Pie Fight

Mass housing practice essay

"The failure of slum clearance and council housing to solve hte housing problem led to a sharp change of idrection in favour of inner city renewal by the 1970s." Discuss.

This essay will critically evaluate the efforts of slum clearance and council housing to solve housing problems following the second world war, and will then look at the response to the slum clerance and mass housing in the form of the small is beautiful movement, as well as other inner city renewal efforts. Rather than look at  "the housing problem" as a monolithic issue, this essay will argue that policy solutions oftern create new problems, and will frame the penular swing from slum clearance to inner city renewal in this light.

Following the second world war, the UK  had an undeniably large housing shortage caused by shortages from before the war coupled with the bomb damage of some 750,000 hoomes during it. As late as 1953, more than 2/3 of households in the UK were lacking basic amenities, were overcrowded, or were sharing. The government's response (within cities) was to embark on a mass housing movement that demanded wideapread slum clearance in order to make way for large high-rise or deck access estates. As Power notes, slum clearance and mass council building had many successes. For instance, by 1974, less than one in four households suffered from the conditions mentioned just above. From huge shortage of housing in the mid-50s, the government had a surplus in the mid-70s, and the vast majority of new council housing, including slum clearance housing, offered more space and light and far better amenities than slum dwellers had known before. As Peter Hall has pointed out, the reason it took so long for peopel to turn against slum clearance in teh UK is because what was being cleared was, on the whole, so squalid.

While the exploision of council housing after the war led eventually to there being some 6m council homes by the mid-70s, with 4m of those being in the form of houses, inner city slum clearance represents a distinctly troubled aspect of council housing. Much of this is attributable to the government's focus on slum clearance followed by mass housing in the form of deck access and high-rise. In the case of the latter, by the mid-60s, 26% of new council building was high-rise, desppite it's very high cost and lack of attractiveness to families, the elderly and others.

Slum clearance was central to the government's rush to put up the highest possible numbers (up from 100,000 per  year under Bevan after the war to 300,000 under MacMillan in the mid-50s). Based on modernist notions oftabula rasa and wiping the city's slate clean, slum clearance was a top-down, coercive solution, argues Power, which demanded a mass housing logic that said that bigger was better. Large estates, as Coleman and others have noted, were very difficult to manage and had numerous other physical problems that contributed to eventual difficult to let problems by the mid-70s. The clearance required to build big led to widespread blighting, as areas sat for a decade or more after being declared unfit. This gave rise to twilight zones in which the rising minority population found itself exploited by rapacious private landlords, and tore communities apart, as doccumented by many, including Wilmot and Young. The imposed and imposing solution of mass estates replacing terraced streets led, Coleman argues, to new, unfirendly new slums replacing friendly old ones. Clearance was often driven by a destructive logic baased on the Le Corbusian notion that cities needed to be destroyed in order to save them. What resulted, says Coleman, was dystopia rather than utopia. Dunleavy argues that the negative effects of slum clearance and mass housing was the delegitimisation of council housing as a viable tenure, despite the fact that only 13% of council homes were high-rise by the 1970s.

Dunleavy also points out that, by the end of the 1960s, 2/3 of the houses declared for clearance in london were structurally sound. The clearance logic of destroying rather than renovation gave rise to a strong backlash, as documented in Rod Hackney's The Good, The bad and the Ugly. As he notes, most residents did not want to be moved to new estates, they just wanted to add toilets or other amenities to their homes - something that was far cheaper and quicker than clearing then building anew. And as Jacobs has argued, clearance then mass housing would not even increase densities, as the Le Corbusian love of large patches of "no-man's land" green spaces around tall blocks meant that as many terraced houses could have fit on the same space.

Hackney and others were part of the "small is beautiful" 'movement which argued that renovation and rehabilitation were more in tune wiht public needs and desires than was mass housing. Often led by women and including minorities, they agitated for community-led renovation of old but sound homes, and for keeping communities together. Improvement grants were key to this, argues Hackney, and tripled in use during the early to mid-70s. A key example of the small is beautiful movement is Charteris in North Londn, where residents worked together to stop a clearance project, dealing, says Power, the final blow to post-war Britain's obsession with slum clearance and top-down, big is better solutions.

In the conflict between slum clearance and "small is beautiful" approaches to meeting housing need, we see opposite sides of the continuum. Clearance aimed to solve a particular problem - the need to meet major housing shortages in a short period of time - but created many others, as jsut discussed. Smaller scale inner city renewal aimed to address the problems caused by clearance, but would not in itself have been able to meet housing need on as large a scale. Today, the pendulum seems to be somewhat more in the middle, with housing associations seeking more community-based partnership and councils adverse  to the top-down solutions of the past. Hopefully it will make for a corrective mix.

