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H<\/span>ere is the dream, if you can afford it: gleaming apartments, close to Liverpool\u2019s waterfront, complete with penthouse swimming pools with views of the north Wales mountains, and sumptuous rooftop gardens. They are mostly bought by investors who then rent them to local professionals: three years ago, a report on early sales of flats in one development said that 40% of early buyers were from Australia, China or Singapore.<\/p>\n Ten minutes\u2019 walk away, you can witness a very different spectacle. Every Monday night, a charity called Liverpool In Arms hands out food in the city centre, to queues of people. Some are homeless; others have a house or flat to live in, but can\u2019t afford to eat. While I was reporting on the city\u2019s housing crisis for the Guardian\u2019s video series Anywhere But Westminster, I watched its volunteers in action for the best part of an hour: they told me the need they try to meet has doubled since last year.<\/p>\n I spoke to a 50-something man who had failed to keep up with a \u00a320 weekly surcharge and the rent on his flat, and then had his benefits withdrawn by the Department for Work and Pensions\u2019 sanctioning regime: he suddenly had nowhere to live, and was clearly in a state of complete disorientation. The same was true of Jimmy, who was sleeping rough, and described being endlessly tortured by one of the city council\u2019s cruellest policies: its insistence on summarily disposing of people\u2019s tents, with everything they contain.<\/p>\n <\/span>The city that reveals Britain’s biggest problem: there’s nowhere to live \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n I asked him about the prospect of somewhere permanent to stay, and his eyes filled up. \u201cI\u2019ve got more chance of sleeping in that bed there,\u201d he said, and he pointed at a sumptuous double bed, festooned with cushions and pillows, in the illuminated window of Primark.<\/p>\n The next morning, I went to an advice service run by the Merseyside Refugee Support Network, full of the frantic bustle of very fragile lives. In a warren of rooms next to a city-centre church, there was a steady stream of people faced with one of the asylum system\u2019s cruellest features: the fact that, with a handful of exceptions, if you are granted residency in the UK, you will now be served notice of the need to leave accommodation funded by the Home Office in a matter of weeks. The result, as I saw, is a rapid pipeline to living on the streets.<\/p>\n They arrived in an upstairs room, carrying letters from the Home Office contractor Serco. A man from Eritrea, who carried the sense of someone who was utterly terrified, showed me the instructions issued to him and his wife: \u201cThe Home Office has told us you have been granted permission to stay in the United Kingdom. You are still required to leave the property no later than 12 noon, which is [on] the date given in the attached notice to quit.\u201d<\/p>\n He was being helped by a volunteer who had come to the UK to escape war in Sudan. \u201cThey\u2019re going homeless \u2013 they have not any choice,\u201d he told me, before he described what often happens next: the handing-over of tents and sleeping bags, and another increase in the numbers of people who huddle in Liverpool\u2019s doorways.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n <\/span>A homeless man in a tent in the centre of Liverpool, 1 April 2025.<\/span> Photograph: Peter Byrne\/PA<\/p>\n 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\u2019s social housing waiting list. But one figure is particularly shocking: reflecting the fact that most local authorities now lack either the means or will to build anything more than paltry amounts of new social housing, the city\u2019s \u201cadditional social rent dwellings\u201d in 2023-24 totalled \u2013 and read this slowly \u2013 five.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 which has damp walls, ceilings covered in mould and an upstairs window that won\u2019t shut \u2013 for \u00a3600 a month. But her landlord recently hit her with a no-fault eviction notice \u2013 because, she suspects, he is set on charging a new tenant the \u00a31,400 monthly rent he now gets for similar properties, which are presumably in a much better state.<\/p>\n The numbers of people waiting for social housing, she told me, means that unless she and her son endure a spell of homelessness, they are highly unlikely to get that kind of help. So she is trying to somehow find a way through all this impossibility, with precious little idea of what comes next. As we talked, she mentioned a seemingly indelible part of the online conversations she sees about people in her predicament. \u201cI see the messages on Facebook [that] blame the asylum seekers: \u2018If it wasn\u2019t for these people coming over on the boats, you\u2019d get your house.\u2019 That upsets me tremendously. Cos it\u2019s not right.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 which offers people such as Helen a range of new protections \u2013 is about to receive royal assent. Ministers say their \u00a339bn 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 \u2013 and besides, the target amounts to only 18,000 a year. On the ground, therefore, everything still feels terribly fragile and uncertain.<\/p>\n In London, housing policy is about to undergo the utterly absurd change that was recently decried by my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty, whereby developers will be free to build even less \u201caffordable\u201d housing in return for even greater public subsidy. Liverpool city council, meanwhile, has just started a public consultation on its target of 30,000 new homes over the next 15 years, but any hardened specifics on social housing are hard to come by (its latest draft Local Plan says the council will require large developments to set aside 10% of homes for social rent, but clearly, this won\u2019t get near current levels of need). This is the focus of a brilliantly energised new campaign called Help \u2013 House Everyone in Liverpool Properly. It keeps its collective eye on the city\u2019s gleaming new developments, and also wants to steer the local conversation about housing away from blaming outsiders, and blurring the politics of housing into asylum and immigration: the city\u2019s crisis, they say, should bring people together rather than pulling them apart.<\/p>\n Which brings us to a particularly disquieting shift. Liverpool has long been credited with the so-called \u201cscouse exceptionalism\u201d that supposedly makes its people less prone to belligerent expressions of national identity and Little Englandism. But in many neighbourhoods, there are now streets festooned with union flags and St George\u2019s flags. In the midst of what I heard about its housing shortage, they began to look like a desperate, distorted show of a fear laced with defiance, and proof of an unshakable political fact: that if you make people feel scared about something as basic as the roof over their heads, they will sooner or later start to behave in very unsettling ways.<\/p>\n John Harris is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n