Homelessness in England is up 6.8% on the previous year - with thousands in temporary housing

alphacyberranger@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 237 points –
It's a wealthy European country, so why is homelessness on the rise?
euronews.com
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Hardly surprising. Watching the same grocery items increase in price 3 times in 6 months, sometimes to over 150% of the original price, it was clear people were going to be in trouble.

Pair that with skyrocketing rents, especially in the landlord's paradise that is London. And the fact that even getting into a rental often requires a lot of money upfront. The cracks are widening.

A lot of people were barely holding it together before. It's only going to get worse unless drastic changes are made.

Alright what is causing this? Is it brexit, regular inflation, reduced social support or all three?

All three, plus 13 years of underinvestment in the country and mismanagement of the economy leaving us all poorer and more exposed to financial shocks.

As others have said, a lot of things.

Inflation is soaring all over the world. And we know that companies are taking advantage of the excuse to raise prices in excess of inflation. Brexit dealt a huge blow to the UK specifically. A war in Europe restricting the flow of quite a few staple goods.

And the Tories systemically gutting every social safety net they reasonably can over the past 13 years.

And for major cities like London, private landlords take full advantage, using every excuse they can to increase the rent by the maximum they can year-over-year. Which also has the secondary effect of forcing working-class people to move very frequently, which is expensive. I knew very few people who were renting and hadn't moved at least once in the last 3 years. Some moved multiple times.

I don't think the inflation is so regular.
I think a lot of it is driven by soaring profits of large companies.

Capitalism inherently creates wealth over concentration. It simply can't function without intervention- as we can see, it devolves to neo-feudalism and rent seeking parasitism.

Intervention can reset the counter, but these are inherent traits of Capitalist political economy