Convergence and divergence in EU housing

Article by Preimus and Dielman

Convergence

1. Tenure segmentation by income seems to occur everywhere, they argue. main reasons include unattractiveness of mass estates, eligibility criteria everywhere except Den and Sw (50% limit in Fr, completely by need in UK), expanding o-o
2. O-o and sh are in a zero-sum battle across europe, they say
3. housing corps struggle with what they see as a core conflict: need to house the most vulnerable, but need to keep public housing viable as a tenure, and concentrating the vulnerable has been proven not just to be bad for housing, but to have significanat knock-on area effects
4. Kleinman says we are moving toward a more european approach. Gorwth of housing assoc is large part of this.

Divergence

1. While soc rented sector is on decline in most including now Den, is stable in Fr
2. UK little private rental, little HA, but tide changing on latter. Kemeny says that in much of europe there is a unified rental market in which private and non-profit renting are more integrated in pol terms to create a larger viable alt to oo. in UK, opposite. Monotenural, he argues, though Power disagrees strongly.

Early housing reformers - essay outline

Compare and contrast the approaches taken by industrialists who provided model dwellings and other 19th century housing reformers. Were their outcomes different?

Okay, I'll go through my notes and see what evidence I have. First, though, a bit off the top of the head. I'd start by discussing the situation at the time:

1. desperate need for housing the poor and very poor, and the idea that only market solutions were morally acceptable. I'll then look at three separate approaches: very briefly touch on rural model dwellings, spend more time on urban model dwellings, talk about Octavia Hill, then briefly touch on Ebenezer Howard, perhaps wrapping it all up by pointing to transport revolution as helping to kind of bridge soem of the gap. Were their outcomes different? Yeah bo.

2. Rural model dwellings such as Cadbury's Bourneville represented in some ways a sort of corporatist mini-welfare state, seeking to provide good housing, education an even healthcare in exchange for healthy, happy workers and an owner's salved conscience. In a sense, it was solidarity on a small scale.

3. However, these attempts only strove to meet very small-scale needs particular to individual owners. Other industrialists took a broader approach by trying to help solve the housing problem within cities where most workers needed to be. Sutton and Guinness et al - still need to read more about them - housed a fair number of folks but even as early as 1885 this type of model dwelling was being criticised for failing to house the very poor and indeed for exacerbating their problems by creating more housing need through clearance. Doesn't Sutton have some success with housing poorest, in Morris's argument? Model dwellings did meet some of the need.

4. O Hill was against clearance and believed in renovation. Managed to rehab properties and even people through concentrating first on the latter. Hands-on management style, had 2k houses under her control when died in 1912. She was very successful at something most felt couldn't be done: providing decent housing for the very poor - though there were still some too poor for her. However, her approach could not hope to meet massive urban need.

5. One approach that hoped to forestall the need to do that was E Howard's, who tried to set up the Garden Cities as a third magnet combining urban and rural attractions. Like all the others, his solution, true to the time, was predicated on sound business principles, with garden cities being self-financing. They failied, but still had great influence, leading to garden suburbs (helped by transport rev).

6. In the end, none of these approaches would be sufficient to meet housing need. Council building would replace. Their approaches had been both different and similar. With teh exception of Howard, all more or less succeeded in what they were trying to do, but not on a scale large enough to solve the overall housing problem. (Urban model dwellings and Howard were only ones attempting to solve major problem.) In end, non-market solutions were deemed way to proceed.

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Ok, now notes to fill out the above, though I do think I could pass this exam question at this stage.

Setting the stage

1. Was an age that believed in self-help and laissez-faire, as Tarn notes - one in which help that conflicted with the diktat of the market was seen not only to be economically unsustainable but to weaken the moral fibre of those who recieve the help. With the state not yet willing to try to actively solve the problem of housign the poor, others stepped in. As Morris I think argues, part of the goal was to show that the market could be melded with morals to meet public need. They were philanthropic rather than charitable, and meant to do well by going good.
2. Moralising reform
3. Conflicts of the time included private property v public health (pub health wins) and a battle over profit-seeking rights of landlords versus the housing needs of the poor. In this latter battle, landlords were carrying the day. A moral avesion to the results of this gave rise to early housing philo.
4. According to Malpass, the iron link between poverty and poor housing seemed unbreakable.
5. Trevelyan: the "utilitarian squalor of Victorian cities". For the poor, the emphasis was on the latter.

