Here is the dream, if you can afford it: gleaming apartments, close to Liverpool’s waterfront, complete with penthouse swimming pools and luxurious rooftop gardens. They are mostly bought by overseas investors who then rent them to local professionals. Yet just ten minutes’ walk away, a very different spectacle unfolds, where a charity hands out food to queues of people every Monday night, with the reported need having doubled since last year.
According to the housing charity Shelter, in the 12 months leading up to March 2025, Liverpool city council received 2,048 applications for homelessness support, a 25% increase on the previous year. The most recent data shows 12,764 households on the city’s social housing waiting list. But one figure is particularly shocking: the city’s “additional social rent dwellings” in 2023-24 totalled – and read this slowly – five.In the last year alone, private rents across the city have gone up by an average of 9.6%. While I was in Liverpool, I met a single mum called Helen, who works for the local ambulance service. Up to now, she has rented the house she shares with her 15-year-old son – which has damp walls, ceilings covered in mould and an upstairs window that won’t shut – for £600 a month. But her landlord recently hit her with a no-fault eviction notice – because, she suspects, he is set on charging a new tenant the £1,400 monthly rent he now gets for similar properties, which are presumably in a much better state.
None of these are specifically Liverpudlian problems: they form one particularly vivid element of a national story split between an ever-growing crisis, and housing policy that is still nowhere near to convincingly dealing with it. On the upside, the renters rights bill – which offers people such as Helen a range of new protections – is about to receive royal assent. Ministers say their £39bn social and affordable housing plan will deliver at least 180,000 homes for social rent by 2036. But spending on that policy has been backloaded to the end of the current parliament – and besides, the target amounts to only 18,000 a year.
Faced with the inadequacy of national solutions, grassroots efforts in Liverpool are taking action. This is the focus of a brilliantly energised new campaign called Help – House Everyone in Liverpool Properly. It keeps its collective eye on the city’s gleaming new developments, and also wants to steer the local conversation about housing away from blaming outsiders: the city’s crisis, they say, should bring people together rather than pulling them apart.
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