Housing activist Terry McGrenera presents a verbal snapshot of social housing in London today.
On the same day, 10th June, as the GLA’s Planning Committee met to discuss the differing views of invited guests about the current surge of tall buildings that are either proposed or actually in under construction in London, there was a full page advertisement cum educational feature in the Evening Standard inserted by the South Bank University to highlight the post-graduate courses that are on offer to students who want to choose a career in the construction industry. It states “The capital’s skyline is being transformed, the London property market has been booming and along with major investment in infrastructure projects such as Crossrail and HS2 (sic), this has led to an increased demand for building professionals.” In addition to being the largest provider of Building and Town Planning post-graduate courses in the UK last year, the South Bank University has a long history of educating building-related professionals stretching right back to 1904 and the London Council School of Building. Yet it is ironic that – just as the South Bank University is boasting of offering the largest variety of courses and the Construction Industry Training Board predicts that 182,000 new jobs will be created between 2014 and 2019 – the number of postgraduate courses available in housing has decreased, is decreasing and is set to decrease further. This is occurring at a time when the demand for housing has increased, is increasing and is set to increase again. Even the London School of Economics has dropped its postgraduate housing course. Those that remain are structured towards housing practice. For example, the housing course at Westminster University, through the involvement of the Chartered Institute of Housing, is for housing professionals to advance their “brilliant careers” by adding a masters degree to their CV. (When I did the course myself, all the other students were either housing officers or managers working for housing associations or local authorities. I was the only person interested in housing as a one of the pillars upon which the wider welfare state was constructed.) Even one of the guests at the GLA Planning Committee, Professor Rebecca Tunstall, left the LSE to pursue her housing career at the University of York. This is the result of the changes that have taken place over the past 30 years leading to the extinction of council housing provided by local authorities following the loss of millions of homes under the Right to Buy Act and large scale stock transfers that have taken place. (Pawson and Mullins in their book After Council Housing see the end of directly managed council housing by 2015). The remnants of what is left of council housing in London that haven’t been sold off or made subject to stock transfers have been targeted as regeneration areas. More and more “gentrification” is being used to describe the pressures that are being placed on people in ondon who live in rented accommodation. That is how it is seen by a new booklet, Staying Put, which has been produced by people whose homes are under threat from the process. “Regeneration is sold as bringing benefits to local communities, but, in many cases, it is just gentrification under a different name. Gentrification is the process by which middle class people moved into an area, increased the price of property and made it no longer affordable to those on lower incomes. Council housing acted as a barrier that limited gentrification and ensured that lower income households could live in central areas of London. Since the 1990s Tory and Labour governments have targeted council estates for various ‘regeneration’ programmes justified through so-called ‘mixed communities’ policy.” Both national and local Governments justified their actions by claiming that they were tackling “deprivation” and “social exclusion”. Local authorities and their regeneration partners – which include property developers and housing associations – say that council residents will be able to return and live in the redeveloped areas. Such promises are usually broken once the land is sold to developers. Regeneration is gentrification when tenants and leaseholders of council estates have to move out of their homes to the fringes of London. Those that do return can only return as housing association tenants, paying higher rents and services charges. Anna Minton in her book Ground Control has a section entitled How Public Housing was Killed Off in which she described what has happened over the past 30 years. It was the acceptance by successive governments of the belief that the market was the best means by which public housing could be provided – first by housing associations and then by various agreements with developers. This was a fallacy. This has led us to where we are today: a city that is increasing only where rich people can afford to live.