Model dwelling companies

1. Two key attempts at solvign the housing problem both unfolding at roughtly the same time: model dwellings and model villages. Industrial villages such as Saltaire and Bourneville offered a fresh start in the fresh air. In addition to what i write above, note that they could only be a localised patch on a much bigger problem, and that they had soem inherent weaknesses in addition to this. Utopianism often came with a heady dose of moralism and even condesencion, as witnessed by Saltaire's lack of a pub, which some have said was to deter meetings that could lead to unionisation. Salt himself had a wine cellar.
2. Cadbury and Rowntree were Quakers, and the quaker ethos informed their goals, as did utopian visions of Robert Owen.
3. Not a sustainable solution to housing need, but Bourneville still exists.
4. 5% philanthropy (against notion of standard investment return of 7-10%). Peabody Trust founded 1862, with Guinness and others to follow, and Sutton Trust coming at end of 19th century. MOdel dwellings to house deserving poor. Built on large plots of cleared land, a process which exacerbated the crowding that was hurting the very poor, and for which MDCs were criticised by the 1885 Royal Commission on Housing the Working Poor. O Hill testified on this issue.
5. Tarn argues that early housing societies were successful neither in terms of achieving their financial objectives nor in terms of meeting housing need. Morris disagrees, arguing that not only did MDCs deliver a return on investment comparable to other businesses of the time, they argues that they did a better job of meeting housing need than they've been given credit for. For instance, while Steadman Jones and others criticises them for not housing the very poorest, she argues that meeting the then unmet needs of the socio-economic class above them was still a necessity, andn that the MDCs did it well.
6. According to Malpass 2005, MDCs' original intent was to house the very poor. They continually deviated from this, and were criticised for it by the RC on the Housing of the Workign Classes. Booth's research showed that less than 1/4 of tenants of philos were within his def of poor.
7. Garside argues that the Sutton MDC, which was established later than other major ones, did manage to house a significant percentage of the very poor. There was no doubt that it was more successful at doing this than many others, she says.
8. Architecture criticised as "ruthless utilitarianism"
9. Early housing philo was a conjunction of market solutions and moral crusades, but some, including Fabians, argued that it was immoral to profit from the needs of the poor. Morris argues taht private profit could be combined with public good, surely an argument that would sound nice to many current politicians.
10. MDCs used selection to help solve the vexed problem of housing teh "deserving poor" with the "undeserving". As Landlady Pyle said, drunks had to go. O Hill was more forgiving, saying she would take drunks, but not if they made their neighbours miserable. For both approaches, the key was to maintain social order conducive to happy living in crowded situations. Note that Power says that in time LAs would become jealous of Trusts' ability to remove problem tenants.
11. Wohl says that before 19th c was over, that is before Sutton Trust was founded, it was recognised that MDCs could not provide sufficient housing to meet need.
12. Morris says that MDCS have been blamed for delaying the advent of social housing.
13. There  are arguments that MDCs' failings were more exogenous than endogenous. Morris argues that the advent of better transport at least temporarily spelled the end of urban solutions focused on high densities. Garside argues that government did not do enough to encourage MDCs: eg, the Local Govt Board prevented LAs from facilitating the work of the Sutton Trust.
14. Despite differences between MDCs and Hill, they shared her belief in strong, hands-on management, and this has stead them in good stead over time. A management style that Wohl summarises as "a controlled environment of enforced respectability".
15. By outbreak of WWI, there were only around 20k council houses. Even between 1890 and 1914, though, Both Guinness and Sutton built more than 1,000 flats. (Peabody had built 5k from 1860-90). But according to Power 1993, MDCs and philo landlords had built 120k flats by WWI.

