Hitting where it hurts (part two)

In the 1930s, a charitable trust built London's New Era estate to provide affordable housing to working class residents.

In 2014, that estate has been sold to Westbrook Partners who have openly declared their intention to refurbish the entire estate and then raise the rent to 'market' rates. This is likely to treble the cost.

Many of the current residents will leave because they will not be able to afford to stay. They are unlikely to find anywhere else at a similar rent in a similar location. And so groups of friends, family members, social circles - an entire community - will be broken apart.

Some may end up homeless. Some of them will be rehoused by the local council. Some will not.

The story is explained very clearly here.

None of this is illegal

You might think something in the above story should be against the law. It isn't. Westbrook are perfectly entitled, in law, to act in this way.

Anything else would be unfair encumbrance on the free market. And we wouldn't want that, would we? Where would it end?

(Anyone saying 'Scandinavian levels of equality, social care, health care, civilised values and bleak television dramas' can award themselves an extra point.)

Enough of being flippant

Protests to Westbrook Partners are pointless. They exist in order to buy up stuff that they think is undervalued and then sell it on for a better price. They're not breaking the law. They're acting in the interests of their clients. Why should they give the current residents a break - and thereby give a smaller return to their own employees, shareholders and investors?

But maybe protests to the investors would work better.

According to the article in The Guardian, two investors in Westbrook Partners are the 'New York State Teachers Retirement System' and the 'State of New Jersey'.

Do you want your pension to be funded from mass evictions of working class families?

Has anyone asked that question of New York State teachers?

Sure, not all of them will care. But some of them will be horrified. Some of them would accept a very slightly smaller pension to avoid causing misery to others.

And some of them will work to ensure that Westbrook Partners leave the residents of the New Era Estate alone - and don't go looking for similar targets elsewhere.

And if they can't achieve that, some of them will try to stop their pension fund from investing in Westbrook at all.

I don't have the resources

I don't have the resources to track down every pension fund and private individual who invests in Westbrook Partners. But, with a bit of media exposure in the USA, some of them might even step forward.

And if the lost business becomes large enough, if the bottom line starts to smart, maybe investment houses will think this sort of speculation is not worth the trouble.

U-Turn

In my last post, I argued against a boycott of Amazon on the grounds that using the principle of the free market to try to encourage morality from a company was likely to lead to a resurgence of Roman-style entertainment. (Perhaps I got a little carried away, but I did state that I thought my analogy was clumsy.)

And yet here I'm recommending using the free market to try to alter a company's behaviour by pressure from its customers.

Some might call this a u-turn. I prefer to think of it as looking for an approach that might make a difference.

Feel free to argue the point - here, on Twitter, on street corners if you prefer but I might not turn up.