Mixed tenure estates
September 24th, 2010
My thinking on this has been coloured by the analysis of Nicky Gavron. For example if I skim my blog I can find the following quotation . . .
‘Mixed and balanced communities are rightly one of the shibboleths of the London Plan. But under Mr Johnson’s this means ‘a mix of tenure should be sought, particularly in neighbourhoods where social renting predominates’. Where, one might ask, are displaced residents to go? Crucially, there is no reciprocal policy for social rented housing to be introduced into areas where private housing predominates.
On the one hand the right wing London boroughs want to clear their council estates and build private flats for sale to overseas investors and on the other hand they don’t want new “social” tenants moving in anywhere, the polarisation of London will continue.
Now turning for a moment to the interview Dave Hill conducted with Karen Buck MP we can find the following transcript:-
DH: In terms of security of tenure isn’t there an ongoing debate in the world of housing assocations social housing in the broader sense about whether you need to change the rules I mean it’s because you have situations where people they get themselves into a nice social rented home of one type or another they stay there for ever sometimes they start to earn a lot more money than they earned when they moved into it. It’s that kind of conversation that’s going on. Is there no kind of argument for changing the rules as they stand at the moment?
KB: Well the people who advocate these different theories come at it from two absolutely mutually contradictory positions. On the one hand we get people saying “it is outrageous that one gives a secure tenancy” implying in some way a luxury penthouse suite in Covent Garden that is being given to somebody let’s say when they get pregnant at 15 and then later on they become a multi-millionare fashion designer and they still stay in this subsidised accommodation.
On the other hand many of the same people criticise social housing as being a concentration of the extremely poor. Now it is not possible to build a social policy on both arguments at the same time. Actually the truth is that most tenants are disproportionately compared to national average income and wealth, are very low income.
They are in social housing almost overwhelmingly because they cannot afford to be in the private rented sector, and we need to retain social housing for that purpose. In addition most people who enter social housing these days do so because they are vulnerable by virtue of homelessness. A very very difficult position that people have to go through.
So social housing needs to be there to meet those needs. What happens when people start earning a lot of money? Well, as I’ve said, actually the numbers in this category are very very small. I think we live with it. I think if we want “mixed tenure” we want communities of people living different lives different kinds of incomes then social housing should be like that as well.
Why make social housing more residual than it is already by forcing people out of it, out of Hackney, out of North Paddington, at the very time when they start earning some money? Keep them in those properties being parents at the local schools, being part of the local community, with some money to spend, and part of a useful peer group.
DH: Is there nothing though in the argument which is advanced by Hammersmith and Fulham most vocally that you need to take much more radical action to break up, the term “social ghetto” has been used, these kinds, these kinds of communities, to enable there to be a richer if you like mix of housing types more mixed communities?
This talk of mixed communities is something which is also used by Labour authorities, Hackney where I live, famously we decanted, to use this rather unfortunate term, people from tower blocks, built different kinds of homes, there’s a lot of common ground isn’t there? What makes the Tories version of this so much more wicked than Labour’s?
KB: Well there is a lot of common ground around the concept of the mixed community. Absolutely, absolutely rightly, nobody, no sensible person, even at the time when we were building some of these original estates wanted them to be large concentrations of very low income people.
In fact, oddly enough, and it’s going off at a slight tangent, right to buy made that situation much worse because a lot of those people who did have some income in the 1980s who were council tenants bought their homes, usually moved, and rented those properties back to other low income households quite often to homeless people to the council so that actually exacerbated the situation itself. [pause]
We are all in favour of mixed communities, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, places like this which have a very high level of social housing. It is in my view entirely right that they want to attract some middle income, not necessarily rich enclaves of people who don’t spend money in the local economy but middle income households through shared ownership through a bit of low cost affordable housing.
What that means however is that Hammersmith, Harrow, Westminster, Ealing, these other boroughs, the more affluent boroughs, should have their share of social and low cost affordable housing. In fact what we’re seeing is that these Tory boroughs squeezing, or trying to squeeze their social housing out of their boroughs completely.
I don’t see Hammersmith and Fulham council for example saying well actually yes let’s break up the White City estate a bit because we think there’s too much of a concentration of low income households and let’s build a whole load of new social housing in Fulham, no way. They do not want low income people living in Hammersmith and Fulham at all, and frankly I have no doubt that there are political motives behind that thinking.
