Tom Nicholas
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My Next Video is About... | The Friday Update
🕑 Added 2024-10-11 17:00:13 +0000 UTCWelcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.
The housing crisis. I’m making a video about the crisis housing.
And how we might solve it.
Over the past few months, I’ve found myself occasionally reflecting on the overall tone of my videos.
They can often come across as a little bit negative.
Of course, this is generally a fair reflection of the topics I cover and how they integrate with the world around us.
Climate crisis, genocide, the continued rise of the far-right… there’s a lot going on right now.
But, what I’m keen to try and do a bit more of in the future is to foreground solutions (or potential solutions) to the world’s problems and those trying to bring them into being.
This doesn’t mean taking a Pollyanna-ish view of the world in which all our problems are months away from dissolving in front of our eyes.
There are a handful of YouTube channels which aim to focus on “positive” news stories, and they often end up being vapid in the extreme.
(There’s one I can think of which basically ends up providing boosterism for every tech fad going.)
It might still involve looking at far-fetched solutions—and acknowledging that they’re far-fetched!
But I want to see if I can do better at not just sitting in doom and gloom so much…
As part of this, my next video currently has the working titled How Britain (Almost) Solved the Housing Crisis.
It’s a look at the rise (and fall…) of council housing in the UK.
Over the course of the 20th century, successive British governments opted to intervene in the housing sector to push up standards and push down prices.
The result was a fairly rapid transformation from a country in which most people lived in private-rented slums, to one in which sanitary, high-quality and affordable housing was an available to most people who wanted it.
In short, Britain solved what had previously been a horrific housing crisis.
More recently, that promise has faded once again. Privatisation and a lack of house building have led to a scenario in which people are living in less and less space, for an ever higher proportion of their rent.
But, I want to explore what we might learn from how Britain fixed its housing crisis last time around for how we might do again.
I’ll reveal a little more (and hopefully share some little snippets!) very soon. I think it’s gonna be a good one!
Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!
Comments
Tom Nicholas
I haven't actually it's been on my list. While the video is very much about how *form* of tenure is as important as the sheer number of houses, I am a little skeptical of some of Bano's arguments (or at least arguments I've seen attributed to him) that it's the *only* thing that matters, and that we have enough housing already. But that might be a misrepresentation of his thesis that I've picked up! I know he's also done some really important work as a lawyer.
Izzy Killeen
Have you read "Against Landlords" by Nick Bano? It was revelatory, and essential reading on this subject if you haven't read it already.
