Luxury Leftovers Won’t House the Poor: A Rejoinder to the Financial Times

Dear Tej,

I read with deep concern your article titled “*Why Socialists Should Embrace Luxury Apartments*,” which was published in the 16 July 2026 edition of the Financial Times. The central theme of your opinion piece is that the development of luxury apartments is a more effective strategy for tackling housing affordability than the construction of social housing. The contents of the article appear to be what one is accustomed to reading in the Private Eye or The Onion rather than the Financial Times. Disturbingly though, this is not satire, but something you and many others strongly believe in.

You argue that, in response to the housing affordability crisis, self-styled socialists should stop advocating for social housing and “Embrace the construction of more expensive ones instead.” To support your thesis, you argue that construction of large-scale social housing is economically unviable for private developers due to high construction costs. You also note that Prime Minister Burnham’s plan to build more affordable housing would cost an extra £10bn in subsidies.

This trickle-down economic approach to solving the housing affordability crisis is based on a logically flawed analysis. At the centre of your analysis is the principle of filtering. You argue that as “Higher-income households move into newly built units, they free up older properties, raising supply and slashing prices for middle and lower-end housing,” To support your theory, you cherry pick two studies that suggest this so-called filtering effect worked in 512 and 100 units in Honolulu and Helsinki, respectively, leading to the release of units available for low-income households.

Your analysis relies on a limited data set to justify a significant policy shift. Basing your argument on two academic research that draws on a combined sample of 612 housing units in Honolulu and Helsinki is insufficient grounds to conclude that filtering will work for the 1.34 million households on the official social housing list in England; the 4.2 million people estimated by the National Housing Federation to be in housing need in England; the 134,000 families in England living in temporary accommodation; and the 380,000 homeless people in England. It is unrealistic and simplistic to assume low-income households will move into these unaffordable luxury apartments once the previous occupants vacate.

Luxury apartments are often acquired by high-income earners as additional investments in their existing asset portfolios, thereby reducing the likelihood of their being released to the market. According to the English Housing Survey, there were 809,000 second homes owned by households in England, more than a third of which were purchased as long-term investments rather than as places to live. Research by University College London revealed that between 2015 and 2025, overseas investors shifted from investments in expensive single-detached homes to units in multi-property residences, such as blocks of flats or apartment complexes. The study also revealed that London accounted for 45% of all overseas-owned residential titles and 81% of their total value in the UK.

It is a tortuous logic to suggest that social housing can “Discourage tenants from moving in search of better jobs if that means letting go of subsidised housing.” Is this not advocating for a Kosovo-style social cleansing of people with low incomes whereby cities like London are cleared of the “undesirables”? Such thinking belongs to a Dickensian world characterised by social exclusion of the poor.

It is obvious from your piece that you are not comfortable with the government devoting funds to lift the marginalised out of their dire housing straits by providing an economic justification for the government not to help the economically disadvantaged. You consider an extra £10bn on subsidies to build more affordable housing as excessive. You also note that “Scaling back large social housing commitments and backing more market-rate developments saves public funds and expenditure on housing benefits” and creates fiscal space to provide targeted support for those who need it most. Mr Parikh, why does your solution entail inflicting more pain on the marginalised to relieve the pain of the marginalised? Is this not like arguing that, to solve the hunger crisis, we should make food more expensive; to improve public health, we should make healthcare very expensive; and to improve public education, we should make education more expensive?

I find it very disturbing that, when it comes to helping the less privileged, commentators like you often invoke economic jargon such as “fiscal discipline”, “balancing the books”, “living within our means”, “fiscal responsibility”, and “budget constraints”. Yet, when public funds are allocated to benefit the rich and powerful, use of this economic jargon disappears. While you express concern for how much the government is spending to make life less burdensome for people on the margins of society, you remain silent when government devotes funds to favour those on top of the economic ladder. This paradox can only be described as a form of capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich, in which the rich are too big to fail, and the poor are too small to help. During the 2025/26 fiscal year, the UK Government is expected to spend £62bn on defence and £68.3bn, £73.8bn, £76.5bn, and £79.1bn in the 26/27, 27/28, 28/29, and 29/30 financial years, respectively. Some of these funds will line the pockets of defence contractors, benefiting their executives, lobbyists, shareholders and supply chains. Yet while you have little or nothing to write about the government expending money on items that destroy limbs and lives, you have an issue with funds allocated to enable the poor to have adequate and affordable housing. The UK government has spent £21bn to date to support war efforts in another country, yet you suggest spending money on social housing to help the poor in the UK is a waste of taxpayers’ money. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the UK Government committed £1 trillion to bail out banks affected by the crisis (including £123.93bn provided as loans or share purchases). Yet, when it comes to the government investing a comparatively modest sum in social housing, you argue it will prevent people from “Letting go of subsidised housing.” It is difficult to reconcile the socialisation of losses for the rich with the privatisation of losses for the poor.

You place so much faith in the market that you call for the suspension of affordable social housing in favour of unaffordable luxury apartments. When we put our faith in the market, we should not forget the humanity of those left bloodied on the Jericho road. In his book, The Moral Limits of the Market, Michael Sandel notes how we have drifted from a market economy to a market society, which he defines as “A way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavour. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.” When market logic becomes the basis of public policy, we risk being indifferent to human suffering.

Trickle-down economics, which you have so much faith in, is a myth. Contrary to the notion that a rising tide lifts all boats and that, as the economic pie grows, all will benefit, the affluent end up owning all the boats and eating all the pie. A wise man once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. History tells us that trickle-down economics, as the name suggests, is nothing more than a trick in which the rich get richer, the fat get fatter, the privileged get more privilege, the comfortable get more comfortable while the poor get poorer; the thin get thinner; the insecure become more insecure, and the vulnerable become more vulnerable. The consequences of trickle-down economics have contributed to greater inequality. We now live in a world where, according to Oxfam’s Global Inequality Report, the richest 56 people in the UK hold more wealth than 27 million people combined and where the world’s 12 richest billionaires have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, or more than four billion people. As Martin Luther King put it, “It is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.” If the objective is for the marginalised to have decent affordable housing, then it is immoral and wrong to ask the poor to wait for the rich to vacate their luxury apartment before having a home to live in.

It is very easy for someone with your professional and economic background to use the pages of the Financial Times to advocate for building more unaffordable luxury apartments as the solution to make housing available for the least and the last. It is easy for people with your level of comfort, insulated from the daily realities of moving from house to house and from counting every pound to pay your monthly rent, to reduce affordable housing to an intellectual debate. But if one’s life journey has been defined by a struggle to put food on the table, if one’s life journey has been defined by working day and night only to be paid peanuts to feed one’s children rather than progressing from being a Chief Economist at the Institute of Directors to being a Director at a leading Credit agency, one quickly realises that affordable housing is not an academic exercise to be debated but a matter of life and death and a thin line between comfortable sleeping and rough sleeping.

Selah

Ahmed Olayinka Sule, CFA

Alatenumo

July 2026