Collaborative management of studentification processes: the case of Newcastle upon Tyne

This paper explores both benefits and potential drawbacks deriving from the spatial distribution of student accommodations across Newcastle upon Tyne. The core of the paper focuses on the interconnections, collaboration and exchange between university and city council as a potential “win–win strategy” for managing the spatial distribution of students across the city. On the one hand, both universities and local authorities in Newcastle are aware of how the urban location of student accommodation provides both services and facilities to students and positive implications for other inhabitants (and the local economy) as well. On the other hand, the increasing number of students living in both private and university accommodations can cause a progressive decrease in families living in such neighbourhoods in the long run. The risk is the formation of an “exclusive geography” in some parts of the city centre, in which the colonisation by students may cause the definition of a “distinctive time and space framework” (Chatterton in Geoforum 30:117–133, 1999), not always in line with that of non-student neighbours. Collaborative planning between university and city council is showing potential solutions for generating new urban spaces which in turn produce collective benefits within the city. This paper concludes that student housing planning should be reconceptualised in the light of collaborative schemes between universities and local authorities in order to guarantee community cohesion and quality of life of both established residents and students. The creation of platforms of dialogue between students, local communities and local authorities might contribute towards enhancing mutual understanding while informing local authorities about the needs of both categories of residents.     

Tenant Participation and Social Housing in the UK: Applying a Theoretical Model

Tenant participation is becoming an almost ubiquitous feature of the planning and provision of social housing. A range of opportunities has been (and is being) created by and for tenants to participate in the planning, provision and evaluation of housing services. Yet while local authorities and other social landlords may be keen to consult tenants, and tenants themselves often want to make their voices heard, there is a perennial problem in actually getting people involved. This paper provides a comprehensive framework for understanding this important question. It then reports on recent research that applies the framework in two different contexts: tenants' associations and tenant management organisations. The implications for housing policy and practice are discussed.     

Difficult to Let Housing Association Stock in England: Property,Management and Context

Problems related to unpopular housing are not new in Britain's social rented sector. In the past, however, these have generally been associated with housing provided directly by the state through local authorities. For many, the term 'difficult to let' has become synonymous with large, ageing, poor quality estates managed under a centralised framework and subject to a long period of low investment and indifferent management. There has also been a long-standing assumption that social housing allocations systems tend to channel the most vulnerable tenants into the least desirable housing. In fact, the problem of difficult to let property is now as pervasive in the not-for-profit sector managed by housing associations as it is within council housing. In many cases the developments affected are small in scale and, in a significant proportion of cases, recently constructed. In explaining why property becomes difficult to let, the local and regional context is clearly important. The balance between social, economic and housing demand circumstances and property and estate characteristics varies between regions. There is relatively little evidence that difficult to let housing association properties are occupied by disproportionate numbers of the most severely disadvantaged tenants and this suggests that something has happened to modify the segregating effects of allocations systems observed in earlier studies. Nevertheless, this apparent change must be seen within the context of the general trend towards a residual role for social housing in its entirety. The social class and income range of new social sector tenants now is much diminished by comparison with earlier decades with few distinctions between the occupiers of difficult to let and other housing.     

Housing rites: young people’s experience of conditional pathways out of homelessness

Abstract

Since devolution, Scotland has been perceived as an international trailblazer in homelessness policy. This is principally due to The Homelessness Etc. (Scotland) Act 2003 which led to the ‘priority need’ category being abolished in 2012, thus placing a statutory duty upon local authorities to provide settled accommodation to nearly all homeless households. This has been widely praised for extending citizenship rights to those experiencing homelessness. In contrast to this, this paper examines the experiences of young people (aged 16–24) where judgements on whether they were ‘housing ready’ delayed them being provided settled accommodation. Drawing on Bourdieu's writing on rites of institution, it is shown how the symbolic categories deployed by support services and landlords operated as a means of ‘vision and division’, creating new social positions that lengthened the pathway out of homelessness. In a complimentary move, there was a fusion of support with control mechanisms to determine a person's readiness for settled accommodation.     

Room Sharing in Sydney: A Complex Mix of Affordability,Overcrowding and Profit Maximisation

The shared housing sector is a growing private rental submarket. Researchers have sought to analyse the drivers of this growth, the benefits of shared housing for tenants, landlords and wider urban systems, as well as risks for tenants and local planning systems. Yet, there is limited research exploring the diversity of the shared housing sector. In particular, analysis of room or space sharing with non-related adults is lacking. This paper explores the characteristics, geography and impact of room sharing across Sydney. By analysing online accommodation listings this paper provides insights for policymakers seeking to monitor and regulate shared room accommodation.     

