Poverty is part of the blueprint on newbuild estates likes ours

Building community is about more than how many bedrooms you’ve got

Imogen Ball

Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest on a new housing development in the South-West of England.

A render of a new housing estate showing a road, wooden fences and clapperboard hosues.

A developer's render of a new housing estate.

Modunite Ltd on Unsplash.

Enter a newbuild property, and the first thing you’re greeted with is sparkle. The thick dust of construction has been wiped away, and everything is so clean, so tidy, so… new.

If you’ve bought such a property, you will have likely had a meeting during the purchasing process to ‘choose your options.’ During this meeting you will surprise yourself at your attention to detail: working out which plugs require USB connection; how many spotlights you want in the kitchen; what colour the cupboards should be, and what kind of flooring you’d like. Who knew that flooring was such an expensive, and extensive decision.

For some of my new neighbours, however, the process has been a little different.

As with all newbuild developments, there is a requirement for 10 per cent of it to be made up of affordable housing. On an estate as big as ours, that means approximately 200 homes. ‘Affordable’ is a relatively broad category, with schemes including shared ownership and discounted rates for first-time buyers included alongside social housing. In reality, affordable housing is still not affordable for everyone.vOn arrival at your new affordable home, you are unlikely to find the spotlighted kitchen, the USB plug sockets, and extensive pre-laid flooring. These are all unaffordable extras. Instead, you are greeted by your bare, naked subfloor. Under our newbuild fluffy carpets lie cold and hard ground. In new social housing, this means a dusty floor for little feet to take first steps on.

It was perhaps naïve of me, but I had assumed that flooring was a relatively essential element in a house, even if it’s social housing. I was wrong. Even when a previous tenant has had flooring fitted it can be removed between occupancies. Hygiene-related? Maybe. But perhaps the blanket ban on flooring could be reconsidered.

On our housing development, social housing is mixed in with privately-owned properties. Detached five-beds sit just down the road from terraced socials – but the distance between the lives of their inhabitants is significantly bigger than the distance between their homes. There is already reputational differentiation between streets.

Then there’s the geographical positioning. There is no prescription of how social housing needs should be spread across the development. In our case, it is weighted heavily towards the first few stages of building. As building progresses, houses will get bigger and the distance between them more spacious. In keeping with the locality, the back end of our development will see more palatial, less ‘affordable’ homes. Putting affordable housing up front means that the 10 per cent quota is achieved, publicised, and the existing county culture protected. It also means that these early stages of our development will actually be more heavily populated with social housing. Perhaps even attempts at integration of affordable housing will be undermined by this planning strategy.

As we live and do life on our new development, I have been privileged to meet lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds and in lots of different housing. Some are first-time buyers, who have struggled to save a deposit and work long shifts to cover the mortgage repayments. Some are experienced homeowners, who have upgraded to bigger homes and bigger mortgage repayments. Some (like us) have become homeowners, only through the generosity of parents and through shared ownership schemes. Some are social housing tenants, paying rent on homes that will never be theirs.

In this mixing pot of society, we are trying to build a community that supports all. Just over a year ago, my husband and I moved onto the estate with our boys to start a new church. With the help of others, we aim to be at the centre of a thriving local neighbourhood.’ This means being committed to community; loving our neighbours, no matter who our neighbours are. Because Jesus doesn’t care where people live or where they came from. Jesus doesn’t care how many bedrooms your home has, or what percentage of your home you actually own. Jesus doesn’t care whether or not you have adequate flooring.

He also acknowledges the dusty, dirty feet of his followers. He sends them into strangers’ homes with a message of peace, their dusty feet only to be shaken off on the way out. I suppose this means their feet remain dust-coated and mud-caked while they’re there. So, while we are here, perhaps we will also have dusty feet - with or without carpets.

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Article

Christmas culture

Creed

Generosity

27 December 2023

4 min read

God owes us nothing

Reflect on gifts given and received at Christmas, and spot the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A large stone house is wrapped in a red ribbon and bow.

Howard Dickins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

One of those difficult Christmas Day moments is opening a present from someone, only to realise you forgot to get them something. Or the reverse – expecting a present, but not getting it. It leaves you feeling awkward. Like you owe them something. Or they owe you.

The familiarity of the Christmas story also plays into this. We know how it goes. God gives us the baby Jesus. He does it every year. If he didn’t we’d feel short-changed. After all, life is hard sometimes, and, surely, God owes us something.

God Owes us Nothing. This is the title of a book by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic Church rejected the legacy of the great St Augustine when it rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the seventeenth century, but that's by the by. What got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something that runs through much mediaeval thought, to the Middle Ages, through Luther, Calvin and then on to Pascal and beyond.

If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don't get it. You regularly hear stories of people who believed in God, until a friend got ill, or died, or they encountered tragedy in the raw, or experienced the aftermath of an earthquake, a war or a tsunami, or encountered real suffering and 'lost their faith'.

I suspect this kind of thing happens because deep down we think that God owes us something, and if God doesn't give it, then the problem is with God – either that he is unkind, or simply doesn't exist. God should step in every time we make a bad choice, or someone else does, because, basically, he owes us. If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose.

To begin however from the perspective that God owes us nothing – that we have no rights over him, no claim on him, means that everything we do get comes as a gift – as a sheer delight, something to be deeply grateful for. Every breath, friendship, act of kindness, chocolate, football, mistletoe, wintry walks on bright December days – all these are gifts not rights. It suddenly turns everything about my life from something I feel I have right to, and moan mercilessly about if I lose it, to something that is a true surprise.

To that extent the Dawkins atheist brigade have a point – we should not think the universe is made for us, or that we are any more than specks of life on a distant planet, and we should give up our delusions of deserving divine intervention when things go a bit wrong. The essence of Christian faith is the faith that although we should not expect to receive any divine favours, the surprise is that we do receive so much from the hands of God. Despite our insignificance, we have been privileged by God to play a key role on this planet of reflecting his image to the rest of creation, caring for it on his behalf. We do often enjoy gifts of health, laughter, sport, music, shelter etc., and these are neither random accidents of a faceless universe, nor things we have a right to expect because of our inherent deserving, but gratuitous, free gifts from the heart that beats behind it all. And most of all, we are given the gift of Christ as a brother, a friend and a rescuer.

It is so much better to view everything as unexpected and gratuitous gift than as a right. 'Rights' make us grasping, holding onto things and insisting on them – they centre life around me and what I deserve. 'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose. In the Christian life, if I think God owes me something, then grace and mercy will not seem a miracle to me at all – after all, it's only what I deserve. If God owes us nothing, his grace, the gift of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, his provision of my needs are all miracles, things I don't deserve and thus to be given thanks for with a constant sense of wonder and amazement.

As you look around the living room post-Christmas at the gifts you have been given, whether wanted or not, try to think of them as given from people who owed you nothing, yet gave you something. And then think of everything you receive each day as pure, surprising, delightful gift. And then take that into the new year. It might lead to a truly thankful and (relatively) more carefree life. It is perhaps the key to happiness.