Punk Human

HUMAN NEED ABOVE ALL ELSE

MORAL DECENCY OVER GREED

The current chronic shortage of available accommodation options, alternately described as the national housing crisis, is a shameful scenario for any country to experience, and is not the product of some wild force of nature that remains beyond our control. Rather, the property famine that plagues our cities and towns and which compels the most vulnerable to sleep on the streets, is largely, if not entirely, the product of unrestrained property speculation.

This lack of restraint is perhaps best described as a severe diluting of moral principle. What was once thought to be for the common good and what was once considered to be for the benefit of the wider community has, during the early twenty-first century, become a kind of old fashioned nonsense that can be ignored like so much internet advertising. The practice of allowing morality to serve as a guiding light in public affairs has largely disappeared.

Morality in the form of upholding the primacy of human need above all else can be the antidote to the modern cult of putting profit and greed before people. However, if a new trend of moral expression is to take root and prosper within our society, we will first have to acknowledge the deficiencies and shortcomings of our current housing model.

One way of doing this is to create and publish an informative database that identifies empty and abandoned properties. Using a simple presentation that combines a photograph taken from the street with text that denotes the location of the property. And, that is made freely available to all.

That database now exists in the form of the Empty Properties Register.