Pie Fight

Housing question - v rough sketch: Discuss the development of [social] housing policy in Denmark. What lessons can we learn?

Housing question - v rough sketch: Discuss the development of [social] housing policy in France. What lessons can we learn?

French social housing policy has been most top down of any in European and has also been the most successful in Europe, at lest in terms of building numbers. At the same time, French estates have become synonymous around the world with disaffection and social exclusion, issues that have also been key in the UK. French social housing is fianced by cenral government, but provided and managed by arm's length organisations.

French social housing get started later than in many other European countries. Following a crisis of housing most famously brought to public and poltical attention by Abbe Pierre(?) in 1954, highlighting something like the 1m people or families who still needed housing, France launched an industrialised building process and centralised approach to funding which enabled France to build an astonishing 14m units between 1945 and 1991, with around 3m of those being social housing in the form of HLMs, or "habitations of moderate rent". By the end of the mass building movement in the early 1970s, France had used industrialised techniques so successfully that it had cut average building times per unit from two years to seven months. Much of this was because of its decision to do an end run around urban issues by concentrating its building on the peripheries of cities and through using cranes and tracks to build on a massive scale. Whereas the UK built thousands (get no.) of estates to house a total of X families, France built only 200 ZUPs - but they contained a total of 1m dwellings!

France has been sucessful at its financing as well - keeping the ownership and management of the estates away from govet control and in the hands of arm's length social housing management organisations which must abid eby good business principles, including balanced budgets. Also had decent managemet strategeis - those these would still prove insufficient for problems of large estates as they became residualised.

However, following the success in the numbers game, Fr has met with failures and problems, some endogenous to its housing policy, some exogenous. In the former category is the residualisation of social housing. This has beeen driven by several factors, including government encouragement of o-o, causing it to drfit further down the income bracket, and, perhaps most significantly, building too many giant estates and of a type that people find off-putting. These huge estates were generally in areas that had weak trasnport and shopping and other facilities, which made them unattractive. At first had a good social mix but over time the estates got pauperised. Became increasingly the homes of France's huge immigrant population - man yof whom were brought in to build the very estates they would evenentually populate.

Exogenously, France's high levels of immigration have fed into this problem. As the working, moderately paid tenants who social housing initially targeted have left for o-o, estates have become difficult to let, and imig pops have poured in, helped by the govt's ALP housing support programme, which pays up to 2/3 of the rent. The residualisation of social housing has contributed to a cycle of decline that has proved very difficult to arrest, despite govt attempts at intervention since the 1970s. With demolition too expensive an option for wedepread use, most of these have concentrated on improving outward appearance of giant estates, while also attempting to address broader issues affecting estates through efforts at increasing employment, particularly amongs disaffected youth, increasing tenant participation in the estate, improving transport and community necessities such as shopping facilities, and increasing participation with local governments.

There is much the UK can learn from France's social housing policy, both for good and bad - there is stuff there to make us optimistic, but also pessimistic. (Note that Thatcher did learn.) For the good, French financial management was far superiour to British style. This is of courese an outgrowth of the fact that local authorities do not control housing in France as they do in UK, and were forced to maintain good business practices. This may have stemmed residualisation somewhat, as may have the policy of setting a high income limit: 50% of French qualify. French management was also superiour. The choice of location was clearly inferiour: to build out there, beter off doing as Brits did and building houses. However, France has still ended up with same residualisation problems as the UK. Some of this may indicate that residualisation of social housing is inevitable in countires where owner-occ is eoncouraged. (In France, worth noting that private renting has decreased, but is still relatively high: around 30%, something like three tiems what the UK has.) Still, both countries have faced similar problems of difficult to let estates caused in large part by oversupply and unpopular building styles. With regards to residualisation, it may be fair to observe that ther are many paths to perdition, and the UK and France appear to ahve each chosen their own. The key seems to be the mass housing has dangerous side effects, even if it is financed and managed better than the UK was able to do. Both countires are now caught in catch-22 situations where they need to house their worst off and at least in the UK the law demands it - in France? - but also know from experience that concerntaitons of poor residents are bad for social housing and fuel a downward spiral.

Historic shifts in tenure pattern: past exam questions

Past exam questions:

• Why did the tenure system change radically in the 20th century? Who benefitted from teh changes?
• Housing is said to be the wobbly pillar of the welfare state. What makes housing different from other welfare services? Discuss.
• What different roles does the state play in housing development? What problems and limitations are there in these roles?

Mass housing: past exam questions

Exam questions:

• Cf and contrast the mass housing themes of post-war housing and the "small is beautiful" movement of the 1960s and 70s. What were the advantages and disadvantages of each?
• Why did housing policy shift, following the mass housing boom in the 1960s in Britain, in favour of "small is beautiful"? What long-term impact did this shift have?
• Many believe that mass housing was doomed from the outset. How far would you agree with this statement? What were teh consequences for current social housing policy?
• What accounts for the change in attitude by both residents and housing professionals toward high-rise housing?
• "The failure of slum clearance and council housing to solve the housing problem led to a sharp change of direction in favour of inner city renewal by the 1970s." Discuss.
• From 1945 to 79 "housing has rarely been far from the centre of the domestic political debate". Contrast the Conservative and Labour governments' approaches to housing policy and provision during this time period.
• Why did the Thatcher govt find it possible to shift housing policy towards privatisation and the break-up of council housing?
• "Public housing is a Rolls Royce achievement in Britain." How far is this true in reality?

