a third of brits lived in council housing

IveSeenTheLight

Thrugelmir wrote: »

In the late 80's early 90's. Many found work in the Netherlands and Germany.

Auf Viedersein Pet

Naturally, people are prepared to travel to find work, however can you say that the majority emmigrated to those countries back then or did they leave their family to earn their "packet of pay"

Working all day,
For a packet of pay,
And send a little back to the wife,

LydiaJ

blueboy43 wrote: »

It was Aneurin Bevan who wanted council estates "where the working man, the doctor and the clergyman will live in close proximity to each other". Some hope

Actually, I think this is finally beginning to happen. While this century is so far turning out to be much worse for social mobility than the second half of the last one (especially the grammar school era) it is turning out to be better for mixing different classes together in terms of where they live.

The house where I live now was built in 1969. I've seen the plans of the original development, and it was planned and built with all the houses essentially the same, with only very minor differences. Most have since been extended in one way or another, but they still all attract people of a similar level of financial resources.

The house I've recently moved out of was built in 2002. The street had 5 small terraced 3 bed houses, two 4 bed detached (one bigger than the other) and one 5 bed detached. The rest of the development (3 or 4 more streets) contained more of each of these four designs, plus several 3 storey town houses (3 bed, but a lot bigger than the 3 bed terraces).

I don't think those are isolated examples. 21st century housing does tend to have different sizes of houses mixed together much more than 20th century housing did, and that means it mixes together people with more and less money.

Jowo wrote: »

Get a good modernist tower block, give it a smart foyer and a concierge in a smart uniform and a smart hat, build a gym on the top floor, install lifts that work – then maintain them, and keep the place clean. Lo and Behold: luxury executive apartments! This is happening in various British cities, but this is exactly what should have been done years ago for all those council tenants."

In the early 1970s, a concrete office block was built in the centre of Bristol. It was called "Avon House North" and housed the offices of the late-but-certainly-not-lamented county of Avon. It probably looked pretty ugly even when new. By the 1990s it looked terrible. At some point it "won" a vote to find "Bristol's ugliest building".

Part of it is still the same grim office block kind of thing. The other half has been tarted up (including refacing the whole of the outside and painting it) and is now luxury apartments. The picture shows something of the contrast on the outside, although it's much more striking IRL, and I imagine the interior difference is even more dramatic.

hcb42

It's still ugly!

John_Pierpoint

pqrdef wrote: »

Have we forgotten the slums already?

Jowo wrote: »

I've been interested in some of the debates around the tower blocks in Glasgow as many have been demolished.

Some argue that it wasn't structural problems in some of them that led them to be unpopular but a failure on the part of the council to manage the maintenance and the tenants, that once junkies moved in, the better tenants moved out.

A decent concierge and security system is also key.

According to this argument, it's not slum housing, it's slum tenants.

There was a property development company that wanted to buy some of the towerblocks, inlcluding those in the Gorbals, which is just a short walk into the city centre, but it was refused and they were demolished. The developer was confident that they could regenerate them.

Apparently, out of the two adjacent high flats in the Gorbals that were demolished, they were chalk and cheese, one was a crime den and the other was very popular and community spirited.

Norrie: "I worked as a Concierge in NorfolkCt Gorbals for 12 years.
I always said that it would be better to modernise them.
I have spoken to many tenants and former tenants who would never have left Norfolk if they had been modernised and the anti social element placed elswhere."

Here is someone else making the distinction between services and infrastructure rather than writing off the uglier end of the social housing spectrum as automatically being slums.

http://alistairrobinson.co.uk/architectonics-and-geotectonics-connections-and-coincidences-part-1-basil-spence/

"I never lived in a tower block, and when I was growing up in the eighties, many of them were as forbidding and ugly to me as they were to anyone else. But while most of them are ugly – because of all those nasty little corrupt or cheapskate councils and their incompetent architects and lazy contractors – there are many that deserve better appreciation. In fact, it’s easy to prove that tower blocks are not inherently bad, and that they can escape all those bad associations.

Get a good modernist tower block, give it a smart foyer and a concierge in a smart uniform and a smart hat, build a gym on the top floor, install lifts that work – then maintain them, and keep the place clean. Lo and Behold: luxury executive apartments! This is happening in various British cities, but this is exactly what should have been done years ago for all those council tenants."

Yes BUT high rise is a high cost high tech. structure with high maintenance costs. Take the communist countries as an example - is anyone in Cuba better off from living in a soviet inspired tower block, than in a low rise maisonette or better a terraced house?
In Siberia one could argue that keeping the winter at bay is crucial to the design, but piled up city centre tower blocks are just driven by a desire for the rich to get above the hoy poly.
Part of this is driven by the excess profit that accrues to the land owner in a successful economy.

