Privatization Of Housing Research Articles

Polycentric urban development in post-socialist context: the case of the Budapest Metropolitan Region

Even though the concept of polycentric urban development has been high on the agenda in the literature it has rarely come to the fore in academic papers dealing with the postsocialist cities. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the evolving polycentric pattern of urban development in the metropolitan region of Budapest. For the purpose of study we use commuting data of the 1990, 2001 and 2011 national census. The rapid transformation of Budapest after 1989 the re-establishment of market mechanisms, the privatisation of housing, the liberalisation of the property market, and the growing re-integration of the city to the world economy aff ected not only the core city but also the metropolitan periphery.The previously rather homogeneous structure of the metropolitan periphery experienced significant changes in the course of the transformation. The advantages of location, which had been insignificant during the state-socialist period, once again became truly beneficial which resulted in growing disparities in the metropolitan periphery. Since 1990 the functional interplay, cooperation, interdependence as well as physical infrastructural linkages between Budapest and its metropolitan zone have been further intensified. Residential suburbanisation and the suburbanisation of business activities led to new flows of commuting within the metropolitan region. Our findings show that the reallocation of urban functions took place in the wider metropolitan zone of Budapest among existing centres, which fits to the European version of post-suburbanisation concept rather than the US one.

Migration and adult education: social movement learning and resistance in the UK

The article is based on data and evidence from a project of 'activist research' in migrant and refugee social movements in South Yorkshire U.K. The article argues that migrants' social movements have been neglected as important in the development of popular adult education in the U.K. The history of migrants' social movements from 1945 is sketched to demonstrate social movement influences on the content and ideological assumptions of state provision of adult education. The history also suggests a similar trajectory to 'old' contentious social movements like trades unions. The current research in migrants and asylum rights movements reported in the article suggests that migrants social movements are active and proficient in developing popular adult education initiatives including critical analysis of racist political and power discourses. The importance of these movements is demonstrated in a case study of a high profile campaign against the privatisation of asylum housing in Yorkshire by the world's largest security company G4S.

Debating the State in Private Housing Neighborhoods: The Governance of Homeowners' Associations in Urban Shanghai

AbstractThis article examines the transformation of state power in urban China by investigating how the state governs a newly emerging type of neighborhood organization connected with housing privatization, the homeowners' association (HA). Based on a series of extensive field research visits in Shanghai from 2006 to 2012, it analyzes the contradictory rationales behind HA policies in Shanghai, and elaborates the debates between state actors and non‐state actors on the boundary of state intervention. It finds that the state in Shanghai has engaged multiple goals in its governance of the HAs: regularizing the real estate market, promoting self‐organization at the neighborhood level, and channeling homeowners' participation in urban politics. The neoliberal rationality of governing through subjects' autonomy and a tradition of the socialist discourse on party leadership co‐exist in the state's toolkit for governance. But the state's capacity to coordinate these different governing techniques varies across fields. I highlight the dilemma a non‐liberal state confronts in cultivating self‐organizing and self‐responsible individuals. This contrasts with some of the studies on ‘China's neoliberal state’, which argue that the bureaucratic system has been resilient in coping with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism.

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization. By John Arena. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pp. 344. $82.50 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

<i>Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization</i>. By John Arena. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pp. 344. $82.50 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

Public housing into private assets: Wealth creation in urban China

State socialist economies provided public housing to urban citizens at nominal cost, while allocating larger and better quality apartments to individuals in elite occupations. In transitions to a market economy, ownership is typically transferred to existing occupants at deeply discounted prices, making home equity the largest component of household wealth. Housing privatization is therefore a potentially important avenue for the conversion of bureaucratic privilege into private wealth. We estimate the resulting inequalities with data from successive waves of a Chinese national income survey that details household assets and participation in housing programs. Access to privatization programs was relatively equal across urban residents in state sector occupations. Elite occupations had substantially greater wealth in the form of home equity shortly after privatization, due primarily to their prior allocations of newer and higher quality apartments. The resulting gaps in private wealth were nonetheless small by the standards of established market economies, and despite the inherent biases in the process, housing privatization distributed home equity widely across those who were resident in public housing immediately prior to privatization.

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization. By John Arena. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pp. xi+303. $82.50 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

<i>Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization</i>. By John Arena. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pp. xi+303. $82.50 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

Towards an Understanding the Outcomes of Housing Privatisation in South Africa

Housing privatisation is commonly understood in political economic terms. The proponents of privatisation argue that the provision of ownership enables households to have security of tenure, which in turn leads to increased housing investment, the development of a secondary housing market and a source of income for the local authority by means of land tax. On the other hand, critics of housing privatisation suggest that such processes lead to landlordism and an increased dependence on mortgage finance. This paper uses historical methodology to trace the historical lack of secure tenure for urban black South Africans. The data consists of 395 structured questionnaires conducted in the case study area of Mangaung, the former black township of Bloemfontein. The results suggest that housing privatisation processes in South Africa cannot be viewed only through a political economic lens.

