Choice and Control: Social Housing Management and Access to Social Housing

This chapter charts the death of public housing from its emergence as part of a wider collective resistance to the social murder of unregulated capitalism to its planned demise under neoliberal policies of privatisation, demunicipalisation, deregulation, and austerity. A first section explains how public housing represented both the partial decommodification of shelter and the protection of residents’ health and safety through a wider system of building regulation and control. A second section argues that these qualities made public housing a target for privatisation and demunicipalisation policies that have recommodified and financialised housing and land for profit-seeking corporate interests. It was in this context that ‘outsourced regeneration’ featured in this book was born with the launch in 2000 of New Labour’s Decent Homes programme to bring all social housing in England up to a minimum decent standard by 2010. The chapter ends with an explanation of how the assault on public housing has been accompanied by the rolling back of building regulations and the rolling out of self-regulation that has weakened building safety and residents’ ability to hold their landlords to account.

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Social Housing Management

10.1007/978-1-349-13647-6 ◽

1997 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Martyn Pearl

Keyword(s):

Social Housing ◽

Housing Management

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The Role of Social Housing in the ‘Care’ and ‘Control’ of Tenants with Mental Health Problems

Social Policy and Society ◽

10.1017/s1474746409990248 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 111-122 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Sadie Parr

Keyword(s):

Mental Health ◽

Social Housing ◽

Community Care ◽

Mental Health Problems ◽

Health It ◽

Housing Officers ◽

Housing Professionals ◽

Policy Agendas ◽

And Control

Social housing is at the intersection of two policy agendas, namely anti-social behaviour and community care. This means that tenants with mental ill-health might at once be defined as vulnerable and in need of support to enable them to live independently, but simultaneously their behaviour may be viewed as a threat to the safety of others serving to legitimatise disciplinary and punitive forms of intervention on the grounds of ‘difference’. This paper focuses on the role of housing professionals in the management of cases of ASB involving people with mental ill-health. It argues that housing practitioners are not adequately equipped to make judgements on the culpability of ‘perpetrators’ who have mental ill-health and ensure their response is appropriate. This raises questions about the training housing officers recieve, and more broadly, whether the competing policy aims of community care and ASB can be reconciled.

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Social Housing as Crime Control: An Examination of the Role of Housing Management in Policing Sex Offenders

Social & Legal Studies ◽

10.1177/a020305 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 10 (4) ◽

pp. 435-457 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

David Cowan ◽

Christina Pantazis ◽

Rose Gilroy

Keyword(s):

Sex Offenders ◽

Social Housing ◽

Crime Control ◽

Case Study Research ◽

Study Research ◽

Housing Management

This article considers the ways in which social housing has in recent years become inextricably linked with the process of crime control. Drawing on case study research into the rehousing of sex offenders, the authors provide evidence illustrating why and how social housing management has become increasingly drawn into the fold of crime control. The article then highlights some serious but often neglected concerns stemming from the adoption by social housing management of more crime control responsibilities. Whilst protection of individuals and communities should always remain paramount, the article concludes with a discussion about the implications of what these processes may mean for social housing.

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