Octavia Hill

1. When asked by the 1885 Royal COmmission if her role was to reform the tenants no one else woudl touch, she replied, "The tenants and the houses." Her philosophy was that both could be improved together, bit by bit. She was pragmatic, and seems to have had an early and sensitive understanding of how area effects impact on one another, along with a healthy scepticism for utopian solutions.
2. Blamed greedy landlords and middlemen for much of the housing problem, and was commmitted to making the landlord-tenant relatiionship non-expoloitative. Not through charity - "I have never allowed a second week's rent to become due" - but through working with tenants. Full rent collection allowed her to charge less - in contrast, for instance, to the landlord she noted who had many rent arrears, but such squalid conditions that he made more off his tenants through his second profession: undertaker. Organised ssavings clubs, andn believed that good management was the most effective form of social order: in a precursor of the broken windows theory of policiing, said that "people will add dirt to dirt". Recognised that bad living conditions broke people down and encrouaged behaviours that led to even worse conditions. She or her landladies visited all tenants at least weekly.
3. Tarn says that while she was brave and admirable, her solution was only palliative.
4. She was anti-utopian, and preferred gradual rehabilitation of slum dwellings to their clearance (she recognised that while this led to better housing for some, it led to worse housing for more), and so conflicted with the urban model dwelling companies. She was against blocks of flats, believing them oppressive and difficult to manage: "people become brutal in large numbers". Was against imposed solutions (and imposing ones). Jacobs would surely have approved of her.
5. She believed in, among others,  two key R's: renovation, and rents paid on time.
6. Like MDCs, it was run on a for-profit model. FIrst investor John Ruskin in 1863.
7. According to Power 1993, in her 60-year career she took over, restored and maintained 15k properties, though when she died was only in control of 2k.
8. In a prescient statement for mass housing, she said, "It is far better to provide a tolerable tenement which will pay than a perfect one which will not." The UK would learn this lesson to its pain. I suppose that European social housing, which was run on sounder businees principles, tried to offer a perfect home that would still pay.
9. Malpass says her influence on 20th c housing management is debatable, and calls her reputation "absurdly inflated", and calls her (2005) a "xonservative moral entrepeneur". Rowr.
10. Hill believed strongly in private philanthropy, and thought that council housing would never take off, but by time of her death in 1912, her landladies were finding it hard to make ends meet. More significantly, times were passing her by re meeting housing need.

Ebenezer Howard

1. Like Jacobs, Malpass says that garden cities were anti-urban in nature.
2. Howard was influenced by the utopian thinking of model villages. Unwin, designer of New Earswick for Rowntree, would design Letchworth (1903), the first of only two garden cities.

Long-term outcomes

1. Were all egs of hands-up rather than hands-out.
2. Tarn and others argue that failures of model dwelling companies and other early housing philos in the 19th century led inevitably to the emergence of municipal housing. For instance, Tarn argues that, faced with the seemingly insurmountable housing problem, the public's social conscience grew into a sense of community responsibility for its less successful members, leading to subsidised council housing. Malpass 2000 argues that this line of development is less direct than others believe, and presents evidence (not v convincing, in my view) that voluntary providers continued to be active until council housing rose to fore as part of teh post-WWI settlement. Garside suggests that the rise in LA housing cannot be explained as a response to the inadequacy of the efforts of the early housing philos. Malpass 2005 says that the argument, advanced by Tarn and others, that the manifold failings of the MDCs helped to make the case for state provision of housing has been discredited.
3. One could argue that, rather than a non-statutory means of housing the poor, the MDCs and appraoches of other early philanthropists were "pre-statutory": ie existing not as a direct contrast to strong municipal involvement, but at a time before that was deemed viable.
4. Tarn's emphasis on the growht of a sense of social responsibility perhaps masks the strong sense of social responsibility shown by the early housing phionathropists. However, their morals were constrained by their market-orientation, some argue. Others, pointing to European social housing, would say that one does not need to choose only one or the other, and indeed might be better off choosing a mix - one not so market-orientated as in 19th century Britain, of course.
5. The conflict between market and need is still very prevalent today. Is housing a business or a service? It's both, and there are huge tensions in that.
6. Basic conflict over pace of change. Hill goes bit by bit, whereas MDCs and utopieans want whole hog change.

Housing convergence and divergence

1. My notes and thoughs on reading Kemeny (1998). Should note that Priemus and Dielman discuss European convergence in their overview of social housing, and Power's look at mass housing in Europe highlights but doesn't, I think, overtly discuss convergence.

• Kemeny criticises particularist and universalist approaches as too extreme, arguing instead for "theories of the middle range".
• convergence (ie universalist): eg marxist ideas that same logic of late capitalism drives housing change in all developed nations

2. Castells being silly and unilineal (housing pol and situations can only develop in one way):

• Researching France, and doing his work in the mid-70s, he argued that France had an endemic housing crisis that could not be solved by private interests, and that France's situation could be extrapolated to most other capitalist countries, wiht the only major variable being the level of early state intervention.
• Argued at the time that UK had a less severe housing crisis and that this was attributable to early and significant state intervention
• Strongly criticised by Duncan, eg, for cherry picking data from whatever particular periods of time suited his argument (fossilising particular moments' in nations' histories), and for completely ignoring communist countries, which contradicted his argument that massive state intervention led to fewer problems. Exceptionalism.

