Brickonomics

In their article (page 3 here) for the LSE’s Urban Age conference on London, Miguel Kanai and Sarah Ichioka say

the decaying and rapidly shrinking stock of affordable housing in inner London continues to be, depending on the analyst’s view, an etrapment or the last resort for the least fortunate in a largely unaffordable metropolitan housing market.

I would argue it’s a bit of both. Social housing has undoubtably been a last resort for those unable to access housing through the market, but it’s also true that many social housing estates have become pretty bad places to live. Why?

I’d pick out three main reasons.

• Residualisation: council housing used to be mostly inhabited by the working classes, ie the upper end of the lower end of the income distribution. This was in large part because council rents were too high for the poorest of the poorest. But from the 1970s on, as rent rebates finally allowed the very poorest to afford council rents, as local authorities were forced to accept a duty to accommodate homeless households, and as the more affluent tenants left the sector by exercising their Right to Buy, social housing was predominantly the tenure of the workless poor. These effects were compounded by the huge rise in unemployment in the 1980s. As Chris Holmes says in his book A New Vision for Housing, this ‘residualisation’ was not necessarily a bad thing by itself – “the opening up of council housing to more of the poorest households was a desirable and overdue change”. The problems arose because of the interaction of residualisation with the second major factor.
• Concentration: The wave of council house building after the second world war was notable for creating local concentrations of social housing in far greater numbers and densities than had been seen before, many in inner city areas. This was partly a result of the extreme resistance to social housing from residents of affluent areas. As the poor and workless came to comprise a greater proportion of those living in social housing (as described above), the natural result was a great concentration of poverty and worklessness on single estates. Being poor is bad enough, but being poor and surrounded only by other poor people is worse, because it means fewer links to job opportunities, a neglected physical environment, and probably a worse schooling for your children as the impacts of deprivation on each child’s education and development are compounded – and children with a no prospect of a job and bored at school are more likely to gravitate towards anti-social behaviour and crime. In many cases, these effects interacted to create a downward spiral into hopelessness.

The combination of residualisation and concentration would have been bad enough in many cases, but only when combined with our third factor did many estates become such supremely bad places to live.

• Design: Holmes rightly calls the post-war ‘mass housing experiment’ “a disaster”. Most new estates were built in a rush and with little money, in a time when modernist architectural ideas were offering a hopeful but in retrospect totally impractical vision of high-density living. In practice, high-rise towers were often badly designed by architects, shoddily built by private contractors, poorly maintained by landlords and bereft of safe and secure play areas and surrounding amenities. High density living can work, as it does in many continental European cities, when accommodation is well designed and maintained and poverty is not piled on top of poverty, but in England the combination created serious problems. The fact that some former ‘no-go’ towers are becoming attractive to renters in the private sector suggests that greater mixing of tenures would have avoided many of the problems, but the urgency of providing accommodation to so many in need and, again, the resistance in other areas mitigated against that.

Recognising the increasing problems on the estates, those who could afford to often upped and left, which unfortunately tended to compound the problems for those left behind. Apart from simply being poorer, those left behind faced several barriers to finding work and, if they could, moving on and moving out:

• The benefit trap – The combination of high marginal tax rates, steep withdrawal of housing benefit and the cost of childcare makes work a pretty unattractive proposition for many who rely on HB to pay part of their rent. So they stay workless, and stuck in social housing.
• Immobility – Moving around within the sector is complicated and costly, which makes relocating to take advantage of job opportunities more difficult. Again, the net result is you’re stuck where you are, with any skills you have going to waste.
• The housing market - Even without these other factors, the unchecked rise of house prices would have made a home of their own an impossibility for many in social housing.

Social housing itself can’t be blamed for making its tenants poor, and without subsidised housing millions of people would quite clearly have been much worse off, as they were in the private sector slums and hovels occupied by so many well into the latter half of the last century. As a tenure of last resort, it does its job very well. But for too many social housing became something of a dead-end, and because they all tended to be lumped together in the same places the estates became places of last resort.

But it isn’t a lost cause by any means. Here are a few suggested solutions:

• More mobility within the sector across local and regional boundaries to allow greater access to work opportunities.
• Get rid of (or at the very least significantly reduce) the benefit trap by reducing the housing benefit tapers, cutting taxes on the lowest incomes, and subsidising childcare costs.
• More spatial mixing of tenures – Where possible and without neglecting the primary purpose of social housing to meet housing needs, move economically active people into council estates and poorer people into richer areas. Social housing has worked best when it has been mixed in with other tenures. Many streets in London demonstrate this – they contain apparently identical homes, some of which are privately owned or rented, some of which are rented from the council or a housing association. De-concentrating deprivation, from both ends, can work wonders.

The first two proposals are basically technical. The third, though, would be a major break from post-war practice, and politically controversial in affluent areas who have traditionally resisted any provision of social housing. Well, tough. The lesson of the past few decades is that social housing can help solve the problem of housing need, but if we concentrate it all in small inner-city areas we are storing up huge problems for the future. The rich may feel like they can escape these problems, but experience suggests that concentrated poverty, deprivation and crime impose costs on our whole society. A common-sense approach to accepting smaller levels of social housing in more areas of the country will ultimately benefit everyone.