Geared to producing ideas,with the emphasis on youth: the creation of the Camden borough architect's department under Sydney Cook

The housing projects designed by Camden borough council in London in the period 1965–73 when Sydney Cook was borough architect—which include Fleet Road, Alexandra Road, Highgate New Town, Branch Hill and Maiden Lane—are internationally recognised as being among the most important housing schemes of the past half century, providing a model for low-rise high-density urban housing that is still relevant today. Yet the programme of which these projects were the outcome has received scant attention from historians. This paper, which is the first published output from an ongoing research project, explores the institutional and organisational structures from which these projects emerged. Drawing on archival and other primary sources as well as interviews with many of the principal figures involved, it shows how the new borough, created under the 1963 London Government Act, developed the legacy of its constitutive boroughs—Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras—and how Camden's exceptional position, in terms of both wealth and location, was used by Sydney Cook to attract leading designers from London's architectural world, including young graduates from the Architectural Association and elsewhere, to undertake a re-think of the design of inner-city housing.     

Social Disorders in the Early Stages of Public Housing Decline: A Helsinki Case Study

While Helsinki's council housing is in physically good condition, it is beginning to experience crime, drug dealing and anti-social behavior. Through a case study of Helsinki's council housing the paper seeks to improve understanding of public housing decline early in the process. Open-ended interviews with Helsinki housing experts and housing officials highlight weak eviction laws and inadequate funding for transitional housing as key causes of increases in the number of multi-problem families. Analysis of a 2001 Helsinki public housing residents' survey indicates that while most residents did not believe neighborhood conditions were getting worse, almost half of the respondents were pessimistic about one or more neighborhood conditions (e.g. noisy neighbors, crime) and those who were most pessimistic about their neighborhood were most likely to plan to move. Recommendations for preventing further decline are discussed.     

Health Selection in the Housing System: Access to Council Housing for Homeless People with Health Problems

The relationship between housing and health has long been recognised. More recently the relationship between homelessness and poor health has also been acknowledged. In this paper it is argued that these associations reflect, in part, the health selective availability of housing. Paying particular attention to the British context, and drawing on qualitative data concerning the experiences of a sample of single homeless people with health problems, it is illustrated that people with health problems are struggling to re-enter the housing system despite, in theory, having priority among people eligible for council housing. Some preliminary conclusions are then drawn regarding the significance of these findings to understanding of the relationship between housing, homelessness and health.     

The housing problems of employees: Housing markets, policy issues and responses in England

The paper presents empirical evidence from an exploratory survey of employees in one case study company. It illustrates how the deregulation of the housing and labour markets in England has impacted on the company employees to produce a range of welfare housing problems. These welfare housing problems were experienced by relatively affluent home-owning employees, though were concentrated amongst lower-income households, those spending a larger proportion of their income on housing costs and renters. These problems disrupted employees’ home life and work in diverse ways with knock-on effects into their company and the economy. Other companies surveyed in the research offered employees advice, where they had the capacity. However, there was a reluctance amongst employees to report problems because of growing perceptions of insecurity in employment. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for additional state intervention in housing policy. This need goes beyond that recently announced by the Labour government which focuses upon the regeneration of council housing. New policies are needed to regulate the housing market and to provide information to government and its agencies to develop a greater understanding of local housing markets.     

Delivering Social Housing: Examining the Nexus between Social Housing and Democratic Planning

The construction of social housing in gentrifying neighbourhoods can ignite contestation, revealing tensions between economic imperatives, social policy and neighbourhood change. With a view to understanding how the convergence of these agendas preserve unpopular, but socially critical housing infrastructure, the aim of this paper is to explore how the challenges social housing implementation encounters across these agendas intersect with a broader agenda for local democratic planning. Using social housing as our empirical focus and directing attention to the gentrifying local government area of Port Phillip in Victoria, Australia, this paper reveals how a council’s main asset to support implementation – its policy frameworks – creates an urban narrative of social inclusivity and diversity. Through this case, we illustrate how elected officials and some residents draw from these policies to interject into episodes of community contestation, which we argue presents opportunities to expose and renew commitments to social housing over space and time.     

Housing Finance Trapped in a Dilemma of Perceptions: Affordability Criteria for the Urban Poor in India Questioned

This paper demonstrates how formal housing finance is the product of the perceptions that prevail among the middle and upper classes, who as policy-makers, economists and managers, determine how housing finance institutions fix the terms and conditions of housing loans for the urban poor. They use affordability criteria that fit the purchase or construction of a house in one go. However, affordability criteria for the urban poor have to be linked with practices of incremental building and consequently incremental financing. Failing to do so leads to serious mismatches between the demand and supply of formal housing finance for the urban poor. To be able to serve the poor adequately, the middle and upper classes should stop aiming at the financing of housing constructed in one go. Instead, they should open their minds to the building and financing practices of the urban poor.     

