Housing Renewal—Doesn't it Make You Sick?

Abstract

Correlative links between poor housing and poor health have been well known for many years. A problem for urban studies, however, is that the supposed causal relationships underlying this correlation are ill-understood and only weakly established. Hence the expectation that housing improvement will lead to a corresponding change in the health of the community (and therefore of individuals) has little causal support and remains an assumption. Studies of renewal schemes have rarely operated at the micro process level which would allow this assumption to be tested. Moreover, significant changes in health are likely to occur only over a relatively long period; hence measurement is difficult and ascribing causation problematic. One way of approaching this research problem is to examine what impact the uninvited, and frequently dramatic, renewal process itself has on the health of the individual. In this research an interpretive biographical interview method was used to elicit tenants' understanding of their situation, of the experience of housing renewal and how it impacted upon their health and well-being. In some cases the process itself was indeed stressful and damaging while in others enjoyable and rewarding. This pointed to a complex web of factors but predominant and influential was that of personal control, its degree of importance to the individual and, crucially, its negotiability. This paper looks at the connections between control and health and re-introduces into the housing policy arena the importance of the individual whose interests are currently submerged in the 'imperatives' of community involvement and consultation. The research contributes to a housing-health linkages model (Easterlow et al., 2000) by introducing, as an important factor affecting health and well-being, the nature of the tenant/landlord relationship itself in the social rented sector and examining the potential for a new partnership at this 'micro' level.