Many of the streets have Scottish names; many of the houses are graced with distinctive male or female keystones above the front door, rumoured to be based on Archie and his wife. The estate is at least a 15-minute walk from the nearest train station and is mostly an established family neighbourhood. I have lived here for three years and have fallen hard for its charms.

While Archibald Corbett’s legacy is widely known and celebrated with affection locally, it’s unlikely that his politics would go down well with many of his estate’s residents today: he was an unapologetic capitalist (Lewisham has been Labour for as long as anyone can remember) and he disapproved thoroughly of drinking (summer nights around here are full of the sound of late-night partying; K-pop, Jamaican dance-hall, Eastern European folk, take your pick). And as someone who believed in decent housing for working-class people — by which he meant one family per house, a garden, proximity to a station and park — it’s likely he would have been appalled by what’s been going on lately in his streets.

Because at the moment, as a result of Tory housing policy, the modest houses of the Corbett estate are being bought up by property developers, their interiors ripped out, and in their place, units designed for individual occupation inserted into them. The units can be as small as 6.52 metres squared — smaller than a prison cell. By adding a hastily constructed loft, a narrow terraced house of approximately 60 square metres can be transformed into a “HMO” — a house of multiple occupancy comprising up to six separate “units”. These HMOs represent different things to different people: for the owners, they are sources of profit; for the neighbours, they can often be sources of nuisance or even danger. And for the vulnerable people who live in them, they can be a living nightmare.

As residents became aware of an increase of HMOs in the area, an acquaintance of mine organised a meeting last month with the Lewisham East MP, Janet Daby, to address the issue: he expected it would be attended by him and a few other people who were directly affected. In the event, the church hall was standing room only, with at least 150 people in attendance. The officials were clearly expecting this as we were met not only by Janet Daby, but two local councillors, three council staff including Lewisham’s Director of Planning, and three Metropolitan Police Officers.

Residents spoke of a sense of hopelessness as developers bought up houses next to them and undertook building work without any regard for its impact on them, ignoring party wall agreements. One woman from another ward but within the borough reported being told by a council officer to not go into her back garden because the irresponsible building work rendered it too dangerous. For her there was nothing that could be done, because the work was being conducted around the back of the house and was, as such, private and none of the council’s business. A councillor described the companies that make hay amid the lax regulatory environment as “cartels”.

The council staff and the politicians were not defensive, as I expected them to be. It was far more depressing: they seemed utterly defeated. The Director of Planning asked people not to sell their houses to these developers; one might reasonably ask, if you have a badly run HMO next door to you, who other than a developer is going to buy it? Another councillor suggested direct action and looked to the three Met police officers in attendance, one of whom had already described local HMOs as “not fit for human habitation”. They shrugged, perhaps in assent. The “cartel” comment councillor — with a flair for drama or perhaps an appropriate sense of what was at stake — spoke of law and order breaking down. Another woman questioned the absence of the state, why she was paying her taxes, and whether anyone cared about what was going on in the community?

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What is going on here is something called “exempt accommodation”: housing that is exempt from the usual limit a local authority can pay in housing benefit for the provision of accommodation to vulnerable people. The additional money is intended to cover the cost of caring for the residents of such accommodation; people who are vulnerable for a whole host of reasons. Ashley Horsey of Commonweal, a charity that has researched exempt accommodation extensively, explained to me that there are two types: one sort is for people with long-term challenges such as mobility or an intellectual disability. This kind tends to be well run.

The other type of exempt accommodation (“non-commissioned”) is intended as a stop-gap for people who temporarily need assistance during a transitional stage in their lives. This includes people emerging from prison, people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, women escaping domestic violence, care-leavers and people who have been sleeping rough. It’s not uncommon for people from all of these categories — and others — to live alongside one another, sharing a hallway, a kitchen and an entrance. According to Crisis, 150,000 people across the UK are being housed in exempt accommodation, a 62% increase since 2016.

