Homesick
By Peter Apps
Published by Oneworld Publications, 2025, £20
Reviewed by Helen Pattison
Homesick is a raw portrayal of the housing crisis in London today. Peter Apps’ book shines a light on this crisis through interviews with ordinary people. Many of the interviewees talk about their, sometimes, low-quality housing in the 1980s but compare it to today when they have little certainty and housing eats up a huge part of their incomes. Private renters in London now spend about 40% of their incomes on rent alone.
What really hits from this book is the huge disparity, between the housing situation just four decades ago, and the situation today in social housing and the growing numbers facing the wolves of the private rented sector.
The book tracks the degeneration of social housing. While sometimes offering security it is has also seen decades of under investment and is falling in quality. Apps also looks at the situation facing different generations, especially young people, who can’t afford to stay in the areas where they grew up. But the housing crisis doesn’t discriminate by age. Older people renting privately face harsh poverty, up to 40% experience this. There is also the crisis facing disabled people and those losing their mobility with age, who struggle in unsuitable housing. And of course, there’s huge insecurity in the rental market today.
Interviewees talk of the excitement around the modern flats they were moved into in the 1980s, from the slum housing that was still being cleared. Today much of the council housing stock is damp, falling into major disrepair and even dangerous, but tenants have no choice but to stay.
While Apps’ book tracks the impact of huge attacks on housing, it also tracks the change in the political outlook of the working classes. The 1980s was marked by big class battles, but since then falling working-class confidence has allowed the door to be opened for large-scale attacks and the undoing of many social gains including around housing. Although that confidence is beginning to change today.
Then, a much more organised and confident working class expected that the capitalist system could be forced to provide for them to have families, to be able to set down roots in neighbourhoods with stable employment, housing and communities. It isn’t just housing that has changed in the last four decades but all those expectations too. Today young people expect to be worse off than their parents, they postpone starting a family for fear of being unable to afford one, and have no expectation of the situation changing.
Even the in the 1980s, the housing situation was still a reflection of the ‘Homes for Heroes’ concession after the second world war, when a rival economic system existed in the Soviet Union. The pressure of the existence of an alternative to capitalism, even though it was a bureaucratic, totalitarian distortion of socialism, forced the ruling class into making concessions like the welfare state and the house building programmes. Housing was still being built in the 1980s on a large scale in the gaps and destruction left by the war and clearing slum housing.
Apps writes that in 1981, 34.8% of housing in London was social housing, compared to 15.1% rented privately. Today those figures have flipped, meaning hundreds of thousands of Londoners are now beholden to skyrocketing rents. Recent years have seen double-digit percentage increases in London rental prices, rents growing much faster than wages.
Margaret Thatcher’s ‘everyman a capitalist’ politics started the transformation of the housing sector, including with the ‘right-to-buy’ council housing introduced in 1980. This policy has been broadened since then. The removal of rent controls was in the 1988 Housing Act, which also introduced ‘no-fault’ evictions to make being a landlord more competitive. Successive Labour and Tory governments have left these huge attacks on housing in place. Starmer’s government has been in power since 2024, but the watered-down renters’ rights bill isn’t going to be implemented till later this year.
The book explains how it was a political and ideological struggle to push owning a home, rather than relatively affordable, secure council tenancies, offered as a route to stability in old age. Apps exposes that all of this was being done even though it was known that the housing benefit bill would ballon as a result. Today the government spends up to £40 billion every year on housing benefits, all of which prop up the sky-high rents. But also, it feels like London is open to big developers. Repeatedly these big developers have gotten reductions in their affordable housing quotas, meaning that the skyline of London has changed drastically but the housing crisis hasn’t.
Apps never glosses over the sometimes very low-quality of housing which his interviewees experienced, but that means the book also shows how things have gone full circle. New housing is expensive though highly profitable for the developers, but has also had a litany of problems from corners being cut to the cladding scandal.
It’s important not to look at the 1980s with rose-tinted glasses and neither does the book; there were many social issues facing communities. High levels of pollution and poverty, domestic violence and crime, though of course these problems remain today. Very importantly, Apps discusses the serious racist divisions in London, the racist murders, and growing confidence of the far-right forces. Although, the working class also responded to these problems with several mass struggles and movements.
An important takeaway for today is Apps’ comments on the need for activists to take up the issue of the housing crisis; if not it will be left open to the right populists and even the far right to make gains out of it.
Apps raises other new problems that must be considered. The number of extreme weather events, hot, wet, and cold. Our housing will have to meet challenges. Some of the potential measures that could be taken to tackle the housing crisis are listed. Like home acquisition schemes, which are already in placed in a limited way. The problem is that councils are then forced to compete with the over-priced market. But long-term empty homes, and big developments built simply for investment opportunities could be taken over by the local authority to house those in need, with compensation paid only based on proven need. There is also the issue of land ownership, where public land which has been sold for development has seen a tiny proportion of the homes put up for social rent, just 2.6%.
The question of what demands and what programme is needed to solve the housing crisis is extremely important. But socialists must also raise how the working class can meet this challenge and get organised. Apps’ book is wrong when it says we are at the “whim of creditors” and due to high government debt can only hope for smaller changes or risk spooking investors. This doesn’t explain how the Homes for Heroes and other welfare reforms were carried out at a time when government debt was 250% of GDP, not 100% like today.
Apps lists small-scale campaigns as one solution. There is no doubt the efforts of housing campaigners are valiant. But one campaign he mentions took ten years and won eleven homes. That can’t be the answer. Any discussion of fighting the housing crisis must be linked to building a political and industrial struggle. Faced with a political alternative, Labour and other future capitalist governments could well be made to speed up and increase the building of social homes. But posed in this period is the building of a working-class political voice that could win control of councils and more and implement a programme not at the behest of the bond markets and big business but the needs of residents instead.