Common sense on Council Housing – BD
June 17th, 2011
What a breath of fresh air has blown through the dusty corridors of Single Aspect House today with the arrival of this week’s BD Online and a letter addressing all the problems of sink estates and other denigrated social housing. I have no idea whether the author is a housing professional or simply a former council tenant but Steven Bee runs Steven Bee Urban Counsel His letter speaks volumes about the approach required to return to the heady days of the 1970s when so many lived in council housing without the scale of the problems apparent today.
Broader range of council tenants may end stigma
The assertion by Richard Wellings of the Institute of Economic Affairs that “subsidising” housing is as dangerous as other aspects of the welfare state (Debate 10 June) – presumably the education and health services on which most of us rely – in breeding “welfare dependency” shows an inadequate level of objectivity.
The social history of municipal housing in the 20th century shows that the council house-building programme generally created mixed, stable and safe communities in relatively generously appointed dwellings with access to good local facilities. Within a decade of the introduction of the right to buy, the profits had been pocketed by the fortunate tenants, and well managed and maintained estates began their slow decline in the hands of householders forced into ownership that many of them could not afford.
As the product of one such council estate, I welcome the green shoots that suggest a new flowering of municipal housing for rent. With the small proportion of new households who can actually afford a mortgage struggling to find a willing lender, the attraction of such housing to a broader range of tenants could dissolve the social stigma of the council estate, and get us away from this country’s aberrant obsession with home ownership.
Steven Bee
Winchester, Hampshire
The writer of the above letter was responding to an article in last weeks Building Design magazine in which two leading figures debated whether or not councils should still build houses:-
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“Worse still, subsidised housing breeds welfare dependency by shielding beneficiaries from the full consequences of poor decisions. Like most aspects of the welfare state, it often ends up harming the people it was designed to help.”
https://www.bdonline.co.uk/news/should-local-councils-still-be-building-housing?/5019690.article
I have quoted only the last, but most relevant paragraph (with which I wholeheartedly disagree), from the article, to which the letter writer has responded.
This ties in well with a related comment by Owen Hatherley in his book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain where in the chapter on Sheffield he says:-
“By the end of the 1970’s, over half of Sheffield’s housing was council-owned, and they were still building Brutalist deck-access housing, albeit on a warmer, smaller scale that can still be seen in Gleadless, which we will come to presently. This is a reminder that council housing was never intended to be the emergency measure it is now, but something that was genuinely ‘mixed’. ” – Owen Hatherley
Please see my article on the sink estates for context, and my review of Utopia on Trial for the problems created.