3. Barlow and Duncan 1994 argue that Swedish housing is better than UK and France, indicating that high levels of state intervention are not necessarily a prob. But isn't the question about the type of state intervention: eg direct ownership being foolhardy?

4. Kemeny 1995 notes two conflicting approaches to renting. In one, non-profit renting is more or less ghettoised into a residual sector, thereby channeling consumers into owner-occ. In the second, non-profit renting and private renting are more integrated (in policy terms), leading to a "social rental market" that offers an attractive alternative to owner-occ.

5. Kleinman 1993 points to trends in British housing that appear to be moving the UK towards a  more European housing system.

Mass housing v small is beautiful - draft essay

Compare 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?

In this essay I will look at the advantages and disadvantages of post-war mass housing, and of the "small is beautiful" movement that sprang up in the 1960s and 70s as a reaction against some of the negatives of mass housing. While focusing on the UK, I will, at the end of the essay, look at other European countries to see if there are any similarities in the experience of mass housing and movements arising in response to it.

Despite the immense criticism is has received, to fully understand mass housing it is essential to look at what it came about in response to. Post-war Britian suffered from a huge housing shortage, both in terms of available dwellings and in amenities. In terms of outright housing shortage, 3/4m homes had been destoryed or damaged during the war, exacerbating Britain's already severe housing crisis. During the next three decades, the government would address that crisis by building approximately six million homes, while also clearing the worst of the Victorian slums. For many, this clearance was necessary if the UK was to meet its housing needs, both in terms of sheer numbers and in terms of modern amenities. As Peter Hall notes in Cities of Tomorrow, prior to the mass housing movement, the squalor of much British housing is hard for modern commentators to grasp, and the reason it took more than a decade for peoploe to begin reacting against the worst excesses of mass housing is that what it was replacing was so often terrible. According to Power, in 1951, six years after the war had ended, 4.8 million households lacked their own bath, and more than two-thirds of UK households were either overcrowded, sharing, or lacking basic amenities. Thanks in large part to the mass housing movement, by 1971 that figure would be down to 24%. Light and space standards increased immensely as modern homes replaced squalid slums. Importantly, the vast majority of those homes were in the form of houses rather than flats. As Power has noted, for most residents, the government's post-war mass building programme led to markedly better housing.

However, these are not the dwellings that stand out - or, rather, stand above our cities. Instead, we associate mass housing with the troubled and troublesom high rises looming over London, Birmingham and other British cities. Why is this? First, we must look at what Timmins and others have criticised as "the numbers game". In the climate of shortage discussed above, high building numbers quickly became both a strong vote winner and, in Timmins' words, a sign of political virility. Whereas Bevan had decreed in the 1940s that governments would be judged not by the quantity of their building but by its quality, succeeding government emphasised the former, to the detriment of the latter. MacMillan's "People's House" suffered from what have been called "brutal" restrictions on size and cost per unit. Very significnatly, it was deemed expedient to build in urban flats, often in the form of high rises or deck access, in order to maximise building speed, even though building high was significantly more expensive than building houses, the preferred form of residence for Britons. To speed the building of flats, the UK adopted industrial building techniques and designs (such as flat roofs) better suited to drier climates. As Power has noted in her study of Denmark, where many such building techniques originated, industrial building requires high quality equipment and excellent building techniques; however, as numerous critics have noted, British builders frequently cut corners, for instance by using newspaper as filler for cement. The ultimate result of such shortcuts and cost-savings would not be fully recognised until Ronan Point collapsed in 1968. Industrial building also encouraged corruption on the part of politicians, as Cole and Furbey have eloquently documented. Perhaps most significantly, even though only about 400,000 high rise flats were ever built between 1953 and 1975, accounting for only 13% of council flats, wtih houses accounting for nearly six times as much, in the public mind, social housing has become indelibably associated with troubled high rise estates, helping, as Dunleavy argues, to delegitimise council housing as a tenure.

The design of many mass housing estates reflected utopian, Le Corbusian visions of segregated usages and communal space. However, when transplanted to the reality, these utopian visions, argues Coleman, turned dystopian very quickly. High rise flats were unsuited to families with children, and large communal spaces meant both that mothers could not keep an eye on their kids and that those kids easily distrubed everyone else within earshot. Such no-man's land areas, argues Jane Jacobs, are one of the most prenicious legacies of mass housing, leading to decreased social order and well-being, and increased crime.