​​This type of accommodation (non-commissioned exempt) has created a situation that turns vulnerable people into units of profit to be mined by developers — the “cartels” the local councillor spoke of. Providers can charge up to £960 per month for the provision of accommodation for people in this category. By examining adverts for rental accommodation locally, one can clearly see this: a “studio” going for £960 per month in a borough where a double room in a more traditional house-share with a responsible landlord yields only around £500-£700 per month. At the meeting in Lewisham, one such landlord — and brave soul, given the atmosphere — spoke up in some bewilderment: why aren’t the Government regulating us, he asked.

The additional money paid to these providers is supposed to be used to provide assistance to residents, to ensure they have the help they need to move on with their lives. What has actually happened is that many providers absolutely fail to provide this “help” — it is neither defined, measured nor monitored — and simply cream off the money that is supposed to assist people, as profit. In a detailed report into the issue Commonweal describe an “accountability deficit” that has arisen here: there is no obligation on providers to ensure that their residents are looked after — despite the premium that is paid for the accommodation. The results can be grim — “sex for rent” situations, drug users living alongside those trying to stay clean and endless anti-social behaviour issues for neighbours.

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Imagine for a moment that you are a woman escaping a violent situation in your home. You get away, and you get housed. You turn up at your new address and find a six-square-metre room is now your home. The kitchen you use is shared by five others, some of whom have histories of violence, some of whom are using drugs. The kitchen has no window; you have nowhere to dry your clothes. You are supposed to stay here temporarily, but you can’t afford private rents, and there is no social housing available.

What do you do? What can you do? It’s too noisy to sleep at night. Your landlord is making up to £12,000 per year off of you; he doesn’t want you to leave and there is nowhere for you to go. Some women in situations like this have children living with them — and because of the lack of oversight, it is unclear how many children are currently living in such circumstances.

The “accountability deficit” — lax oversight, little to no building regulation and helpless local councils — has created a gold rush in neighbourhoods like Lewisham: places where housing is still cheap, relatively, and where local homeowners are of modest incomes and can’t easily afford solicitors to defend their rights. A local homeowner here in Catford dug into the ownership of the HMO next door to him and found the property was flipped four times in quick succession between companies owned by the same person. The tactics used by many of these companies are straightforward: they purchase houses, in cash, easily outbidding ordinary buyers. They then proceed with building work as quickly as possible and ignore legal requirements that require consent from neighbours.

If neighbours object, they have trouble finding out to whom they can object — these companies maintain a practice of keeping former buyers’ names on the land register or they flip houses (four to five times in one day) to obscure ownership. These companies take a calculated risk, knowing that most regular homeowners will not have the time or the resources to wade through the legality of the situation. The game is stacked utterly in favour of the developers; the only instrument the council has is weak and ineffectual.

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This instrument — an Article Four Direction — can be used to prevent further HMO development in a neighbourhood, but only after complaints have been made. It cannot be applied retrospectively, meaning there is no disincentive for developers to continue to act with impunity. Article Four was applied in wards to the south of the Corbett estate and this is why development has suddenly descended upon these streets; the problem was not solved, it simply moved. The first many people knew of it was the sudden, poignant sight of six small fridges turning up for delivery at the recently-sold, small three-bedroom house next door.

This, of course, points to another issue: habitation by what amounts to six separate households creates a dangerous strain on services and facilities. I hear of a HMO in another neighbourhood that had its gas and electricity switched off due to fire safety concerns.

Nobody is being incentivised to fix this situation. Not local government, not the taxpayer, not vulnerable citizens, and not central government, which is effectively paying private corporations a premium to house people in dangerous conditions. But when the guiding ideology of our era lacks a moral dimension, or a sense of responsibility towards a community then this is where we end up. It’s hard not to think of Grenfell and the callousness of companies such as Kingspan, where staff have admitted to prioritising profits over standards. And I’m struck by the clinical nature of the language we now use around housing: units, delivery, services, clients. Who thinks about their homes in that way? Who are we forcing to think about their homes in that way?