Living on the Margins: Comparing Older Private Renters and Older Public Housing Tenants in Sydney,Australia

An increasing number of older Australians are dependent on the private rental market for their accommodation. Through the use of semi-structured in-depth interviews, the life circumstances of older renters (65 plus) in both public housing and private rented accommodation in Sydney are explored and compared. Using Amartya Sen's concepts of capabilities and functionings, the study illustrates that due mainly to lower accommodation costs and greater security of tenure, the public housing tenants interviewed had far greater capability to live a life they valued. In contrast, most interviewees in the private rental market were struggling financially and were extremely anxious about their security of tenure. Their capacity to control their present and their future was very limited.     

Anti-social Behaviour Strategies - Individualistic or Holistic?

Anti-social behaviour, both criminal and non-criminal, has been at the top of the political agenda for some time. Within the housing management arena it is seen as a problem that can affect the whole standing of an area or estate and influence other functions including allocations and void control. This paper looks at the various strategiesadopted by local housing authoritiesto deal with anti-social behaviouramong their tenants. It is argued that whereas the problem has in the past been seen as part of managing 'difficult to let' or 'problem' estates it can now arise throughout an authority's stock due to processes such as the residualisation of social housing. This has led to the adoption of strategies which individualise the treatment of anti-social behaviour rather than addressing the wider difficulties faced by many anti-social tenants. Anti-social behaviouris placed within the ongoing debatesaround 'problem' estates, their causes and solutions. The recommended 'good practice' strategies are set out and consideration is given to the effect of the adopted strategies on the future role of housing management policy and personnel.     

Managing Complex Spatial Planning Processes

This article surveys the way in which the idea of sustainable development is integrated into current spatial planning practice by Swedish local authorities. The Brundtland Report's definition of sustainable development calls for all dimensions of sustainability to be considered. Given that today's planning processes deal with large volumes of basic data where epistemological and technical knowledge must be co-ordinated with the actors' values and views of society, this makes spatial planning a very complex process for local planning authorities. The question is whether these ideals of sustainability are manageable in a complex planning situation. Case histories of the implementation process in Sweden indicate that local authorities seek to limit this complexity by dividing the main topics, i.e. ecological, social and economic, into separate planning processes and planning documents. Furthermore, each of the sustainability dimensions seems to be strengthened by social discourses, which can be recognised in the visions of the local plans. The various modes of planning correspond to and are strengthened by these discourses.     

From deficient planning to “incapable tenants”. Changing discourses on housing problems in Sweden

Since the mid 1970s, discourses on housing problems and problem tenants in Sweden have changed significantly. This article, which is based on official reports and an urban case study, accounts for this transformation at the national, the urban, as well as the work‐practice level of discourse from a constructivist perspective.

The government's understanding of high vacancy rates were, in the 1970s, associated with deficient planning and building. However, in the 1980s, focus was diverted to a crisis in the public housing sector, which in turn highlighted the “noisy neighbour” as the source of their negative image. At the urban level the shifting discourse is signified by the municipal housing companies’ more selective policy in the 1980s, and the local social authorities’ growing role in housing for homeless clients. Contradictory demands from the role as landlords and as social workers, at the level of work‐practice, resulted in a redefinition and revaluation of homeless clients. In the beginning of the 1990s, these new practices at urban and street‐levels were sanctioned at the national level, thereby completing the shift from structural to individual accounts for housing problems.     

Struggles and opportunities at the platform interface: tenants’ experiences of navigating shared room housing using digital platforms in Sydney

Digital platforms have shaped the ways of navigating and occupying shared housing properties in the private rental market. Online platforms reconfigure the geography of housing searches and allow potential tenants to identify and enquire about shared properties while transcending local and national boundaries. Urban scholarship has viewed these platforms as real-time, fine-grained, big datasets for investigating housing markets. However, limited attention has been given to tenants’ experiences of using online platforms, and the extent to which these platforms facilitate access to housing. Drawing on interviews with tenants [n?=?35] in Sydney, this paper explores tenants’ experiences of searching, negotiating and securing shared room housing advertised on digital platforms. The findings highlight that shared housing digital platforms operate on the logic of peer-to-peer interaction between landlords and tenants via user-generated listings. These platforms allow tenants to compare rental prices, locations and characteristics of shared properties through ‘computerised algorithms’. Shared housing tenants, nonetheless, face a series of challenges, especially related to misrepresentation of property conditions, fake profile identity of advertisers, upward pressure on rental prices and high competition for listed properties, all of which influence their housing search and living experiences. Digital platforms emerge as complex socio-technical assemblages that are difficult to regulate as city authorities struggle to formulate effective mechanisms to govern technology-led social change. The paper provides valuable insights into housing informality and tenant exploitation at the platform interface and calls for platform governance.

