GUNS AND HOUSES

It was horrible to learn of a shooting on Walterton Road last week, on the edge of the parish. A young man  remains in hospital, critically injured, after being shot in the neck by someone passing, apparently on a moped at 8.30 in the evening. Details remain sketchy, and contradictory, as some people thought a car was involved, and either two shots, or seven were mentioned. A member of the congregation who lives on the street had heard and seen nothing unusual. The previous evening we had been told by the local police that our silly youths on the Estate have decided that they want to have their own gang, instead of being disputed territory between the Harrow Road Boys, the Lisson Green Men, and whatever they are called on the Mozart Estate (the virtuosi perhaps?) and so they have taken to taunting other postcode dwellers on social media. The result of these taunts apparently was that ten of the Lisson Green "Men" turned up at the youth club on the Amberley Estate with machetes. We really do not need this. Of course we can reassure people that you are unlikely to have any problem if you are not a young black male, but young black men are actually human beings too, and part of the community.

Bizarrely the line that the Evening Standard chose to take on the shooting was that this was a nice street in prosperous Maida Vale, where "Regency townhouses sell for £3 million". This is laughably misleading.  First they need a history lesson; nothing on Walterton Road dates back to the Regency (1811-1820). This area was developed after 1870. And when I looked on Zoopla, the average price of a house was £1.3 million, but that was only an estimate because so few houses are actually sold; almost all the houses are divided into flats, and almost all the property is social housing. Most of the property belongs to our local housing association, WECH (Walterton & Elgin Community Homes, the clue is in the acronym) which is a remarkable thing, a well-run housing association, run for the benefit of the residents. Many of those in Walterton Road are Bangladeshi families, as the older Caribbean families are gradually moving out, but the street is pretty diverse; it was one of the great centres of squatting back in the 1970s, and several of The Clash lived there before they achieved success.

WECH was set up in the wake of the "Homes for Votes" scandal, the notorious episode of gerrymandering by Dame Shirley (later Lady) Porter, when as Leader of Westminster City Council in the 1980s, she moved council tenants out of marginal wards and sold off those properties. Many of those moved out were transferred into the Harrow Road and Westbourne Wards, which were regarded as hopeless, and some homeless people were even housed in two semi-derelict blocks of flats on Elgin Avenue which were full of crumbling asbestos (a fact well-known to council officers). The Thatcher government had created mechanisms to encourage housing associations, and tenant buyouts, but Lady Porter was much discomfited when the council tenants in Elgin Avenue and Walterton Road (and streets round about) organised themselves to acquire the property. So WECH was born, and it has remained tenant-controlled and has worked hard to improve housing conditions (the asbestos-riddled flats were demolished). Lady Porter was found to have acted illegally and ordered to pay a surcharge of over £42 million, but the council later accepted a settlement of £12 million, on the basis that legal action would not be cost-effective. She fled to Israel.

In my experience most housing associations are pretty unresponsive to their tenants' problems, and are in fact more difficult to put pressure on than council housing departments (which at least respond to complaints from councillors) as they are not actually accountable to anyone. They pose as community-focussed organisations, but are in fact raising money by mortgaging their properties and playing the US property market. Anyone involved with community issues in this part of London will tell you horror stories about Genesis and Notting Hill, which have now merged (into an organisation whose two computer systems are incompatible). but they seem to be typical. Sadly, Genesis began life as the Paddington Churches' Housing Association, but the churches gradually lost interest, and the management manipulated the rules to take control from them, with the result that an organisation that had been set up on Christian principles (in the wake of Rachman) turned into an entirely secular and indeed entirely godless company, which asset-stripped former Church property. Both St Peter's and Emmanuel churches are built into blocks of Genesis flats, which gives us endless troubles, as witness the spectacular damp here in St Peter's House, which Notting Hill/Genesis are doing nothing about, as our cupboards fill with mould, and the paint drops off the corridor walls. I'm just glad I don't have to live there, as some of my predecessors did.