The incredible human misery on display at the workhouse attached to central London's Middlesex Hospital inspired Charles Dickens to write "Oliver Twist"; now, Camden council has granted a developer permission to develop the site into luxury flats (just in time for the luxury flat crash!), in exchange for a commitment to build some below-market-rent social housing flats, which will be accessible through "poor doors."
Poor doors were the inspiration for my novella "Unauthorized Bread", the lead story in my new book Radicalized: these are separate entrances that developers build for luxury properties that have attained planning permission due to a promise to build below-market units. These separate entrances -- a cross between Jim Crow segregation and a Victorian servant's entrance -- ensure that the full-rate people don't have to ever encounter the subsidy people, but more importantly, they serve as a constant reminder to the subsidy people that they don't really belong there, they are mere charity cases. As I write in Unauthorized Bread: "even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it," or as John Siman paraphrases, "Free markets is a euphemism for fuck you."
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