Such negative externalities became an increasing part of mass housing estates, with poor design and management combining with exogenous factors such as increasing unemployment and immigration, plus an eventual oversupply of council housing, an ever declining private rented sector, and increased government emphasis on owner-occupation, to conribute to the residualisation of social housing in general, and, more particularly, the problem of difficult to let estates. Some argue that the ultimate cause of difficult to let estates was the people who lived on them, and in resident opinion polls cited by Power, "bad neighbours" was one of the chief complaints of council tenants. However, the evidence is clear that short-sighted allocation policies concentrating the most troublesome tenants together also played a key role, as did poor management of mass estates. As Power has argued, UK mass housing suffered from a mentality that put property before people, believing that once the government had built new properties, it did not need to invest significant energies into managing them - in contrast to the European approach to mass housing, with its tradition of the concierge system and resident caretakers. As Power has noted, while residents of difficult to let estates can be fairly criticised for urinating in their buildings' elevators, we should not forget how often, through a combination of cheap building and poor management, those elevators did not work in the first place.

Coupled with all of these flaws, mass housing also had negative effects on the city as a whole. To build large estates, it was necessary to clear large swathes of land, which led to councils declaring large numbers of structurally sound properties as unfit. As Dunleavy notes, in the late 1960s, more than two-thirds of London houses in slum clearance areas were deemed structurally sound. Communities were broken apart, blight and twilight areas abounded, and, as Rod hackney documents, renovation was verboten, even though it cost on average only one-third what building a new house would. As one of hackney's neighbours asks in The good, the bad and the ugly, "Why are they tearing down our homes, when all we need are toilets?"

The top-down, bureaucratic, mass housing logic (or illogic, some would say) described above gave birth to a contrary movement, "small is beautiful". It made no sense for the government to prefer tearing down homes at great expense to the far cheaper option of offering improvement grants to add amenities or renovate, community activists argued. Rejecting brutalism, mass housing and top-down solutions, these activists, often women and/or members of minority ethnic groups, joined together to fight for a community-sensitive, community-led, "people before property" appraoch to meeting housing need. And with some success: from 1970 to 1975, improvement grants increased three-fold, and communities such as Rod Hackney's outside Manchester won their fight now to be broken up. (Lack of sensitivity to community needs had been one of Cullingworth's main criticisms of the mass housing movement.) In Finsbury Park, London, residents successfully banded together, delivering what Power has called the final blow to slum clearance.

Such victories, however, had their downsides, and critics have argued that renovation of neighbourhoods such as London's Barnsbury all too quikcly led to hyper-gentrification that benefitted the middle classes at the expense of traditional neighbourhoods. Perhaps a more significant criticism of the small is beautiful movement is that, while its successes should be applauded, there is no way it could have met the housing need that the mass housing movement sought to tackle. In that context, it is perhaps worth noting that all European nations embarked on post-war mass housing campaigns, and all have had problems, but that Britian's have been the msot severe, indicating that while some of the problems of mass housing are endogenous, sensible approaches, such as good management and strong financial oversight, can help mediate some of the weaknesses of mass housing. However, as Andersen note in his look at Danish mass housing, this requires constant effort.

Why did councils get so involved in UK social housing?

From Hovels:

1. LAs were working with trusts as early as 1890, but did not expect to become large-scale landlords - however, a combination of rates income, slum clearance, public health, and rebuilding powers helped change that. Only had about 20k props at start of wwi, cf 120k for philantrhopic landlords and model dwelling companies

2. Power says that the war effort galvanised energies behind a state-solution to the big UK housing crisis. But outher countries had suffered even worse during war, so I don't understand this. Anyway... state wanted to build a lot of houses fast, and neither private landlords (uncoordinated) nor model dwelling companies were seen as a solution. Re the latter, the state was reluctant to subsidise them, she says. The key factor was that 5m servicemen were returning home to a situation of great housing shortage and rising international socialism, and the govt felt that it had to do something bold, and do it fast. Homes fit for heroes was the ticket, and the emergency Addison Act of 1919 therefore provided generous funding for local authorities to build, while not relying exclusievely on them.

3. Hope was that council building would raise standards while removing the profit motive that had been in the way of providing enough decent housing. In Malpass's analysis, the market did not yet work for the working class (including, most importantly, the better-off, politically potent part of it), and the govt felt that this was a political problem that had to be solved quickly. For their part, LAs saw control of social housing as politically valuable in the pursuit of votes, and were more willing partners in improving conditions than philanthropic trusts had proven, according to Power. Fair to note here that govt commissions had expressed some level of displearsure with model dwelling companies.