A lack of housing security, a lack of a home — not knowing where or if you’re going to sleep at night or if the place you have is safe, is a reality for thousands of people across this country. The current solution: pay developers to make it go away; pay them whatever they want. The utter disregard for the dignity of the individuals involved or the neighbourhoods they live in, is grim and very telling. As a resident told me: the developers don’t live in Catford. They live in Knightsbridge or Dubai, or everywhere and nowhere.

These are our elites: they don’t put the names of their cherished homeland on the streets they create, they hide behind shell companies and when they look at vulnerable people and ordinary neighbourhoods, they see pound signs and profit.

This question has animated much of my reading this year: from Clayborne Carson’s Martin Luther King Jr, to Roy Foster’s examination of Ireland’s revolutionary generation in Vivid Faces. But the book that today’s Twitter activists could perhaps learn the most from is John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s deeply researched and highly entertaining biography of Dorothy Day. This rambunctious American peace activist emerged in times that echo many of the crises we currently face, but her answer to them was, inspiringly, different.

Born to a relatively comfortable middle class family in 1897, Day enjoyed a misspent youth among the radicals of 1920s Greenwich village, falling in love with feckless journalists and drunk intellectuals, writing novels, experimenting with feminism and socialism, and trying to figure out how life should be lived. If a friend of Dorothy’s was going to be arrested — and they often were, for agitating for votes for women in the 1910s, or protesting against the arms race in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1960s — you could safely bet that she would be right there alongside them. The Groucho Marx saying about how a good friend will try to bail you out of jail, while a best friend will be in the cell next to you, could have been written about Dorothy.

Dorothy did not have to agree with you to love you. Her worldview did not depend on ideological convergence between friends — unlike that of today’s activists, who often insist on absolute purity and cannot tolerate disagreement. While Day’s openness allowed for the hectic fun of her early life, it gathered depth and meaning when she converted to Catholicism in her early thirties and began the journey that would lead to the foundation of her influential movement and newspaper, the Catholic Worker.

Dorothy’s conversion was an enormous surprise to her friends — she ran with a bohemian set and had been inclined towards communism as a young person (who isn’t?). But she ultimately declined communism’s emphasis on material progress as the only thing mankind need bother itself over. She needed more, and she thought humanity in general did too. Dorothy saw each individual as a whole person — which helped her avoid the horrific dehumanisation of the great ideological catastrophes of the twentieth century: ones that many of today’s activists, in their determination to hate those who don’t agree with them, seem bent on replicating.

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Dorothy, on the other hand, practised the love she preached. In 1933, she and Peter Maurin — a penniless French intellectual drunk on the radical potential of the Gospel — founded a “House of Hospitality” in Dorothy’s stomping ground of lower Manhattan. The House was for anyone who needed shelter, food and care — no questions asked. Crucially, no standards of behaviour or personal hygiene had to be adhered to. Dorothy liked to tell newly arrived volunteers at the House: “there are three things you have to remember about very poor people who live on the street: they don’t smell good, they aren’t grateful and they are apt to steal”.  This is not the carefully sanitised language of the modern activist; it’s the no-bullshit lowdown from someone who lived her word. Dorothy was not interested in saving people: her religiosity was non-evangelical, her compassion was not charity. It was not about control.

The results of all this acceptance were predictably chaotic, and the Lower East Side House of Hospitality was always just about to fall apart: bedbugs, unsympathetic city officials, rats, fire. Dorothy was comfortable with chaos — former hedonists often are — and it was a principle of her new faith that it was no use to live in middle class comfort while helping the poor. You had to live among them.

Day’s commitment to writing about organised labour in the 1930s brought her all across the country and her concern for racism brought her to the south long before the typical white do-gooder from the north paid attention to conditions for black people there. She, like many anti-racist campaigners today, thought that America was rendered a hypocrite through its racist treatment of its own people — but she was prepared to write about it while it was still deeply unpopular and indeed dangerous to do so. It’s amusing to imagine what Day would think of today’s booming Diversity and Inclusion industry with its corporate activism; while an advocate of brotherly love, she also had a caustic wit and a deep, instinctive distrust for any kind of institutionally mandated morality. The Catholic Church of its day did not know what to make of her; at one point, she was asked to omit the word “Catholic” from her newspaper’s title. She declined.

