Anna Waite has a point, it must be a nightmare when so many of us look to her for a solution to the housing crisis.

For years, councils have been selling off their more challenging duties like housing and responsibility for provision of services, allowing more time for our elected representatives to concentrate on park bench and litter bin audits.

So while councillors wondered around parks making notes, the real issues, the ones which actually shape our lives, have been handed over to the profiteering private sector.

Now we are forced to turn to obscenely rich property developers sitting on their bulging land banks, reminding us daily of their intent to ruin our lives and reduce our community to wasteland.

Of course if the council is “nice” to them the developers might build a few budget homes in a corner of their luxury developments for the low paid or unemployed as a goodwill gesture.

Or they just leave the sites to rot a bit longer, which appears to be fine with our elected council.

Meanwhile, while developers line their pockets, you can always try renting from hard-nosed private landlords, of which there are countless in Southend, who have taken advantage of cheap mortgages and now control the supply and price of property and in turn the rent they can charge.

Now our supermarkets are in on the act. I remember when they occupied high streets and kept to selling fruit and veg. Not any more, now we have to hold out a begging bowl and hope a supermarket might grant us a new football stadium or a few miserable “affordable homes” to fight over.

I suggest Mrs Waite stuffs us all in her high-rise tenement blocks and locks the door firmly behind her.

I’m not to sure if I want to be part of a community that has no say in its future any more, or have to endure listening to toothless councillors with their plans to pack us ten to a room on the 13th floor of a high-rise block of flats.

As Southend’s financial pendulum and ultimately it’s future has swung into the hands of faceless supermarket shareholders and alike, perhaps, I should accept this and prepare my sleeping bag and bed-down in a nice cosy corner of my local supermarket.

John Tilson
Kensington Road
Southend