Prince William is going to solve homelessness with a new royalcharity, launching a project called Homewards that starts with £3m for six towns and cities across the UK. It’s such a short sentence to make so little sense. You can look at the housing crisis from a range of perspectives. Some people are obsessed with planning permission; some have a supply-side fetish. You don’t have to chalk it all up to the ever more feudal rentier economy. Nevertheless, we could agree, I think, that an initial drop of half a mil into a city, even if it might put a roof over a handful of heads, would barely scratch the surface.
Furthermore, whatever your view on equality – and again, there’s a spectrum, with some people thinking great concentrations of unearned wealth are good for motivation or whatnot – it would still, I think, strike you as piquant that a man with housing plenty beyond anything he could ever use would style himself as ambassador for the business of getting people off the streets.
Elsewhere in Gaslit Nation, the website This Is Money has been giving advice on how to clean up your credit score if you’re applying for a mortgage: make sure you have separated your finances from those of your feckless ex; get a credit card, and if you have one, keep on top of the bills; register to vote. Because definitely, in the matter of affordability criteria, you are the problem. If you had only kept up the minimum payments on your Marks & Spencer charge card and been a bit more careful in the company you kept, you would be a much better bet for the housing indebtedness that soon nobody will be able to afford and only the luckiest will be able to evade.
It’s baffling, this commitment to a delusion, where nothing systemic has gone wrong, there is no crash round the corner, no spectre of homelessness stalking all the graphs. It’s such an intricate phantasm, collectively constructed, of an old world in which individuals can solve all their own problems, and if they can’t, Prince William can help. I almost admire it.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 29 June 2023. An earlier version said that Homewards was a “new royal foundation” when it is a charity, and to clarify that the £3m is initial funding.
