Across the UK, radical renters are taking the housing crisis into their own hands

In July of last year, as much of the city celebrated their home team’s triumph in the Premier League, a woman in one of Liverpool’s poorest districts was facing eviction.

At the time she was suffering from stomach cancer, and while she was still paying her rent, the property investment group which owned her house on Molyneux Road wanted her gone, so that they could convert the property into a lucrative multiple occupancy house.

The woman in question, who has always remained anonymous, was on her way to becoming one of the countless, forgotten tenants kicked out their homes every week in the UK. A few years ago that may have been how things ended.

Instead, the legal advice and physical support of dozens of local activists helped her secure an emergency ruling delaying her eviction and become another success story in the short history of ACORN, a community union bringing new vitality to the fight for housing justice in the UK.

ACORN aren’t alone in taking the housing crisis into their own hands. The London Renters Union has emerged in recent years to represent and support tenants in the capital, while groups of students across the country have autonomously – and sometimes successfully – organised rent strikes. Similar movements have also emerged in major US cities as well as in European capitals like Barcelona and Berlin.

It’s hard to say why these more direct strategies have only emerged in recent years; it may be that people just got sick of waiting for politicians to solve it.  

“It’s been getting worse for thirty years now so I don’t think people had much trust in the old advocacy sort of thing,” says Thomas. “With stuff like this people can see what they are doing, they can see how they are helping.”

The union has grown hugely in 2020, with many, like Thomas, throwing themselves into the organisation after the disappointment of the general election.

“That knocked the stuffing out of left-wing people,” he says. “The whole idea of campaigning for somebody else and they’ll change it all, people got a big realisation that that’s not going to work.”

Mortgage-holders and property owners have long held huge power in British electoral politics, especially in the Conservative Party. Recent decades have seen housing tenure become one of best predictors of voting, as the country has become polarised between renters and owners.

In 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn's Labour delivered a surprising result which deprived the Conservatives of a majority, much of the party's gains were based on private renters. But it remains to be seen whether this support will be repeated. Housing activists have criticised the pandemic support offered to renters by Thangam Debbonaire, Housing Secretary in Keir Starmer's Shadow Cabinet.

Ali Avci, an ACORN organiser in Haringey, also got involved shortly after the election, helping start a group in Oxford. He was amazed by how well the group were received by the public compared with the Labour Party. 

“As ACORN we were getting a really good reception on the door,” he says. “We didn’t seem like that political party that comes every four years and then disappears and doesn’t care about you.”

The organisers I spoke to were keen to point that many members were people who had not been politically engaged before, and were joining the union because they could see in concrete terms what it could achieve. 

In material terms, they say, it is simply a good deal: In return for an hours wage every month, ACORN offers real, proven community power.

“It’s a minuscule fee to have this kind of element of power behind you,” he says. “where suddenly people in your local area community will stand in front of your house if they need to just to stop bailiffs from coming in.”