     

Deregulated private renting: A decade of change in Scotland

Efforts to stimulate reinvestment in the private rented sector in Britain began in the late 1980s. It suited the Conservative government to label these changes as ‘deregulation’ although they were more complex than this term implies. This article provides evidence of the impacts of the changes in Scotland. It emphasizes the need to examine the impacts on different groups within the private rented sector. In particular, deregulation tended to favour those able to pay market rents, while increased restrictions on housing benefits meant that the ability of low-income households to afford private rented accommodation was reduced. Other groups, such as those in tied accommodation or on regulated tenancies, were largely unaffetted by the changes. In response to deregulation, there has been a significant increase in the flow of lets at the upper end of the market (self-contained flats and houses) while rents for this type of accommodation have barely risen. At the lower end of the market (shared accommodation), the flow of lets has increased only marginally or not at all. Landlords also appear to have become more reluctant to house low-income tenants. The article uses a database compiled from advertisements for private rented accommodation appearing in newspapers and property guides in the period 1987 to 1996. Nick Bailey is a Research Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. His main research interests include: housing and urban policy, particularly housing renewal, neighbourhood regeneration and the private housing market; urban economic and social change; and local economic development policies.     

Correspondence

This paper traces the inter- and intra-regional moves of office tenants and demonstrates how Geographic Information Systems can be used to address substantive research questions. The research tracks the origin of office tenants in new buildings over 10,000 square feet and the destination of tenants from older buildings larger than 10,000 square feet, during 1980 to 1986. For data from Prince George's County, Maryland, the results show that in a new office building, 76 percent of establishments and 50 percent of employees were in firms that were either startups or in-migrants to the Washington metropolitan statistical area. Four percent of establishments but 22 percent of employment in new office space came from older office buildings in Prince George's county. Seven percent of establishments and 22 percent of employment were relocations from small or non-office locations, and the remaining share came from other counties in the region. Nine percent of establishments and of employment had relocated from the District of Columbia. We conclude that the new office space did not draw primarily tenants from older area buildings; rather, the majority of its tenants came from new startups and in-migrants to the Washington, D.C. region.     

‘Ma and Pa’ Landlords and the ‘Risky’ Tenant: Discourses in the New Zealand Private Rental Sector

Social constructions of what it means to let and rent housing are revealed in language and are intimately tied to housing outcomes for both landlords and tenants. This paper is concerned with the socially constructed identities of landlords and tenants in the private rental sector and how these are revealed in language. Fairclough's methods of discourse analysis coupled with Habermas' ideal speech situation and theory of communicative action are used to form an analytical framework for examining public debate and discourse on the private rental sector in New Zealand. It is argued that current discourses about tenants and landlords are the result of public debate and stereotypes that have failed to incorporate the experiences of tenants, and further that these stereotypes conceal the multiplicity of identities and motivations for behaviour of both landlords and tenants.     

‘The Houses Have Been Constructed Everywhere’: The Country Programme of the Housing Commission of Victoria 1945–1960

Abstract

The shortage of housing in Victoria at the end of the Second World War was acute. Families throughout country Victoria were forced to shelter in dwellings that were either ramshackle or overcrowded. From 1945, the Housing Commission of Victoria expended all available resources on the construction of housing units and by 1960 in excess of 47,000 houses and flats had been constructed. Of this total just over 18,000 were built in 120 towns and cities in country Victoria. At all times, the Commission's major criterion for the allocation and siting of these units and the selection of tenants was need. As well, houses were constructed specifically to aid decentralized industry and for numerous government authorities.     

Chameleons or Trojan Horses? The strange case of housing action trusts

Housing Action Trusts (HATs) were conceived by the British government in 1987 as agencies to secure the compulsory removal from local housing authorities of properties needing improvement. They seemed yet another example of a consistent strategy of Conservative governments in the 1980s to transfer functions from elected local government to agencies appointed by the central administration. This new policy looked like more material for party political conflict at both central and local level and the expected conflict took place to such an extent that each of the original six HATs proposed for inner city estates were vetoed by tenants. But by April 1991 the first HAT had been set up after agreement between Hull City Council and the government. In August of the same year Waltham Forest followed and in July 1992 a ballot for a prospective HAT was held in Liverpool. Interest in establishing HATs has accelerated following the Conservative election victory in April 1992 and the government has also restated its interest in receiving direct approaches from tenant groups as well as from local authorities. So what has happened? Is the change another example of Labour local authorities having to come to terms with popular demand for reducing the public housing sector (the Trojan horse scenario) or is it an example of central government salvaging something from a policy which under‐estimated the popularity of council housing (the chameleon scenario)? This article tries to analyse these competing interpretations.     

