To fix the housing crisis, start with what people can actually afford

And unless something changes, we will keep getting the same results. Because the truth is simple, we are still trying to solve a 21st-century problem with 20th-century thinking.

For decades, housing policy has been built around a model that no longer reflects how people live. In the post-war years, it made sense. One factory could employ tens of thousands. Incomes were relatively stable. Communities were more uniform. Council housing was designed to match that reality.

That world has gone. Today, those same places might host 30 or 40 different businesses, with a wide range of wages, contracts and life chances. The economy is more dynamic, but also more fragmented and less predictable. Yet our housing system still assumes people fit neatly into fixed categories. They don’t, and that disconnect is now driving the crisis.

We still talk about housing as if it’s a simple divide between social housing for those in need, market rent and home ownership for those who can afford it.

But the real pressure today is working people often in essential roles earn too much for traditional council housing, but nowhere near enough to buy or rent securely. They are doing everything right, yet the system is failing them.

Worse still, they are largely invisible in the data that drives policy. Because we define “need” based on outdated assumptions, we are misdiagnosing the problem and therefore delivering the wrong solutions.

I saw this first-hand during my ten years as leader of Barking and Dagenham. Like many places, we were dealing with rising demand, declining affordability and a growing number of residents stuck between social housing and the market. It was clear that if we continued with the same approach, we would get the same results.

So, we did something different. I asked a simple question: what can people actually afford?

That led us to develop what I call the Community Rent Model, a system built around real incomes rather than rigid categories. Instead of forcing people into a binary choice, we created a range of rents from around 30 per cent to 80 per cent of market levels, allowing people to pay what they could genuinely afford and move between levels as their circumstances changed. No poor doors. No segregation. One community.

Between 2019 and 2024, this approach helped deliver 20 per cent of London’s social and affordable housing in a single borough, with the vast majority going to local families.

It worked because we stopped treating housing as a standalone issue and started recognising it for what it really is, social and growth infrastructure.

Housing underpins everything: economic growth, health, education and opportunity. Get housing wrong, and the costs are felt everywhere else, like in public services, in productivity, and in the cohesion of our communities.

We also aligned public and private investment around a shared goal of building homes that reflected real incomes, not outdated models. And perhaps most importantly, we combined what I call “cold data” - the numbers - with “warm conversations” by listening to people about how they actually live.

People don’t just want a roof over their heads. They want a home that is secure and genuinely affordable, a community where they feel they belong, and the chance to build a better future.

That is why I've written a book about my experiences and community outcomes.

It sets out the principles of inclusive growth and explains how housing sits at its heart, not as a policy silo, but as the foundation of a functioning economy and a fair society.

So, we face a choice: we can continue applying 20th-century thinking to a 21st-century problem and watch the system come under increasing strain.

Or we can change. We can design housing around real lives and real incomes. We can build genuinely mixed communities. And we can treat housing as the essential infrastructure it has always been. This is not about ideology. It is about reality.

And it does not matter what the country's political makeup is, because this approach works. The housing crisis will not fix itself, but we already know how to start fixing it.

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Darren Rodwell is the former Leader of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and author of Building Communities: One Brick and One Heart at a Time, published by Richer Publishing and Media.

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