4. By the end of wwii, LAs were already large landlords, and were thus well-placed to be the centrepiece of the govt's new housingn drive. Path dependency, as discussed by Pierson. Labour govt did plan to set up a Natl Housing Corp to sponsor mass building of social housing, but this idea was abandoned: Nye Bevan felt that this would give the people and local communities more power and say. LAs already had a broad range of key powers that fit in with a big house building drive: extensive planning powers, a major role in public health (squalor was still rife in slum housing), and were the only boides who had the power to enforce compulsory purchase orders on negligent private landlords. The scale of the housing problem seemed to cry out for collective effort - that's what had won the war, mind ye - and LAs seemed perfectly positioned ot coordinate the various strands of slum declaration, clearance, rehousing, and building.

Mass housing disadvantages and advantages

General info

Advantages

- UK had overwhelming need for better quality housing and lots of it. In 1951, 69% of households were either overcrowded, sharing, or lacking in basic amenities. By 1971 that figure had dropped to 24%.

- modern homes with full amenities replaced squalid slums

- PETER HALL HAS SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT MASS HOUSING BEING A SENSIBLE RESPONSE AND LARGELY SUCCESSFUL.

- The vast majority of the poorly housed got better housing, according to Power.

- mostly houses: by end of the mass housing era in 1979, says Power, of the 6m LA dwellings in the UK, 4m were houses. (Only 400k high rises were ever produced, totaling 13% of social housing stock.) At peak of mass housing movement, in mid-60s, 26% of building was high-rise flats

Disadvantages

- PROPERTY. - The notion of streets in the sky, and of segregating usages, were based on fatal misconceptions about human interaction and social control, says Power. Deck access buildings were at least as unpopular, though, as they were predicated on the same flawed notions of communal space.

- The design was also inapt for the soggy British climate, with flat roofs and concrete led to damp and condensation.

- With a few companies responsible for most mass housing, design flaws such as spalling were replicated on a large scale.

- Despite mass housing estates accounting for only a relatively small minority of council dwellings, their highly visible failures and problems stuck in the public's eye, helping, argue both Coleman and Dunleavy, to delegitimise council housing.

- With all these flaws, you would think that it would at least save money, but not true. High rise housing was particularly expensive. INFO IN EARLIER POSTS, I THINK.

- As Jane jacobs has pointed out, high rise housing did not allow the government to fit more people on valuable urban land. Because of the vast swathes of communal space, densities were no higher than on traditional terraced streets - but because no one felt they had ownership of the communal areas, they quickly became no-man's lands.

- POLITICS. Mass housing invited corruption, as documented by Cole and Furby. Perhaps more significantly in terms of impact, however, it encouraged politicians to think not in terms of people, but in terms of property. Harloe notes that mass housing was at once utopian in its design and scale, yet also starkly utilitarian in its approach to meeting housing need. While Nye Bevin had argued that we shall be judged not by quantity but by quality, MacMillan and succeeding housing ministers focused on the former. Macmillan's people's house was, according to Merret, brutal in its small size and generally cheap construction. HERE A QUOTE OR TWO ABOUT NUMBERS GAME. The desire to score political points by meeting numbers mean that the only poltiically viable solution was the one that put up the highest numbers. Keith Joseph.

- End with Josephs and Nuttgens, I'd say, and perhaps Coleman, who said that all too often, unfriendly slums replaced friendly ones.

- PEOPLE. The destructive logic of slum clearance and mass housing ripped apart local communities. As scholars including Wilmot and Young have argued, both in the 1950s and more recently, communities and neighbourhoods may be particularly important to the less well-off. Amenities cannot always take the place of communities.

- Overbuilding encouraged residualisation and polarisation. There was a large surplus by 1976, says Power. Mass housing estates became dumping grounds for the worst off. Forrest and Murie note that while many council estates remained mixed tenure, inner city mass estates were dumping grounds for those on the social and economic margins. Better off tenants with other options quickly abandoned these large, problematic estates. As they became difficult to let, only the most desperate ended up living on them. (This happened in a broader trend of the residualisation of public housing. In 1962, notes Malpass, only 11% of council households had no earned income; by 1982, the figure was 44%. I HAVE MORE ON THIS IN ONE OF MY TENURE POSTS.)

- Management of estates, never a strong point with council housing, became unimaginably difficult on many mass housing estates. Communal spaces meant that a few problem families could traumatise entire blocks. As Power has argued, however, council mismanagement of mass estates was at least as significant a part of the problem as were problem tenants.