Early housing philanthropy: past exam questions

Exam questions:

• Cf and contrast the aproaches taken by industrialists who provided model dwellings and other 19th c. housing reformers. Were their outcomes different?
• 19th c. images of the city often focused on squalor, disease, and immorality, and were often anti-urban in nature. Cf the approaches of two housing visionaries from this period specifically commenting on their ideals of bringing order to the perceived chaos of urban life.
• Are slum conditions inevitable as cities grow? Discuss the contribution of one or two housing visionaries to tackling them.
• What pre-world war one housing interventions in poor housing conditions in Britain had the most influence on the housing patterns we see today?
• In what way did utopian and philanthropic ideals inspire early attempts to improve housing conditions? How lasting was their influence?

European social housing: past exam questions

Revision topic: European social housing

Past exam questions:

• Discuss and illustrate the most significant differences in housing policy and development between two or more European countries.
• “The public landlord was bound to decline and be replaced by a more contemporary approach.” How have European’s “arm’s length” models influenced recent British housing policy?
• Discuss the development of housing policy in at least one continental European country. What lessons can we learn?
• “Continental European countries adopted different approaches to housing provision, yet in many ways ended up with similar outcomes.” Critically assess this statement.
• Why did the state in Britian, unlike some in other European countries, adopt such strong interventionist methods in housing policy? What were the consequences?
• What factors led to the UK taking a direct [state] role in the provision of housing unlike many of its European neighbours?
• What different roles does the state play in housing development? What problems and limitations are there in these roles?

Coping with permanent austerity

Concluding chapter in Paul Pierson's New pols of the welf st. Here he argues for a realistic, centris approach to the welfare state, based on the fact that it is both under tremendous financial pressures and immensely popular - more popular with people than they tend to acknowledge to themselves, I believe.

A good case in point for this article would be the NHS. On the one hand, it's never been so good nor delivered so much; on the other, it's in what's called the greatest crisis of its history. Unfortunately, the media are never going to stirke the a reasonable middle ground on these issues, which fuels the fire.

He argues that there are two key resaons why retrenchment doesn't work, whythe wlf st shows tremendous resilience. I've read on this before, so I'll be brief. They are:

• electoral incentives: welfare state programmes are popular, particularly the universal ones
• institutional stickiness: formal and informal veto points, and path dependent processes

Hmm, typepad not working with mac? Testing the monkey.

Post-industrial pressures on the mature welfare states

UPDATE: Have already blogged, this, dummy.

I'm loving me some Paul Pierson. His retrenchment thing rocked, and so does this chapter in his New Politics of the Welfare State.

Off the top of my head, the thesis is that everyone's saying that globalisation is what's putting so much pressure on the welfare state, but he argues convincingly that while global pressures are real, they're exaggerated becaues they're exotic and new. It's not this exogenous pressure that is putting a figure four leg lock on the welfare state and trying to administer a heart punch, it's a set of four endogenous pressures that are the inevitable product of a mature and relatively successful welfare state. He argues that it is four profound "post-industrial" changes that are exerting the very real and indeed unprecedented budgetary poressures on the welf st. They are:

1. the  slowdown in the growth of productivity (and thus economic growth) inevitably associated with the transition from a manufacturing economy to one based on services
2. the gradual expansion and growth to limits of govt committments
3. demography: an older pop
4. changes in household structure and their relation to paid work

Income mobility in the US

CPAG has released a report on American socio-economic mobility. Here's the report, here's teh exec summary, and here's what Ezra Klein has to say.

The Center for American Progress just released a comprehensive study of economic mobility and income volatility. And, according to its data, Andy's right about the American lack of fatalism, the belief in opportunity and mobility. When asked if people get rewarded for their effort, 61 percent of Americans agreed, versus 49 percent of Canadians, 33 percent of the British, and 23 percent of the French (weirdly, the Philippines wins this one, with 63 percent agreeing). But of all these societies (save the Philippines), America is one of the least mobile, which is to say the least dependent on hard work rather than social station. In Denmark, the relationship between your parent's income and yours is 15% percent or so. In Canada, it's 19% percent. In France, it's 41 percent. And in America, it's 47 percent. The only country more hidebound and hierarchal is Andy's native England (50 percent), also the country most closely approximating the American economic model.

As it is, if you're born in the lowest income quintile, you have a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent. If you're born rich, you've a 22 percent shot at remaining there.

...

There's been a serious increase in downward mobility, too, with only 13 percent of families seeing a $20,000 (in real terms) loss during the 1990-91 recession, while nearly 17 percent experienced such a drop during the 2003-04 expansion. By contrast, households in the top 10 percent have seen a reduction in downward mobility during the same period.

Market malarkey in childcare - various strands attached

In the main: Download market_weaknesses4.doc

Download market_weaknesses3.doc

Download market_weaknesses2.doc

Download market_weaknesses.doc

The rest of the story: Download Choice.doc , Download Conclusion.doc , Download Cost.doc , Download INTRO.doc , Download outcomes_for_children.doc , Download Quality.doc