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While Dorothy seems to have been on the “right side” of most of the big questions of the twentieth century — anti-Franco, anti-Jim Crow, anti-fascist, anti-war — she was no saint (even if the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the long process of beatifying her, it being much easier to celebrate her now that she’s dead and can no longer shame comfortable prelates with her radical poverty). She was a less than ideal mother to her daughter, but then people called to higher ideals so often fail their own families. Tamar Teresa was born when Dorothy was 29, the result of a doomed love affair (one of several). She was a wanted, cherished child, and her arrival seemed to propel Dorothy towards the spirituality that would shape the rest of her life. But Dorothy was influenced by Emmanuelle Mounier’s “personalist” Catholic philosophy, which was sceptical of the bourgeois family and its emphasis on security and comfort — and this made her an unreliable mother.

A life of voluntary poverty is all well and good when freely chosen; Tamar never had the luxury of that choice. Growing up in an eccentrically run housing shelter can’t have been easy, especially as Tamar got older, and her mother spent increasing amounts of time on the road. While Dorothy had an answer to most questions, her life doesn’t offer many solutions to women who have children and feel called to something more. To be fair to Dorothy though, that one’s a toughie.

Dorothy Day died in 1980. She lived a huge life in a humble way, dedicated to improving — however slightly — the lot of the very least of us. She was a true activist: “the original hippie,” as icon of the counter-culture Abbie Hoffman called her, disciplined in nothing apart from her love for her fellow man, no matter how drunk, disorderly or ideologically unsound those men (or women) were. She is pretty useless as an example, then, to activists whose work involves identifying and shaming those who have the incorrect opinions. And maybe she’s also not that useful to the rest of us either: who among us is going to embrace a life of voluntary poverty? In this era of relentless careerism, such a notion is laughably quaint.

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As a life-long anti-war activist, the last decade of Day’s life saw her engage with the enormous wave of opposition to the Vietnam War. While she was heartened by the size of the protests, she was dismayed by their tenor; she hated the “contempt and ridicule” of the counter-cultural approach to activism. What would she think of current activism, which often seems comprised of only that? For Dorothy, the project of creating a better life on this earth — the project, one might in good faith assume, of all activists — had to be centred in love. And while few of us can follow fully in her footsteps — self-abnegation is not for the faint-hearted — we can perhaps learn from this.

Perhaps her most important lesson, though, for these terrifying, paralysing times, is Day’s rejection of the notion that anything or anyone will ever be “fixed”. Maurin said of the movement he created with her: “we don’t measure our success, we don’t despair and we don’t judge.” Our shambolic life on this collapsing planet is forever in crisis; we are always, like Dorothy’s Manhattan House of Hospitality, about to fall apart. But still she pushes us to answer: how can we make it better for the very least of us in the meantime?

Now, humour operates in lots of ways (I can’t believe I’m writing this, but here we are), one of which is through something called hyperbole, from the Greek, meaning: get a grip. This joke is funny because of the contrast between this teenage girl’s minor inconvenience and the horrors suffered by Anne Frank and her family. There’s also a kind of meta-funniness going on too, I think — the joke seems to invoke the way we cope with the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust by making silly jokes about attics and Anne Frank. The word “we” in that sentence is problematic, probably, because I am not Jewish but, well, I think Anne Frank’s work belongs to the world — and for the sin of that thought, I shall begin preparing my own hide-away.

I wonder if a way to deal with the endless contretemps around problematic language in literature at the moment is to offer the reader two versions of the work they wish to read. The first is the draft produced by the writer with nothing on her mind but the business of getting a good story onto the page. The second is the version put through the filter of sensitivity readers who will remove anything that could possibly be interpreted by any group as a slight. That way, I think, everyone wins: those who believe literature should deal with how people really are — problematic, offensive, foul-mouthed — can read about that and revel in their damnation; and those who think literature should show us the higher ideals through characters who never make dodgy jokes can have their safe clean fun too – although, we can never be too sure of this safety since, according to Publisher’s Weekly, this book had been vetted by sensitivity readers and still the joke made it through.

