the barely regulated private rental sector, and the increasingly futile pursuit of home ownership. In the capital, the invasion of luxury flats built for people on extraordinarily high incomes appeared to start in the east and quickly began to spread north. Construction was alarmingly swift. I spent half of my childhood in Tottenham, north-east London. When I go back to visit friends and family, I see the area changing. Walking down one Tottenham street on an autumn evening, I noticed that what was once an area of demolition had sprung up into skeletal scaffolding. The grounds were surrounded with boarding, and the boarding was plastered with aspirational images. The words on the boarding were in equal parts sinister as they were inviting.
The reading really depended on who caught a glimpse of it at the time. ‘Enjoy a more urban side to living in the heart of north London,’ the lettering read. This was an invitation that was not aimed towards people already living in Tottenham, but to newcomers – perhaps first-time buyers desperate to get on the property ladder with help from the bank of Mum and Dad, or maybe buy-to-let landlords whose sole aim was to make money out of London’s housing crisis. The word ‘urban’ here was coded, a term that implied inner cities, poverty and dilapidation. Urban here, as it is so often used (in music particularly), was code language for ‘black people live here’. The 2011 census saw 65 per cent of Haringey residents report that they were not white British. I was suspicious of the sudden increase of Tottenham new-builds, worried that they might begin to usher in an era of gentrification – with huge implications for the class and racial make-up of the area.
My suspicions weren’t unfounded. In 2013, The Economist reported that in the neighbouring London borough of Hackney between the years 2001 and 2011, Stoke Newington’s white British population jumped by 15 per cent and Dalston’s by 26 per cent.5 Fuelled by gentrification, the change wasn’t just about race, but about wealth, affluence and mobility. It was also about class.
After noticing the first ‘urban living’ invitation, I saw similar new-build construction sites popping up all over Tottenham. In 2015, barriers around the freshly built Rivers Apartments on the Spurs end of Tottenham High Road promised passers-by a ‘major sport-led development for Tottenham’ – new homes, a new school and new jobs. Fascinated by the race and class implications of London’s housing boom, I decided to look into it – and began rifling through the council’s publicly available documents.
The same year, Haringey Council planned to build 1,900 homes in Tottenham by 2018. This was promised to be part of a ￡131 million regeneration programme, with funding secured from the city’s most senior administrative body, the Greater London Authority. On the face of it, this seemed like a positive contribution to meeting the high level of demand for housing in the borough of Haringey. In mid-2015, its housing waiting list had over 4,500 people looking for somewhere to live. The council decided that half the homes built would be affordable, two-thirds of which would be affordable rent, and one-third would be shared ownership. As a response to the housing crisis, it couldn’t have been more timely.
But when I looked deeper into the borough’s regeneration plans, I found a different picture. An intriguing coalition of people had aligned to question exactly who the new housing in Tottenham would benefit, and they made convincing claims about race, class, wealth and access. One activist told me: ‘We’re not opposed to regeneration. This is a community and an area that needs regeneration and investment for the existing residents.’ His view was echoed by another housing activist, who said: ‘People would like to see improvements. But what kind of improvements, and who for?’
The question was whether low-income local residents in most need – who were mostly black – would benefit from the new housing at all. The crux of criticism against Haringey’s housing plans surrounded the council’s decision to ‘place a high priority on affordable home ownership’. The council’s own equality impact assessment (EQIA) of its housing strategy read: ‘There is a possibility that, over time, black residents in Haringey may not benefit from the plans to build more homes in the borough through promoting affordable home ownership in east Haringey. White households may benefit more easily.’ The 250 homes available at affordable social rent that Haringey planned to build by the year 2018 accounted for just 5 per cent of the number of people waiting to be homed, the EQIA concluded. It was damning. But at the time, Haringey Council argued that they needed to sell some homes privately because the funding available from central government wasn’t enough for the whole project.
To truly understand what happened here, you need to think about these housing plans in the context of Tottenham’s history of race and class. In 2015 the average Haringey resident earned around ￡24,000 a year. That figure is above the national average of ￡22,044, but below the inner-London average salary of ￡34,473. However, Haringey’s average earnings were skewed by the vast income inequalities in the borough.
The council calls this the ‘east–west divide’. In east Haringey’s Tottenham Hale, where the new housing was proposed, the highest amount of residents work in jobs like sales and services, cleaning, delivering goods, collecting the bins. That’s in comparison to 23.9 per cent of Haringey’s overall residents working in professional occupations. This is a clear class divide. Home ownership is high in the affluent west of the borough – areas like Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Highgate – while residents in the east of the borough – areas like Seven Sisters, White Hart Lane and Tottenham Hale – live mostly in social housing. Similarly, high salaries can be found in west Haringey, while low pay is found in east Haringey. These fault lines are compounded by race, with white people disproportionately represented in the west of the borough, and black people disproportionately represented in the east. In the west Haringey wards of Muswell Hill, Crouch End and Highgate, more than 80 per cent of residents are white, in comparison to around 40 per cent of residents in the east Haringey wards of Northumberland Park and Tottenham Hale.
A report from the Runnymede Trust and Manchester University declared Haringey one of the most unequal places in England and Wales.6 And according to the council’s equalities impact assessment on its own housing strategy, it is single mothers in the borough who are most likely to be homeless. The numbers of single mothers registering as homeless in 2015 was increasing. It was fair to conclude that it was women – almost certainly the majority black, almost certainly mothers – who were being pushed into precarious living situations. Their council responded by ignoring their needs in its housing plans.