Homesick: What happens when London's affordability crisis meets the climate crisis?

Hello, and welcome to the developer podcast, where we talk about how to make cities worth living in, which often has to do with the spaces between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. How is the lack of affordable housing changing our cities? And what happens when the housing crisis meets the climate crisis? This week, I'm speaking to Peter Apps, an award winning journalist that has been writing about housing for more than a decade for titles including Inside Housing, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Times, The Independent, Private Eye, and of course, The Developer. His Orwell Prize winning book, Show Me the Bodies, covers the build up to the Grenfell Tower fire and highlights the moral and policy failures that led to the disaster. His new book, How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, examines how the housing crisis is threatening the social fabric of London and what happens when precarious housing meets a fast warming city. This conversation is a live interview that was recorded during Festival of Place Climate Resilience, our annual online event that takes a deep dive into how to create climate ready places. If you love this podcast, you will enjoy our in person festival place on June 10 in London with speakers, including author of Feminist City, Leslie Kern, Olympic cyclist, and walking and cycling commissioner, Chris Boardman, and more. And, of course, I'll be there too interviewing people on stage and speaking about how to make places that thrive. Now, without further ado, here's this week's podcast. Hi. Hi, Christine. So it's a little bit different for us we normally speak as an editor and a journalist but today we're gonna be chatting as a journalist and a journalist a little bit. But, welcome here it's really great to be, speaking to you about this book. I really enjoyed and got a lot out of reading it, so thank you for writing it. I mean, you you've written a lot about housing across your career. Why did you decide to write a book about housing in London in particular? Partly personal. I am a Londoner as in born and raised Londoner, as well as living in the city now. So, and I've it's sort of over the span of my life is really like, a real period of change in terms of London's housing. And it's sometimes, you can sometimes forget that, you know, the the the sort of past is actually quite close in terms of this this wasn't always the way London was. So there's a there's a kind of personal connection to it. There's a kind of city I remember that's that's not there anymore. But, on I guess on a broader level, I think the the question of London is a really important one just about the question of cities and how cities are developing. You know, more and more of the world's population live in cities, and that's gonna number's gonna …