From the Guardian website -> Buckedit.mp3 or -> DaveHill_KarenBuck
UPDATE: 19/8/16
You can ignore the rest of this post, Karen Buck said it all above. I’ll leave it here for history’s sake.
So you see my thinking about mixed tenure has been informed by a variety of sources. Let’s look at the two extremes in order to try to find the centre ground. At one end you have the “sink estates” where nobody wants to live, including the people who live there now, and if you want the origins of those then my article “Why sink estates exist” neatly sums it up.
At the other end of the scale are what are know as “gated communities” for which a quick walk along Wapping High Street should suffice, dead areas where people come and go in their cars from underground garages, never to be seen on the street except for perhaps the day when they run out of milk and dash across the road to the newsagent if there is one, coupled with their cleaners who may be seen at the bus stop along with the shopkeepers and Underground staff.
So in answer to your question which was “…are you opposed to mixed tenure estates in principle?” then the answer is no providing that the money from the receipts of the sales under right to buy is used to fund the building of a replacement home on a like for like basis, although it’s getting a bit late, most of the likely sales have already happened. As to flexible tenures well actually I am opposed to them because they will create a transit camp feel to the estates which is unhealthy for everyone. The only tenures I would like to see on a mixed tenure estate are full ownership and secure tenures.
Some time ago I took part in an on-line discussion with a LibDem councillor. We were discussing right to buy.
In an earlier part of the thread he said the following:-
“Personally I think council housing (whether actually run by a council or some other RSL doesn’t really matter) is a Bad Thing. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime lottery that some people win, due to being in the right place in the right circumstances in the right time, and other people lose. Someone who gets a council house due to their circumstances at age 25 might be far too rich and well established in life to qualify for a new council house by the time they’re 45, but they get to keep the one they’ve got for life at half the market rent, subsidised by other people many of whom are less well off, and the next 25 year old who’s in a bad way gets nowhere to live. Google can probably remember the previous threads on this subject.”
I replied:-
>
> Whilst disagreeing with you that it is a Bad Thing, I do see your point about the lack of any incentive for people to move on as their net worth increases.He replied:-
See, I don’t think people *should* have to “move on”. They might have considerable investment in the property (in terms of effort spent), the neighbourhood (circle of friends and contacts), kids at school and so on. I think that some-one’s potentially temporary inability to house themselves should be handled by some means other than giving them a house which you can then never take off them *and* by some means other than giving them a house which you later throw them out of.
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LibDem councillorMessage id [47r8gsFh3m7nU1@individual.net]
The whole thread may be followed by clicking the link above.
One mistake commonly made by the political right, and it came up the other night from Richard Blakeway at Barking, is that everybody seeks to own their own home and must therefore be catered for at every opportunity. This is just the flip side of the right saying in effect “we’re not prepared to ask taxpayers to subsidise your housing so we will encourage you to take out a loan you can’t afford, default, and end up homeless and we don’t give a damn.”
The political right has trouble accepting what the left has known for decades that there will always be a percentage of people who will never be able to afford to own their own home, but can manage perfectly well in a council house. What’s wrong with that? Except that there aren’t enough, or anything like enough at present. If you wonder what that percentage is then Ken Livingstone puts it at 25%-30% which fits very neatly with the other statistic one frequently hears that 70% of people now own their home.
Mixed tenure is an idea that has arisen for two reasons. 1) because of the existence of the sink estates, and been suggested as a way of breaking them up and making them work better. But by its very nature it involves the displacement of a majority of the residents, which provides an opportunity for unscrupulous boroughs to seek the removal of those most in housing need from their borough.
As Nicky Gavron says at the beginning of this article the richer boroughs don’t want social tenants at all so the displacement of tenants from sink estates to make way for better off families is going to be a disaster for those so displaced. Where are they to go?
Read about how the Americans have handled it by clicking the link below. It’s called Hope VI and its being copied here in Hammersmith and Fulham and it is not good news:-
US-inspired plan to break up sink estates gets green light
Follow up . . .
Of course government policy would see this as a move in the right direction towards a social and tenure mix and a more balanced community. It probably does not feel like this if you are on the waiting list – mixed communities don’t seem to work in the opposite direction, as the recent nasty little episode about ‘million pound Council houses’ illustrated.
https://www.jonestheplanner.co.uk/2012/11/hackney-hipsters.html