It will be interesting to see what will happen to the huge "battery chicken" blocks in China, when that economy falters. Unlike "Stalin" blocks in Eastern Europe, which were the best built of the dormitories in the workers' paradise, the Chairman Mao blocks in China are very primitive with shared kitchens and bathroom and leaking roofs.

As far as I know the "Mao" blocks have been sort of privatised, as the poor in now capitalist China cannot afford rents that can pay for maintenance even on low rise.

Perhaps this is the real problem: in the modern technological world there is a rapidly increasing underclass who cannot profitably care for them selves. The old, the single parent with several children, those of little brain, those with personality problems who cannot co-operate with fellow workers in a technologically complex society, those who for various reasons have "dropped out" of the rat race.
Well that is almost all of us at some stage in our lives.

Wealth can transform slums - I live in a home where the one next door was condemned as unfit for human habitation in the 1950's.
[Just the site would be worth quarter of a million now - it is the same bit of land it ever was but has lost its status as a dwelling house]

However "architectural determinism" is not an automatic mechanism;
remember the phase "You can take the girl out of xxxxxxx but you cannot take xxxxxxx out of the girl".
[Substitute your local "wrong side of the tracks" location for XXXXXXX].

pqrdef

The_Fox wrote: »

believe it or not a married working couple who had a couple of children could once get a council house.

In fact they didn't have a lot of choice. They were never going to get a mortgage, unless they won the pools. And the private rental market was small and specialised. Landlords couldn't afford to let to working men at rents they could afford to pay, i.e. comparable with council rents.

So it was get married, put your name on the waiting list, then live with your parents for 5 years while you crawled up to the top of the list. Then grab the first house offered. Don't bother saying it's totally unsuitable for your needs, because you're only pond scum to the council, not a human being. The council housing manager is your God, and he'll exercise his power to shove you back to the bottom of the list at the slightest provocation. No Ombudsman, no appeal.

Once you were in that house, the pattern of your existence was mapped out. You were caught in a trap which only middle-class socialists thought was a good thing, and there was no way out.

ninky_2

pqrdef wrote: »

In fact they didn't have a lot of choice. They were never going to get a mortgage, unless they won the pools. .

that is why the glc mortgages given out via the government owned girobank were introduced. they were a brilliant idea and let people like my parents get on the housing ladder.

of course with grammar schools and free grants for higher education including full housing benefit through the university holidays the future was a little less mapped out for those from poorer backgrounds anyway. believe it or not many children who grew up in council houses went on to university.

birkee

ukcarper wrote: »

I don’t know where you get your ideas about what council estates were like back then but mine are from personal experience. I suspect that even now a lot of estates are not as bad as made out and a minority is spoiling it for the majority.

Totally agree!
And I've personal experience too. Had some neighbours from hell in my time.

ukcarper

Interesting watching the program on BBC about council houses when Thamesmead was first opened you had to have a job and be able to pay your rent to get a property.

Jowo_2

This author blames Labour for introducing a housing act more than 30 years ago for changing the type of tenant who received social housing and therefore helping its decline.

"..Labour gave people the ‘right’ to a home in the housing act of 1977. With noble intent, combined with the end of house building, this was a disaster. Housing officers were picky about who got council housing before 1977, and they worked hard to make sure estates got a mix of people - old and young, families and single, lower-middle and working class.

The 1977 act changed all that. Whereas before, being an alcoholic or a single mum or unemployed or a refugee would have excluded you from public housing, with no new stock, being unstable or unemployed or unemployable or mentally ill or drug addicted or having lots of children by different fathers would now privilege you on the housing list - housing had become a ‘right’ and not a ‘reward’. Estates collapsed, and the ‘respectable’ working classes left when they could. The final blow was not the Thatcher government’s decision to allow the prosperous working classes to buy their well-built, spacious council houses; it was their insistence that the money raised should be spent on any old thing except more houses.

So by the mid 1990s, many social housing estates were either private and prosperous due to right-to-buy, or still in council hands but housing communities in crisis, unable to manage the ever-growing numbers of social problems crammed into their perimeters."

http://www.historyextra.com/oup/high-rise-heroes-and-big-society

ninky_2

Jowo wrote: »

This author blames Labour for introducing a housing act more than 30 years ago for changing the type of tenant who received social housing and therefore helping its decline.

michael collins in the bbc doc came to a similar conclusion. however he also implied that the removal of lifetime tenancies would have the same impact if not worse.

personally i have supported the idea of getting rid of lifetime tenancies. but this is food for thought.