Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745328571 ISBN 13: 9780745328577

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Housing has become a hot topic. The media is filled with stories of individual housing hardship and of major property-related financial crises: of crippling personal debts, rundown social housing, homelessness, mass demolitions, spiralling prices, unaffordability and the 'credit crunch'. This book links all these together through a radical analysis that puts housing at the heart of critical economic and political debate. The authors show that these problems arise from the fact that houses are no longer seen primarily as homes for living in, but rather as a source of profit. Case studies from the UK, the US and other western countries are set into a theoretical and historical overview of how housing has changed over several decades. The book also examines campaigns for better housing and explores possibilities for a different approach to this most fundamental of human needs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Glynn is a Public Interest Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde and a practising architect.

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Where the Other Half Lives

Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World

By Sarah Glynn

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2009 Sarah Glynn
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2857-7

Contents

List of Figures, 
Preface and Acknowledgements, 
Introduction Sarah Glynn, 
PART I BACKGROUND: WHEN 'THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY', 
1. If Public Housing Didn't Exist, We'd Have to Invent It Sarah Glynn, 
2. Neoliberalism's Home Front Sarah Glynn, 
3. Regeneration as a Trojan Horse Sarah Glynn, 
PART II CASE STUDIES: REAL LIVES AND REAL ESTATE, 
4. From Popular Capitalism to Third-Way Modernisation: The Example of Leeds, England Stuart Hodkinson, 
5. Getting Rid of the Ugly Bits: The Myth and Reality of Regeneration in Dundee, Scotland Sarah Glynn, 
6. The Politics of Housing Under France's New Right Corinne Nativel, 
7. Circumventing Circumscribed Neoliberalism: The 'System Switch' in Swedish Housing Eric Clark and Karin Johnson, 
8. Market Rules: Neoliberal Housing Policy in New Zealand Laurence Murphy, 
9. Going Once, Going Twice: A Short History of Public Housing in Australia Peter Phibbs and Peter Young, 
10. Destroyed by HOPE: Public Housing, Neoliberalism and Progressive Housing Activism in the US Jason Hackworth, 
11. Political Marginalisation, Misguided Nationalism and the Destruction of Canada's Social Housing Systems Jason Hackworth, 
PART III THE WAY FORWARD: STRATEGY AND TACTICS, 
12. Fighting Back: Lessons from 100 Years of Housing Campaigns Sarah Glynn, 
13. Homes for Today and Tomorrow Sarah Glynn, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

IF PUBLIC HOUSING DIDN'T EXIST, WE'D HAVE TO INVENT IT

Sarah Glynn

A housing crisis is not a natural phenomenon. Housing systems are man-made, and can be remade. The argument in this book is that current developments in housing must be understood as part of a long-planned and deliberate imposition of neoliberal economic systems that are spreading – albeit unevenly and with local variations – across the globe. Neoliberalism, as the name implies, is based on a return to the ideas of free-market liberalism that predominated before the development of the welfare state and the Keynesian mixed economy. The history of this earlier period provides a stark warning for those who would rely on neoliberal economics to provide adequate housing. In fact, the same social-democratic welfare systems that are currently under attack by the forces of marketisation have their origins in attempts to rescue the casualties of that previous period of free-market capitalism.

Before starting to look at what is happening as those systems are dismantled, it is important to understand why and how they developed in the first place. Significantly, even states, such as the US, that have always placed strong emphasis on free-market values, found it necessary for government to intervene to some extent in the housing market so as to provide a safety net of a minimal amount of subsidised rented housing. The nature and form of housing market intervention differs widely from country to country. All that can be done here in this brief introduction is give some idea of the kind of systems that emerged – and that are now facing different forms of marketisation and privatisation. But first this chapter will look at why they emerged, and it will do this by focusing on the historical example with which the editor is most familiar.

British housing policy cannot claim to be any sort of norm or model, though the forces that created it are similar to those found elsewhere. But Britain was in the vanguard of industrial urbanisation, and Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Britain has become a vanguard of neoliberalism, so it is not inappropriate to concentrate some attention on the developments in British housing that happened in between. Crucial to those developments were debates about state intervention in the market and a reluctance to interfere in private property. Similar debates were occurring across the industrialised nations and provide ominous prefigurations of arguments today.

Nineteenth-century Capitalist Paternalism

By the mid nineteenth century, the overcrowding and squalor of Britain's rapidly expanding industrial towns and cities was being recorded in numerous concerned reports and sensational newspaper articles. But under laissez-faire capitalism, it was not believed to be right or necessary by the ruling classes to intervene in the housing market. Until after the First World War, nine out of ten households rented their home from private landlords. It was not thought to be the role of government to unbalance the relationship between landlord and tenant, while charity was believed to encourage dependency and fecklessness.

Poverty was generally seen as part of the natural order of society, but there were limits to what was regarded as acceptable, both morally and practically. Victorian society made an important distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, with ideas and practices that appear to be seeing a revival in policies such as the US system of Workfare and its derivatives. It was believed that those who were better off had a duty to help those who were unable to help themselves – such as the sick and aged – and to keep them from total destitution. And those who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on hard times should be given help to help themselves and be shown the correct path by their well-heeled moral superiors. But many, especially among the very poorest, were believed to be responsible for their own fates and little better than criminals. An important step in the argument for better housing was to stop blaming slum housing on those who lived in it.

At a practical level, though, slum housing affected everyone. There was a fear that close proximity to the lowest layers would pull down the 'deserving poor', and that slums provided a haven and hiding place for criminals. Importantly, diseases that thrived in the slums did not respect the slum's borders. Improved housing would help maintain a healthier, more efficient work-force. It would also help to keep calm potential sources of unrest. The destruction of working-class housing in Paris was regarded as contributing to the 1848 revolutions, and that same year Lord Shaftesbury claimed, after a meeting of the housing association that he co-founded, 'this is the way to stifle Chartism'.

While the mass of housing provision was left to the market, a few pioneering groups attempted to temper market forces through the agency of housing associations, or the establishment of model villages. These were, however, still commercial ventures that were expected to bring in a certain degree of profit. Model villages, which included homes for sale as well as for rent, were the product of the benign despotism of certain leading industrialists. The villages were an attempt to realise a paternalistic vision of an ideal, and highly controlled, social order: a vision of a community of healthy, happy workers based around their employment. Housing associations were generally funded by wealthy shareholders and aimed to demonstrate by example that it was possible to build good-quality homes for working-class tenants and still bring in a comfortable 4 or 5 per cent return on the initial investment.

Both model villages and housing associations were aimed at better-off workers, and this approach was defended by the argument that improvements would filter down as the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745328571
• ISBN 13: 9780745328577
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Herausgeber: Glynn Sarah
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar