How did London get here (Families in London temporary housing told they cannot use in-built air conditioning, 27 July)? Your report says homeless families, including young children, were placed in a glass tower during a heatwave and told they could not use the building’s air conditioning because it had “not been offered as an amenity”. If that doesn’t make every Londoner stop in disbelief, we’ve become dangerously desensitised. This is no longer a housing crisis, it is a crisis of basic human dignity.
London proudly markets itself as one of the world’s greatest cities: a global financial capital overflowing with luxury developments, billion-pound property portfolios and record-breaking real estate values. Yet, in the shadow of that wealth, children are being expected to endure dangerously hot flats where the very system designed to make the building habitable is effectively treated as a luxury.
When a city reaches the point where vulnerable families are housed in buildings that become ovens, while the solution exists but is deemed off limits, something has gone profoundly wrong.
This isn’t an administrative oversight. It is the triumph of bureaucracy over common sense and, ultimately, over compassion. Politicians have spent years telling us London is thriving. Thriving for whom? It certainly isn’t thriving for the record number of families trapped in temporary accommodation or the children growing up without a stable home.
History teaches us that great cities are judged not by the height of their skyscrapers, but by how they treat those with the least power. On that measure, London should be deeply ashamed. A city where air conditioning exists but compassion is switched off is no longer a world-class city. It is simply a dystopia.
Fernando Quintana Marrero
London