Housing conditions and affordability in Japan

Housing in Japan is of interest as an example of how improvements in living conditions have not kept pace with national economic growth. This paper describes basic housing conditions in Japan and offers an assessment of them against the background of progress over time and within the context of housing conditions in several Western countries. Housing affordability is a growing problem, particularly for population groups that are marginal to the housing market. We discuss the emerging affordability crisis for renters and owners within the broader context of housing provision and review responses to it. The conclusion comments on likely future developments.     

新内城住宅——浅析伦敦多尼布鲁克住宅

二战后，经济、实用、简洁的现代主义风格迅速改写了许多城市的面貌。尤其是战后重建与新建的城市；然而几十年后的今天，大部分已尽显暗淡与萧条。建筑师彼得’巴伯尔在伦敦多尼布鲁克住宅设计中，塑造出一种全新的社会住宅形象与邻里关系，成功的为灰色城市街区增加了一个欢快的主题，在内城与住宅之间诠释出一种更为积极的关系。     

Housing Stock Transfer: Investing in Renewal as a Tool for Sustainable Regeneration

This paper sets out the argument that housing renewal has a major role to play in economic and social regeneration in areas of council owned housing. It considers the role that housing stock transfer, with the shift of ownership from local authorities to Registered Social Landlords (RSLs), might have, not only in generating the investment needed to improve the quality of housing and environments, but also in terms of creating wider regeneration benefits. Using the Welsh policy context, it examines how the first large-scale housing transfer is being used to secure broader regeneration objectives.     

Hidden from History? Housing Studies,the Perpetual Present and the Case of Social Housing in Britain

This paper examines the use and abuse of historical method in the field of housing studies, with specific reference to predictions about the future shape of social housing in Britain. It reflects on the debates about council housing in the early 1990s and sets these against subsequent policy developments. The paper suggests that this exercise reveals some shortcomings in dominant paradigms within housing studies, such as the misreading and misrepresentation of tenants' responses and reactions; the over-emphasis on consumption in assessing processes of housing sector change; the neglect of increasing spatial differentiation in housing markets across Britain; and the failure to appreciate the causes behind increasing volatility in some local housing markets. The paper argues for a more nuanced historical sensibility and a more adventurous methodology when forecasting the future direction of housing policies and the future characteristics of housing systems.     

Housing careers,intergenerational support and family relations

Abstract

The home and family have always been mutually embedded, with the former central to the realization and reproduction of the latter. More recently, this mutuality has taken on a more critical salience as realignments in housing markets, employment and welfare states in many countries have worked together to undermine housing access for new households. In this context, families have become increasingly involved in smoothening the routes of young adults members up the ‘housing ladder’ into home ownership. Intergenerational support appears to have become much more widespread and not just confined to familialistic welfare regimes. The role of intergenerational support for housing remains, however, highly differentiated across countries, cities and regions, as well as uneven between social and income classes. This introduction to the Special Issue explores how the role of housing wealth transfers has impacted the renegotiation of the generational contract. In doing so, it sets the scene for the articles that follow, each of which contribute significantly to advancing understanding of housing as a key driver of contemporary social relations and inequalities.     

新加坡公共住房发展研究:从“广厦”到“恒产”的智慧

伴随着新加坡经济40余年的持续增长,其公共住房的发展也取得了巨大的成功。基于对新加坡公共住房发展历程、运行机制和价值理念的分析,文章得出结论:新加坡公共住房的发展逐步实现了新加坡居民人人有房住、人人有住房的目标,并通过各种方法让居民的住房保值和增值,完成了社会财富结构的重塑,最终为新加坡经济的持续发展提供了稳定的政治和社会基石。     

The Long-run Decline in Employment Participation for Australian Public Housing Tenants: An Investigation

In the 20 years from 1982 to 2002, the proportion of Australian public housing tenants in employment has fallen markedly relative to Australians living in other housing tenures. This paper explores the potential causes of this trend and their policy implications. For male public renters, the declining employment participation rate can be accounted for by closer targeting of public housing to the most disadvantaged in the labour market and blunter work incentives. This is not the case for female public renters. Their employment participation rate has remained flat while improved labour market conditions should have lifted employment participation rates among this group, even after controlling for an extensive range of individual characteristics. Work incentives are important to female public renters, but further research is required if we are to understand why their employment rates have not improved over this 20-year period.     

Technologies of Mobilising Consensus: The Politics of Producing Affordable Housing Plans for the London Legacy Development Corporation’s Planning Boundary

Powerful arguments have emerged that English planning is currently characterised by technologies of governing that generate consensus over top-down neoliberal plans. For post-politics scholars, this dynamic has been conceptualised as post-politics. Using the case of affordable housing planning within the London Legacy Development Corporation, I explore these two perspectives. I find that affordable housing planning within the London Legacy Development Corporation has indeed been shaped by techniques of governing which aim to generate consensus over this Corporation’s affordable housing plans. However, drawing from a power-based understanding of politics, I argue that these efforts represent political techniques of governing.     

