NIMBY

The idea of post war council housing was based on a home for all. The purpose of 'Social Housing' changed through the eighties. With the sell off of Council Houses, the remaining council owned properties became the very barest of safety nets. This meant that some of the people living in them were people who had serious multiple problems, and that the council was/is providing for them the service of preventing them from being homeless. This has the effect of concentrating deprivation / difficulties in the small number of council properties that are still open for new tenants (most people who already have a decent council home will hold onto it for dear life). This is then used as a justification for the NIMBY response. I'd love a council flat, but I don't stand much chance of getting one, not being at such a desperate situation. These means that I have to pay a private landlord rent month on month for a flat which at one point belonged to the council anyway. I'd rather that my money was going into the state rather than into an individuals pocket. In my area, I'm pretty sure that all we've done is swap paying the council a fair rent, to paying private landlords, with, to be honest no real change. The infrastructure of the place hasn't changed. If anything it must have been more settled when the majority of the area was local authority, because it could be managed at a neighbourhood level, rather than be open to the vagaries of private landlords. Just because the properties are in private hands doesn't mean that the area is any different, or less (to use a classic NIMBY concept) 'council'. In a real ethical sense, how much you pay for your house has no relation to what someone else is paying to live down the street from you. In most areas of London there is a huge range of different properties, all being paid for at different rates, by different people, all within a street of each other. It strikes me, though, that the worst possible response to deprivation is to concentrate it all in one area. If people are very poor, the area they live in doesn't attract business. If it doesn't attract business, then there usually aren't jobs or services. If there aren't jobs or services, then there aren't many ways for deprivation to be challenged. This means the state has to step in, and fight the 'regeneration' fight, which in most cases means trying to attract the kind of diverse communities that NIMBY's oppose so much in the first place. When it comes to it, regeneration costs a whole lot more than doing it right in the first place. Also, as an allied point, social housing should be a prerogative of the state. If the state doesn't do it or legislate for it, there isn't really any incentive for developers to do it. Build big and posh, get lots of dosh. Build nice and affordable, get less dosh unless you cut corners. If you cut corners, get housing that creates exactly the kinds of problems such as high population density, lack of workable open space and shoddy, poorly designed housing that has, in some way contributed to many the problems that areas of social housing face today. I'll have more of a think when I've done some work! Cheers, Mark Brown, not the editor of, www.ABCtales.com

I think Mark's covered all my key points on overrall situation re: social housing in Britain at the moment. Personally, I think it would be better if your average person did have the chance to 'buy-in' to a systyem of social housing. I'd like to have that opportunity. "If I bought a flat for £250 k and was paying £1000 a month for it, I'd be a bit miffed that somebody else had been given the same for an £80 a week rent." I don't this is actually what happens as a result of mixed developments. The properties available as social housing are not the same as the ones that get sold to people who can afford to pay £250k. .

Oh! It isn't a heterosexual statement then! Just kidding..... The demise of 'social' housing was the result of the sickest political ploy perpetrated on the British working class in the last 35 years. That evil scumbag Thatcher used council houses to bribe, what was perceived as working class, and therefore Labour voters, into voting Tory and electing herself to office. Thousands of poorer people who had never owned a home of their own were offered the right to buy their homes at massive discounts, (I believe the figure was either 30 or 40%, and she increased it at the next election). They fell for it en masse. That other arsehole, Shirley Porter, then leader of Westminster City Council sold off council houses in her area to better off people, (also at discounts), in an attempt to bring more Tory voters into the borough. The bitch was eventually surcharged by the courts for 'gerrymandering', to try and recoup the astronomical sum of cash (£26 million?) the taxpayers lost on the deals. Thatcher made little or no effort to tell the nation that part of her deal was a block on councils using the money realised from sell-offs to build new badly needed homes. It was her insidious attempt to destroy Labour's voter-base. Many of those who exercised their right to buy ended up being re-possessed in later years as their income didn't cover the mortgage long-term. In short, they were conned into helping elect the worst government this country has had in almost a 100 years. Once elected the bastards systematically dismantled the welfare state and sold nearly all of its commercial assets off, mostly at reduced/ridiculous prices, to her cronies. The £98 per second that BT make for example, SHOULD go into the treasury coffers to help pay for the Health Service, schools, pensions etc. Multiply that by British Gas, Electricity, water, ad infinitum and you get to see why the fat cats of this crap country have now become morbidly obese and the services we all need and rely on are bankrupt. Nimbyism is another symptom of self-interest that resulted, in part, from telling people that if they bought their house they would suddenly become socially elevated. This in turn nurtured an 'I'm all right Jack' epidemic, and sufferers would do anything to preserve the status of their new-found social position. The net result of all this is a dramatic reduction in social housing stocks, thereby increasing the need even more. So much for the supposed non-existence of the class system in Britain.

Right-to-buy was and is one of the most socially destructive policies ever enacted by a democratically elected British government. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most popular, for obvious reasons. Like so many of Thatcher's policies, it enabled one chunk of the working class to buy into the 'me, me, me' capitalist dream, while pulling up the ladder so that the remainder would have little or no chance of ever doing so. "Thatcher made little or no effort to tell the nation that part of her deal was a block on councils using the money realised from sell-offs to build new badly needed homes." Yes but even now that this policy has been eased by Labour - with right-to-buy still in place - it doesn't make sense for councils to build new housing if there's a strong chance they could be forced to sell it at a knock down rate within a few years.

Yeah, it's a mad system. I'm not saying there's anything wrong in principle either with people wanting to own their own homes or the state subsidising them to take the first step on the property ladder. The problem is that the right-to-buy as a mechanism for doing that is specifically designed both to discourage social landlords from building new housing and to make social housing unattractive and inaccessible for most people.

Labour haven't rescinded the right to buy legislation simply because it would give the Tories a big stick to flog them with publicly. 'Oh dear, the party of the working classes are preventing them from bettering themselves!!!!' That would be a destructive move by any leader, let alone a Labour one. The original rules were, if a purchaser wished to sell their subsidised house within five years, they had to sell it back to the council for the original buying price. The idea was obviously to pre-empt speculative purchases, but in fact it didn't work as most speculators simply rented them out for five years before selling them at an even greater profit. I have no idea what current discounts are offered, but back when Thatcher passed the original legislation it was definitely a percentage of the market price, and there was no cap on the cash discount.