- Segue into small is beautiful: mass housing was not only imposing, but imposed. Coercion was a basic part of the process, from slum clearance through to the lack of grass roots participation (Dunleavy 1981). Just as architects saw the break with old-fashioned bujilding traditions as a positive step forward, some politicians saw the destruction of close-knit communities as not so much a necessary evil as an unqualified good. As one politician noted, "Dwellers in a slum are almost a separate race of people... who have no initiative or civic pride. The task, surely, is to break such groupings up even though the people seem to be satisfied with their miserable environment, and seem to enjoy an extrovert social life" (Wilfred Burns, 1963).

Small is beautiful - advantages and disadvantqages

Hmm, not exactly bursting with knowledge on this one. Here goes anyway...

Advantages

- From a social housing perspective, it harkened back to more sensitive, community-based models, says Power.

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- A response to the blight-inducing, twilight area by products of the slum clearance that was required for mass housing. A reaction both agains the devastation wrought by slum clearance and the breaking up of neighbourhoods, and to the coercion of mass housing.

- Most properties that were knocked down or declared unfit were actually structurally sound, and only needed renovation. All we needed were indoor toilets, as one of Rod hackney's neighbours noted.

- Renovation was mmuch quicker, with a typical new build taking 18 months while renovation took only six. Renovation also fit in with the small size of a typical building firm (four people, on average, according to Power). It was cheaper, more responsive, kept communitie together, was often inter-racial, and kept intact a building type that the British public clearly preferred.

Disadvantages

- HAAs abandoned in 1979 amidst claims that they were subisidisng gentirfication on the one hand and were too municipalised on the other. But had great symbolic value, says Power, marking a return to gradualism and an end to imposed, clean sweep solutions.

General info

- Following the Ronan Point disaster, the 1969 Housing Act shifted focus from devlopment to improvement. As Malpass notes, part of what drove this was public disfavour with the mass housing approach, but government desire to shift burden of housing responsiblity to individuals also played a role. This represents a partial retreat away from the welfare state, he says, moving social housing more into a mixed economy of welfare provision.

- Of the UK's 6m terraced houses, 1/3 were destroyed during hte mass housing era.

- There was a swing away from mass housing, towards conservation and renovation. About 1m dwellings were renovated in the 70s: 10% by HAs, the rest by owners

- Small scale, community based approaches proliferated. HAs, housing co-ops, advice centres and other local, bottom-up services developed as the pendulum swung away from top-down, mass scale approach of the preceding two decades.

- Rise of housing associations. Govts found attractive because could combine the flexibility, private initiative, small scales and business acumen of private landlords with the social conscious of public landlords (says Power).

- Cullingworth criticised LAs for their lack of ability or willingness to house single people, minorities, newcomers, and others. HAs could meet community needs that monolithic LAs overlooked.

- Housing Corporation set up in 1964 to support the growth of voluntary and charitable housing assocations - something of a return to early roots in terms of meeting housing need outside market. Aim was to create genuine mixed tenures, whereas LAs were cinreasingly creating polarised, residualised estates. Costs were high compared to council or controlled private rents, though. In 1974, the Housing Corp was given a much bigger role. Rents became more amenable, above council but below market rates. Govt began meeting about 90% of the full cost of each unit. HAs became part of a more local, more direct and more responsive housing movement that restored old property, worked with LAs, helped sitting tenants to stay in the area rather than be relocated. Developed great reputation - one far greater than their actual influence, says Power. Still though, HAs grew rapidly during the 1970s, and played a crucial role in inner city renewal, offering a viable alternative to the bureaucratic, non-responsive nature of council housing.

- General Improvement Areas were established in 1969. AND DID WHAT? SAME AS HAAs?

- Housing Action Areas. Introduced in 1974 to tackle inner city decline by combining council action with community initiative. Councils were encouraged to work with HAs to rehabilitate stock. HAAs were on a manageable scale, with each area including 200-500 houses. Emphasised the attractions of old neighbourhoods and traditional terraced streets. Schemes were time-limited, inclusive and dynamic, but exogenous pressures in the form of the economic crisis meant that they were declared in only a limited number of areas.

High rise estates in Europe

Is rescue possible, asks a 1999 article by Anne Power. Key points:

1. Mass housing was based on a top-down model of housing provision, an attempt at social engineering based on form. They were over-ambitious and over-rigid.

2. Exogenous pressures, eg from increased unemployment caused by collapsing industry, conflated with endogenous ones caused by concentrated poverty and poor design, led to unforeseen problems. Coleman says that what was seen as utopia became more the opposite.

Industrial model villages - Wikipedia

Saltaire

Bourneville