URBAN FISCAL CRISIS AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN MEXICO CITY: From Global Origins to Local Effects

ABSTRACT: Using Mexico City as a case study, this paper examines the unique problems and constraints that contribute to urban fiscal and political crisis in cities in developing countries. The recent international debt crisis and Mexico's history of dependent development accelerated the fiscal insolvency of Mexico City and limited local capacity to generate new or alternative revenue sources. Metropolitan authorities have limited maneuvering room to address this problem due to limited revenues and to growing urban austerity protests. The paper explores contradictory relationships between urban fiscal and political crisis and links them on the local urban level to the national and international context of dependent development. The paper concludes that urban political reform emerges in the constrained policy space where authorities can agree about Mexico City's future and legitimize their rule at the same time.     

The early nineteenth century planning of Newcastle upon Tyne

This article seeks to re‐examine the social, political and economic factors involved in the redevelopment of central Newcastle between 1834–1840, and to suggest possible parallels with aspects of planning practice today. It emphasizes the contribution of the entrepreneur Richard Grainger and — utilizing the author's recent study — the architect John Dobson's possible advisory role. Using a number of previously unpublished maps and plans, earlier replanning schemes by Dobson and others are analysed in the context of the history and development of the town. In particular, attention is paid to ways in which these differed from, but may have influenced, the central area redevelopment scheme. This itself is assessed in terms of both the planning principles involved and its essentially commercial rationale, highlighted by details of the actual occupation of sites. Examination is also made of Grainger's relationship with the municipal authorities of the day and his financial methodology.     

Assessment of barriers to public rental housing exits: Evidence from tenants in Beijing,China

Public rental housing (PRH) exits exert a profound influence on turnover rates, which further impact the public housing principles of fairness and efficiency. However, very few studies have attempted to investigate the tenant's barriers to exit PRH units in Chinese studies. In this paper, using data drawn from a randomly sampled survey of tenants in Beijing during the March 2017, we employ structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the factors influencing tenant's barriers to exit. We find that housing availability is the most influential factor in determining the tenant's barriers to leave PRH, and residential satisfaction is also considered as a motivation against PRH exits. In addition, residential satisfaction transfers the impact of tenant's perceptions of housing and neighborhood to exit barriers. Especially, the effects of housing availability on exit barriers are higher in some groups, such as elderly, high income households, large-sized families and respondents with long spell of residence. Any program aimed at getting tenants to leave public housing sector needs to reduce their barriers to access to the private rental market and take into consideration the various characteristics of the tenants.     

Strategies for exclusion from social housing

In Sweden most local social authorities sublet flats to homeless clients with special contracts. In spite of this kind of social housing there are people sleeping ‘rough’ or in night shelters. These realities were approached in a case study, where a group of social workers engaged in housing support and supply were interviewed and observed. Two sets of methods in social housing control and exclusion are identified: (a) the landlords’ strategy of border control, split into gate‐keeping and expulsion; (b) the social workers’ strategy of discipline, that is to control individuals, while keeping them inside the domains of responsibility. As landlords, the local social authorities applied both strategies to their clients/tenants. This resulted in reinforced border control and a justification of exclusion, which implied judgements of the clients’ needs and capabilities, as well as placing responsibility on the homeless themselves.     

Auckland: Rescaled governance and post-suburban politics

The nature and politics of urban development in Auckland have undergone rapid transformation following amalgamation of eight separate authorities in 2010. Institutions governing metropolitan planning and infrastructure provision were rescaled to form the Auckland ‘Super City’ Council in 2010, with an ambitious vision to become the world's most liveable city and ongoing political contestation between the local and central government. Amalgamation of Auckland's governance was conceived and imposed by the central government as part of a broader economic strategy for “competitive cities”. However, Auckland Council's first strategic plan adopted a contrasting agenda, centred around the goal of “liveability”. Auckland's recent developments illustrate the challenges of a distinctly post-suburban polity. The majority of employment is located in suburban areas and the city has variegated and overlapping patterns in spatial form generated through inconsistent infrastructure interventions across local and national authorities. Conflicting urban policy agenda at national and local scales shows a tension between the pursuit of economic development and provision for collective needs. The politics of post-suburban development create specific challenges for Auckland's governance. Liveability and economic competitiveness are treated as complementary terms in political rhetoric, however trade-offs emerge at a smaller spatial scales. Public concern over housing affordability and risks to the financial stability of New Zealand's economy have led to central government intervention and renegotiation of authority between different tiers of government for land use and infrastructure provision. Auckland's position as New Zealand's largest city and economic centre frequently blurs the distinction between issues of local and national significance. Auckland's governance challenges are not unique, however the current tensions are exacerbated by its dominance in a small and geographically-isolated nation.