CIH Presidental Elections 2012

I've been an (inactive) member of the Chartered Institute of Housing for nearly 20 years and I don't recall there ever being an election for the top jobs?

This year there will be an election for the CIH Vice President between Jan Taranczuk and Paul Tennant. Under the CIH rules whoever is elected will become the President of the CIH in 2013.

I don't think I have ever met Paul who is the CEO of Orbit Housing Association (one of the biggest).  However, Jan use to be a senior Housing Manager in Tower Hamlets and his wife Kathy was my line manager in Bow for many years.  I've never worked with Jan but one thing that did impress me was that he was one of the very few senior social housing managers who still lived on an inner city Council Estate.  They did move out eventually to Kent to be near to family. Jan also runs the Housingstories website.

HousingStories

My “grown up” job is an estate managment officer for a housing association. I have just been sent a link to an entertaining new site (still under construction) called “HousingStories”. Some of these stories don’t exactly show the Social Housing “profession” at its best. I can well believe the GLC mouse story. Not sure what housing management pioneer Octavia Hill would have made of it?

As a young Housing Officer, I received a complaint from a tenant that she kept hearing loud animal noises coming from the council house next door. When I visited the property I was amazed to find a fully grown bull in the back garden. What made it even more puzzling was that there was no rear access to the back garden. The tenant explained to me that he had got the bull when it was just a calf and brought it through the house into the back garden. The idea was that it would be a pet for the kids until it was ready to go to market. When I asked how he intended to get it out of the back garden, he suddenly went quiet! We ended up having to have the animal sedated and hoisted over the house with a crane.

The housing chair had a habit of always falling asleep during council meetings. His political colleagues decided that at the next council meeting they would take a vote to exclude any member committing this sin. As the meeting began our housing chair dosed off. The mayor immediately called for a special vote to evict from the chamber any councillor who fell asleep during the proceedings. As the vote was being taken by a show of hands our councillor awoke, noticed the hands of his colleagues in the air and joined in the vote!