Changing areas - good and bad bits of the same area

RHemmings

There's an area near me which has some good properties. Houses are not expensive there, and transport links are good.

But something worries me. It's a new-ish housing estate, maybe ten to twenty years old. Problem is, it's a large area, and some bits are quite nice looking areas, but particularly down one end, it's very "council estate". Lots of fly-tipping, bits of cars in front of houses, and the rest.

What I'd like to know is how do you look at a "mixed" area like this and predict what will happen in the future. Will the chav area spread, bringing down the other area. Will it stay the same. What sorts of features do you look like to try and predict how the character of various parts of the estate will change?

BobProperty

It's the B reg ex-ambulances that are "going" to be turned into motorhomes that you want to watch out for. :rotfl:
Seriously, my opinion is that the "good" areas stay good and the "poor" areas stay poor. The demography and infrastucture isn't going to change as much as over the first half of the 20th century. When times get harder, recessions etc, the poorer areas really suffer and the nearby areas start to take on the affect. When the economy picks up, the middling areas pick up on the back of the better areas as being "more affordable" but "not that bad". It's difficult for me to judge complete new estates as where I am the areas are all already established. What sort of area is this new estate on the "end" of?

RHemmings

BobProperty wrote:

It's the B reg ex-ambulances that are "going" to be turned into motorhomes that you want to watch out for. :rotfl:
Seriously, my opinion is that the "good" areas stay good and the "poor" areas stay poor. The demography and infrastucture isn't going to change as much as over the first half of the 20th century. When times get harder, recessions etc, the poorer areas really suffer and the nearby areas start to take on the affect. When the economy picks up, the middling areas pick up on the back of the better areas as being "more affordable" but "not that bad". It's difficult for me to judge complete new estates as where I am the areas are all already established. What sort of area is this new estate on the "end" of?

I'm talking about a small distance between the two areas. Like a few hundred metres away, just a few roads really. The surrounding areas are "average" to "council estate". I'd agree about "good" areas staying "good" and "poor" areas staying "poor", but it's much less clear when you have a small estate where the character changes quite rapidly in the space of a few hundred metres.

BobProperty

Can't help really other than ask if there is a noticable boundary, either physical or psychological (read area/postcode snobbery)?

RHemmings

BobProperty wrote:

Can't help really other than ask if there is a noticable boundary, either physical or psychological (read area/postcode snobbery)?

No. No obvious boundary at all. That is what worries me. But it could go either way. Gentrification of the chavvy bits, or "there goes the neighborhood" for the better bits.

real1314

is it all one estate?

or is it one estate, made up of different types of housing?
it might be that some of the estate was sold as private housing from the outset, while some of it was rented via housing assocs.
or maybe one end of the estate is 3 and 4 bed detatcheds and the other end is 2 and 3 bed town houses?
whilst there are many awful people with money and many very decent people with little, you may find that the estate divides on these sort of lines?

no offence of course to the great many (in my fairly wide experience) of decent people who live in HA property / "small" property etc.

anyway, I often judge an area by the cars the residents own.

loads of clapped out 7+ yr old cars = probably bad
loads of 55 or 06 plates = probably snobby
loads of subarus, mitsubishi evos, 4x4s and BMWs = probably trouble!! ;-)

RHemmings

real1314 wrote:

is it all one estate?

or is it one estate, made up of different types of housing?
it might be that some of the estate was sold as private housing from the outset, while some of it was rented via housing assocs.
or maybe one end of the estate is 3 and 4 bed detatcheds and the other end is 2 and 3 bed town houses?
whilst there are many awful people with money and many very decent people with little, you may find that the estate divides on these sort of lines?

no offence of course to the great many (in my fairly wide experience) of decent people who live in HA property / "small" property etc.

anyway, I often judge an area by the cars the residents own.

loads of clapped out 7+ yr old cars = probably bad
loads of 55 or 06 plates = probably snobby
loads of subarus, mitsubishi evos, 4x4s and BMWs = probably trouble!! ;-)

The houses don't look that much different in size, though there are more small detached houses, though mainly semis, in the "nicer" end, while it's mainly semis and town houses at the other end. I'm going mainly by the gardens and environment. Lots of fly tipping, rusting cars, litter, dog stuff, overgrown, etc. in the "not so nice end", beautiful [seriously!] gardens, clean well maintained environment, in the "nicer" end. I haven't been there at night to listen for loud parties and the like. I take your point that the amount of money people have doesn't correlate that well with how nice they are as people and neighbours. But I think there is a correlation between these important points and how they treat their local environment.

mi-key

I'd be careful about an area like this - having a load of scallies next to a nice area means they dont have far to go to find houses to break into or cars to steal !

Sapphire

RHemmings wrote:

Lots of fly tipping, rusting cars, litter, dog stuff, overgrown, etc. in the "not so nice end", beautiful [seriously!] gardens, clean well maintained environment, in the "nicer" end. I haven't been there at night to listen for loud parties and the like. I take your point that the amount of money people have doesn't correlate that well with how nice they are as people and neighbours. But I think there is a correlation between these important points and how they treat their local environment.

I would be extremely wary about living anywhere near an area like this. In my experience if people don't look after their environment it means they don't care about it. (It's not a question of how wealthy they are, but to do with the way they have been brought up, i.e. their background.) I would imagine that it's also a sign that there isn't a good community spirit in such an area - if fly tipping/rusting cards, etc., existed near me, people would be up in arms organizing petitions, etc.

Although I don't know which specific area you are talking about, for myself, living in an area with these visual delights and their contributors would also make me afraid of being burgled, and mugged coming home at night.

tomstickland

There's no way of telling what will happen unless you can identify a clear cause. Would you be happy living there though - would you be running the original question through your head every day? Would you start to panic that it was "spreading" when you spotted someone in the next road with an old bike left in the garden?

I was walking through the masssive housing sprawl in my parents' suburb a few months ago and I noticed how shabby some parts of it had become. Overgrown gardens, rotting cars, peeling paint etc. Only some bits though.

It's typical bovis home land with the oldest houses being late 70s with continuous building right up to today.