A theological reflection on housing

What have words of Isaiah 65: 17-22, written in the Middle East some 2700 years or so ago, got to say to us about issues of housing in our day and culture? Has the writer, who is addressing the returned exiles from Babylon about the problems of rebuilding the broken down capital of the Israelites in Jerusalem, a way of making sense to us now? I think the remarkable thing is how contemporary and attractive this manifesto sounds - an early version of the Millennium development goals. The prophet's vision is of a better life for everyone. Isaiah dreams of God's new world where no more children will die in infancy, people will live to 100 and just be youngsters, nobody will work for a builder and yet not be able to afford their own house, nobody will work on the land but see their family going hungry. It's going to be a world where everyone lives to see the next generations grow up to be thriving and happy, a world where even animals will live in harmony together.

Our visions are pretty similar, even now, and affordable housing is one key element of the picture. But the trouble is our world is a very different to that which the writer of the last chapters of the book of Isaiah was addressing. Building enough houses for the returning exiles of Jerusalem was one thing, though we don't know what the population of the city was at the time, but building affordable housing for people today is quite another. The big trend of our world is urbanisation, and it's happening as fast as when Manchester became the first industrialised city in the world - 'Cottonopolis' - in the 19th century. The world's biggest city now is probably Tokyo, with 28 million inhabitants. Next in size are probably Mexico City and Mumbai with 18 million, and then Sao Paulo with 17 million people. London is more of a Championship than a Premier League capital city, in terms of population, though it's diversity in terms of the number of different races who live there is probably second to none. By now it's pretty certain that more than half the world's population live in cities and towns, and the overall figure could be up to 60% by 2030 - at which point it will be around 80% in this country, where the trend towards living in towns began so much sooner.

And these people all need somewhere to live. In China, the population analysts predict that by 2030 there will be 350 million more people living in towns and cities than do so now, giving an urban total of 880 million. Housing these people will mean needing to build almost 50 cities the size of greater London. Nobody wants to build cities in deserts or on mountain sides, so it doesn't take much imagination to see how much agricultural land could be swallowed up by this urban drift. Shades of Joni Mitchell's 1970s song 'Big Yellow taxi' - 'they paved paradise - put up a parking lot' - or in this case, they put up a new city.

So what do we do about this challenge? Can we risk giving everyone renewed hope of being able to live in their own home when the overall demand is so vast? Should we encourage home ownership at all when the recent economic recession began as a result of unrestricted mortgage lending based on poorly secured loans in the US housing market? The answer, in Isaiah's terms, must surely be that people of faith need an approach to housing that's just and sustainable. Our TV programmes focus on rich individuals buying dream homes from their substantial budgets - half a million pounds to do a barn conversion. 'Escape to the Country', 'Location, Location, Location', and 'Grand Designs' - they're all selling us the vision of an ideal place for us and ours and never mind what happens to you and yours. It's a million miles away from Isaiah's vision. How about a series on regenerating a council estate or creating a new community of rented homes instead? I believe if we don't start to set some national standards of housing equity and affordability for all soon, we'll be storing up tension and division in society for the future, as the gap grows between the haves and the have nots. With our cities and towns filling up fast this need for fairness gets even more important. The alternative could be shanty towns appearing around British cities as happens so often now in South America, Asia and Africa. Is that what we want - a return for some to the living conditions of the back to back houses which Marx and Engels saw in Manchester 170 years ago when they began researching poverty here in Manchester? Surely Isaiah's vision is far more attractive and sustainable. I'd prefer to live in a world where people build houses and live in them.

Revd. Dr. Kirsty Thorpe,

United Reformed Church Moderator of General Assembly

Kirsty Thorpe, 03/11/2010