This dual-edition model has the advantage of creating employment for the hordes of people who wish to work in publishing — and the work itself is likely to be satisfying for graduates trained to locate insensitivities in the texts they encounter. Obviously, it will cost the publishers money, but they are mostly celebrating record profits at the moment so they can afford it — and I suspect they will be extremely grateful to throw some money at the problem of these endless social media blow-ups. Indeed it will probably prove less costly in the long run than having to deal with the reduced efficacy of the PR departments who are surely in some kind of group therapy at the moment (I really hope the companies are paying for this because publishing salaries do not stretch so far as to cover the cost of the kind of mental robustness needed in the frontline of these wars).

The alternative, I guess, is that all we are allowed to read will be campus novels about young people with lovely politics arguing sexily before falling into bed with one another. I have no problem with such novels — but I’m not sure if that’s all I want to read. It seems to me that we are dealing with a gap between how people behave in “the real world” and how people in cultural institutions like publishing houses wish they would behave. Anyone who has ever worked in a bar or a McDonald’s or a factory or even a school or hospital will have heard language that would make the most hardened sensitivity reader faint clean anyway. Which means it’s great that we have so few literary novels depicting those kind of environments nowadays — I mean, can you imagine?

Anyway, it doesn’t matter because the joke has been scrubbed out. The author has asked her publisher to remove it from the text of the novel for future printings and from all existing digital versions. So we all win — earlier, problematic versions of the text will likely circulate on eBay for those who think they can handle it, and everyone else will get a safe reading experience. All we need now is for publishers to provide that option to readers from the start, which has the additional advantage of giving us insight into how many unclean readers are out there, and — if these readers mostly purchase their books online — a handy way to keep track of them and their dirty reading habits.

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I am honing in, perhaps unfairly, on a particularly egregious example here: I know that as I write, any number of books with any number of dodgy jokes are going to press, brought into being by a solid understanding of the difference between author and character which seems to have failed Hilderbrand’s readers so fatally. Of course we know they understand this very well, but this is not about protecting readers from offence. It is really about incentives and how the discovery of offence in texts is richly rewarded by a social media where attention — of any kind, even for being wilfully, deliberately stupid — is the only currency.

But it is the fact that it is such a trivial joke in such a “trivial” genre that should concern us here. “Trivial” genres are the ones read by most people (though we in fiction publishing must always remember that most people do not read our books at all). Most of the fiction market is commercial and of that, at least 50% of it is digital — often low-priced ebooks depicting characters in settings many people enjoy reading about: schools, hospitals, police stations, helicopters, skyscrapers, Nantucket; that combination of ordinary life enhanced by high drama, romance or crime that has been the bread-and-butter of publishing for as long as anyone can remember.

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But now, even here, in the books that never win prestigious prizes, with authors who sell by the bucketload but are never heard of by readers who carry New Yorker tote bags and are sniffy about Amazon — myself first among them, I admit  — even here, if we are to be guided by the Hilderbrand example, it is no longer permissible to depict people talking as they actually talk. Be honest: how inclusive was your language the last time you had sex with a millionaire on a helicopter?

I know that in similar incidents there has been unease at publishing houses about text changes brought about due to social media pressure. And I understand here that it was the author’s decision: the upheaval, the anxiety, the potential damage to her brand just wasn’t worth it. This put me in mind of “Art’s Troubles”, a beautiful essay by Anthony Julius in the recent issue of Liberties, exploring the question of who, in this censorious age of ours, will stand up for the arts?

He astutely comments that the writer/artist will not do so: she is too busy making art, even if the art she is making — commercial romance novels — is usually ignored by the kind of people who read lofty essays in literary journals. As (some) publishing workers do read or at least pretend to have read these essays, I beg them to read Julius’s one and to consider as a slogan – for we all seem so very fond of slogans, all of a sudden, though sloganeering is the very antithesis of art-making – the following:

“Everything is a subject for art and literature; everything can be shown, whatever can be imagined can be described.”

It could even fit quite nicely on a Tote bag.