Devalued places

2021 ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Fear Of Crime ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right To Buy

This chapter explores how pre-regeneration estates became devalued places, largely connected to neoliberalisation and austerity policies and effects. Five devaluation strands are analysed: overcrowding, landlord neglect, population transience, crime and disorder, and stigmatisation. Overcrowded families living in small flats were unable to transfer to larger properties because social housing has contracted, trapping them in dwellings that no longer felt like home – un-homing. Although properties and estates were physically solid, they had been neglected due to inadequate investment, repairs and maintenance services. Landlord transfers (from the Greater London Council to the borough councils), plus managerialist restructuring (outsourcing and cutting back caretakers), also contributed to tenants’ complaints about living in a worsening environment. London estates have become more transient places due to the Right-to-Buy because of increased private landlordism, tenants and Airbnb guests. Crime, fear of crime and anti-social behaviour were important issues at some estates, but less so at others. Estates have become symbolically devalued via mass media territorial stigmatisation which has been exacerbated by austerity-related ‘poverty porn’ TV programmes. Despite such devaluations, residents generally positively valued their homes and estates (Chapter 6), and there was no mass desire to leave unlike in the case of US public housing projects (Wacquant).

‘Excavating’ Pruitt-Igoe using space syntax

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Mark David Major
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Space Syntax ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
Housing Authority ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Charles Jencks

Pruitt-Igoe, in St Louis, Missouri, United States, was one of the most notorious social housing projects of the twentieth century. Charles Jencks argued opening his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, ‘Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.’ However, the magazine Architectural Forum had heralded the project as ‘the best high apartment’ of the year in 1951. Indeed, one of its first residents in 1957 described Pruitt-Igoe as ‘like an oasis in a desert, all of this newness’. But a later resident derided the housing project as ‘Hell on Earth’ in 1967. Only eighteen years after opening, the St Louis Public Housing Authority (PHA) began demolishing Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 [1]. It remains commonly cited for the failures of modernist design and planning.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Deprivation Indices ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Urban Marginality ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Comparative Urbanism

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings and suggests policy recommendations. Part I delineated the pernicious impacts of neoliberalism and austerity on public/social housing in London, and analysed the role that estate demolition has played. Part II cast a sociological gaze not only at how working-class housing, lives and spaces are materially deprived and symbolically devalued by powerful external forces (neoliberalism and austerity), but also at how such housing, lives and spaces become valued and valuable. This emphasis on positive values corrects those policy perspectives that view estates through the epistemologically narrow lens of quantitative area-based deprivation indices. In comparative urbanism terms, London social housing estates remain substantially different from the anomic, often dangerous spaces of urban marginality such as US public housing projects (Wacquant). Part III focused on residents’ experiences of living through regeneration. It demonstrated how the valuation/devaluation duality tilts around in terms of place belonging. Comprehensive redevelopment diminishes the valued aspects of estates, while the devalued aspects are heightened and eventually dominate. The book provides several policy recommendations and research agendas. Demolition-based regeneration schemes inevitably result in state-led gentrification, but refurbishment-only schemes have the potential to improve estates and residents’ lives.

Bending the ‘Third Arm’: politicians and housing associations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Lund
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Housing Association ◽  
Housing Supply ◽  
Housing Associations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right To Buy

This chapter examines political attitudes to housing associations, regarded in the 1970s as housing’s third arm. It explores the politics involved in the changing fortunes of housing associations from the preferred mechanism for producing social housing in the late 19th and early 20th century to a niche role in the 1950s and 1960s followed by a leading role in social housing supply from the 1970s, with housing association diversity appealing to different parties for different reasons. Internal housing association politics, stock transfer from local government and the changing nature of housing associations are reviewed culminating in an exploration of the politics entailed in the Conservative Party’s 2015 manifesto commitment to extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants.

A Nation of Mortgagors, 1970–1989

2018 ◽  
pp. 153-169
Author(s):  
Stuart Aveyard ◽  
Paul Corthorn ◽  
Sean O’Connell
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Home Ownership ◽  
Consumer Durables ◽  
Margaret Thatcher ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Right To Buy ◽  
Credit Boom

Between 1970 and 1989 the two main parties began to diverge on the sale of council homes, particularly after the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The chapter explains the widening ideological fissures on social housing and home ownership. The spread of home ownership during this period continued the ‘tenurial revolution’, which began in the interwar period. In the same period, a co-relationship had developed between mass markets in consumer durables and owner occupation. The relationship was amplified further in the 1980s amidst a credit boom and rising levels of home ownership. This chapter focuses on the role of the Conservatives’ renewed focus on the right-to-buy policy that turned many council tenants into members of the expanded property-owning democracy.

A Green New Deal for Housing: affordable sustainable homes and communities for all

Housing Shock ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Rory Hearne
Keyword(s):  
Public Housing ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Public Land ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Housing Systems ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
Unitary Model ◽  
The Right

This chapter sets out why the connection between housing and the environment urgently needs to be moved centre stage in both the housing and climate debates. It links climate change and housing together conceptually through the centrality of home to the human existence. It sets out a new housing plan: a Green New Deal for Housing in Ireland which details the key solutions for transforming our housing systems to provide affordable, sustainable homes for all. This includes a new housing plan, A Green New Deal for Housing in Ireland: Affordable Sustainable Homes and Communities for All, including mixed income public housing for all, a dedicated Affordable Sustainable Homes Building Agency, reimagining public housing, transforming social housing from being treated as a stigmatized form of accommodation restricted to very low-income households to becoming a model of desirable housing available and attractive to a much broader range of low- and middle-income households, using public land for public and not-for-profit affordable sustainable homes, how the new housing model can be financed, and why a new housing model should be underpinned by the right to housing as foundation of housing policy and law. It develops indicators for assessing housing models: and compares the market (dualist) model and public, affordable, sustainable, human rights (unitary) model.

Devolution: where is the difference?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Lund
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Sustainable Housing ◽  
New Towns ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Right ◽  
Green Belts ◽  
Right To Buy

This chapter explores housing politics in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland both before and after formal devolution. It examines the role of local authority housing in Scotland prior to devolution in relationship to Green Belts and New Towns with particular reference to Glasgow and the sectarian politics in Northern Ireland leading to the creation of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and direct Westminster rule. Post devolution housing politics under New Labour associated with homelessness, planning, stock transfer and changes in the housing market are explored. Divergent policies between the home nations since 2010, associated with the Coalition government’s housing policies, are analysed with special reference to land, social housing, the Right to Buy, the bedroom tax, sustainable housing and the regulation of private landlords.

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