Housing market dualization: linking insider–outsider divides in employment and housing outcomes

Abstract

Past decades of economic growth, relatively widespread employment security and expanding mortgage markets promoted growing homeownership. Recent years have witnessed this growth undercut across advanced economies, evidenced by a rise in other tenures and increasing housing precarity. Studies have shown that these housing outcomes follow more fundamental changes in labour markets. By adapting the established concept of labour market dualization to housing, this paper examines how employment and housing positions are intertwined under late capitalism, and how their relationship has changed through the Global Financial Crisis. Examining the salient case of the Netherlands through household-level data from the LISS panel, we demonstrate that being a labour market ‘outsider’ vastly increases the likelihood of being an ‘outsider’ across housing market dimensions, in terms of housing equity, affordability and prospective asset accumulation. Comparing housing and labour dualization over 2008 and 2016, we further show that the share of multiply disadvantaged households has grown substantially, both among labour market insiders and outsiders.     

Mobilising opposition: The campaign against housing action trusts in Tower Hamlets

This paper examines tenant opposition to the British government's plans for Housing Action Trusts (HATs), using material drawn from a case study of the tenants' anti‐HAT campaign in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. After examining the HAT plans, the reasons for tenant objections to the privatisation of their council estates are explained. The political discourse of the anti‐HAT campaign is examined in order to assess the strategies by which support amongst tenants on both the affected estates, and in the borough as a whole, was mobilised. Strategies of resistance to the HATs were negotiated within the campaign through a constant process of discussion and debate about the purposes of the campaign and the construction of arguments against the policy. Central themes to emerge included a justification of the principles behind the provision of council housing; parallels that could be drawn between the HATs and the London Docklands Development Corporation; the notion that only tenant power could defeat the HATS; and arguments linking local experiences of the ‘housing crisis’ to the HATs and the government's housing policies more generally. The experience of this campaign underlines the necessity for potential divisions in such campaigns to be minimised in order to mobilise support and achieve their objectives.     

Obligations and Expectations: Perceived Relationship between Transnational Housing Investment and Housing Consumption Decisions among Ghanaian Immigrants in Canada

Transnational housing investment is a pervasive practice among many migrant groups residing in various destination countries; including Ghanaian migrants living in Canada. For many, the need to engage in transnational housing investment is beyond the standard rationale and has two prime significance; symbolic and practical utility. Engagement in this endeavour requires substantial financial commitments over extensive periods of time with potential consequences for various aspects of immigrants’ lives in their destination areas including their housing consumption. This paper examines perceived influence of such long-term commitments on housing consumption decisions among Ghanaian immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area using in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. The findings show that although engagement in transnational housing is associated with constraints on immigrants’ decision to enter homeownership, type of dwelling to rent and the neighbourhood choices, it was also associated with a sense of pride, success and integration into Canadian society. The paper concludes that a broader theoretical discussion of housing integration is necessary. Specifically, it calls for a redefinition of the measures of immigrant housing integration in particular – which narrowly considers destination parameters – to one that includes transnational factors as critical in moving the debate on understanding immigrant integration in general.     

Responsible Participation and Housing: Restoring Democratic Theory to the Scene

Tensions between individual liberty and collective social justice characterise many advanced liberal societies. These tensions are reflected in the challenges posed for representative democracy both by participatory democratic practices and by the current emphasis on (so-called) responsible participation. Based on the example of ‘community’ housing associations in Scotland, this paper explores these tensions. It is argued that the critique of responsibility may have been over-stated, that, in particular, ‘community’ housing associations offer the basis for relatively more inclusive and effective processes of decision making than council housing, which relies on the traditional processes and institutions of representative local government for its legitimacy.     

Housing Market Failure in a Booming Economy

This paper presents national data and two case studies investigating the links between housing market failure and the context of Australia's recent resource mining boom. It demonstrates how unprecedented international demand for mineral resources resulted in critical, local housing issues in mining communities. We conclude that without careful strategic planning and understanding of the economic and social role of housing, international market dynamics can create local housing situations that are vulnerable to market and social failures. While this paper highlights the challenges inherent in managing housing issues in Australia during a mining boom, there are likely to be lessons which can be applied in international settings. These challenges include the diversity in scale, cyclical and often unpredictable nature of booms; differences in housing policy and institutional arrangements across jurisdictions and the importance of leadership in growth management and planning.     

DOES INNER CITY PUBLIC HOUSING EXACERBATE THE EMPLOYMENT PROBLEMS OF ITS TENANTS?

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes whether inner city public housing exacerbates the employment problems of its tenants. Results from two evaluations of public housing demonstrations are used to test the potential impact of location, address discrimination, eligibility criteria, and rent schedules on tenant work behavior. To supplement this analysis, the effects of public housing on tenant employment, including self-employment, are estimated using a unique cross-sectional data set known as the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey. The results do not support the claim that public housing, independent of tenant characteristics, contributes to employment patterns. While it is true that most public housing residents do not work, their counterparts in the private real estate market are no more likely to be employed or to have ever worked. Overall, these results indicate that the provision of public housing does not inhibit work behavior.