Single Aspect Blog

@bbeth

I agree with some of what you’ve written but would like to add to it.

1. Design – Deck access flats, Radburn layouts. Basically designing places where criminals could operate without being overlooked, nobody owned the space outside their door and an easy exit was assured. The opposite of ‘Secured by Design’ principles.

Alice Coleman covered this in Utopia on Trial and The Psychology of Housing and Design Disadvantagement but failed to adequately consider the effects of poverty owing to her own views and the fact that she was being funded by Thatcher who didn’t want that aspect of it to be taken into account.

2. Right to Buy – The selling off of the best most spacious stock, the stuff built to Parker Norris standards. The less desirable dwellings being left, lots of high rise flats.

Sir Parker Morris did indeed lead a committee which came up with minimum space standards for houses but not rooms, I have heard that it was ghost written by Oliver Cox of the LCC.

3. The Homelessness Act – Move away from housing the ‘respectable poor’ to anyone who was classed as homeless. More points if you were pregnant or had children. (Not saying this is a bad thing as prior to this they split families up)

Michael Collins made an entire documentary based on this hypothesis but I got my head torn off by Steve Hilditch in a reply to a post I have now deleted when I tried to suggest that. He says that it wasn’t the 1977 Act at all but simply that as the number of remaining council homes became available they were necessarily allocated to those most in need.

4. The aspirations of people who have bettered themselves. A comparison of disposable income of those leaving and entering social housing indicates people with jobs and a reasonable income will move out, to be replaced primarily with those on benefits.

Your paragraphs 2 / 3 / 4 and 6 acted together in that they became a critical mass which intiated a compound process where people able to afford the deposit on a property on the open market bought one, kept the council property they’d bought under RTB and rented it out, often to unemployed people on benefits. The result was that the percentage of unemployed people on benefits on the estates rose, they became less attractive places to live encouraging others to move away and so on.

It has been the result of several not one single, reason.

6. Poverty – the poor become concentrated on these estates and any choices are taken away from them by the economic situation they are in. They become socially excluded – if they want parcels or pizza’s delivered it doesn’t happen because of their address.

See my reply to 4.

7. Initiatives have tended to do capital works to the area. Often involving the local population in any construction or regeneration work has been an afterthought.

Well that’s true but it’s pretty final. Here you’re talking about Ferrier, Heygate, total demolition replaced by new building. Stonebridge Park (Wembley) was better where they did at least only partially demolish and included the residents on the same estate.

Please forgive the fact that my links go to my blog, I’ve been researching all this for some time and that’s where the results have ended up.

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/25/deborah-orr-conservatives-housing-market