Transformation in Russian housing: the new key roles of local authorities

Democratically elected municipal government had no housing role in the Soviet era in Russia, as all housing belonged to the central state and was administered by its local agents. After 1990, a massive privatization of housing was achieved first through the transfer of stock from industrial companies to municipalities and then through no-cost transfer of ownership to the tenants. Despite privatization, a large amount of housing stock has since been unloaded back onto municipalities who now find themselves owners of 11% of all housing in Russia (much more in some regions). The poor quality of stock and the inability of the new owners to meet maintenance costs have led to a growing housing role for local authorities, who have many new responsibilities and expectations from residents, but few resources. Although the situation has parallels in other post-socialist countries, the scale in Russia is greater, and there is no EU aid, nor any tradition either of ownership or collective responsibility. Economic crisis in Europe and a slow down in housing construction in Russia mean that new policies for rental housing are needed. This review considers historic and recent changes in housing policy in the Russian Federation in light of the emerging housing role of municipal governments. In the review, we draw on national data as well a case study of the city of Perm to illustrate the impact of this transformation. Following a national meeting of housing experts in 2011, a new Government Strategy for 2020 has been established and is also discussed.

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization By John Arena. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. 344 pages. $27.50 paper

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization By John Arena. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. 344 pages. $27.50 paper

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization

Introduction: Neoliberal housing policy – time for a critical re-appraisal

This paper introduces the themed section of Critical Social Policy on social housing, privatization and neoliberalism. In tracing the key elements in the development of privatization and residualization since 1979, it argues that these can only be fully understood as part of a wider neoliberalizing agenda, an agenda that is driven by a particular class project. The paper also seeks to re-assert the importance of a critical approach to successive decades of social housing policies in the devolved UK, arguing that the classed basis of housing privatization policies has been largely overlooked by academics in favour of an evolutionary and ‘modernizing’ framework which isolates developments in social housing provision from other wider shifts in social welfare and in labour markets. Understanding such processes, it is claimed, is a necessary step in the development of a more socially just and sustainable form of housing provision.

Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization, John Arena, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012

AbstractInDriven from New Orleans, John Arena focuses on the contradictory role of nonprofits in facilitating the consensual removal of poor, black residents from inner-city spaces as the result of the privatisation and demolition of public housing. His account is constructive for delving into the on-the-ground struggles around public housing and the complexities of urban politics, and, more importantly, for situating the housing question at the heart of working-class struggles. His emphasis on how the gradual construction of consent was imperative in paving the way for the sudden application of coercive force in the aftermath of Katrina is also a welcome correction to arguments that tend to see the post-Katrina policies as the cause célèbre of the striking and rapid reconfiguration of New Orleans. Arena, however, falls short of providing a historicised analysis of urban politics and the politics of nonprofits.

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

The return of class war conservatism? Housing under the UK Coalition Government

The May 2010 election of a Conservative-dominated UK coalition government unleashed an unprecedented austerity drive under the auspices of ‘deficit reduction’ in the wake of the global financial crisis. This article focuses on housing policy to show how the ‘cuts’ are being used as an ideological cover for a far-reaching, market-driven restructuring of social welfare policy that amounts to a return of what Ralph Miliband called ‘class war conservatism’. We revisit the main ideological contours and materialist drivers of Thatcherism as a hegemonic strategy, discussing the central role played by housing privatization in the neoliberal project that was continued, but not completed, by New Labour. We then discuss the Coalition’s assault on the housing welfare safety net it inherited, arguing this has rapidly shut down alternative directions for housing and represents a strategic intervention designed to unblock and expand the market, complete the residualization of social housing and draw people into an ever more economically precarious housing experience in order to boost capitalist interests.

The privatization of council housing: Stock transfer and the struggle for accountable housing

A central element in the privatization of council housing has been the development of stock transfer policy. A variety of perspectives on this process have been explored including the impact on accountability relations; however, the tenants’ experience is almost completely absent from this literature. The paper develops a case study that draws on the experience of the tenants involved in a stock transfer. In the process stock transfers, and related accountability relations, are shown to be contested with tenant-led campaigns challenging this neoliberal inspired policy. The case study illustrates the power and financial resource asymmetries in transfer campaigns with a range of anti-democratic tactics employed by those pursuing the transfer. On the basis of a critique of neoliberalism, the stock transfer process is seen as an attack on the previous democratic control of council housing, which is replaced with ‘governance by experts and elites’ and private sector inspired corporate governance forms of accountability. Thus the paper seeks to answer two questions; how democratic is the transfer process and what are the long-term implications for democratic accountability in the social housing sector.

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Housing, Urban Renewal and Socio-Spatial Integration. A Study on Rehabilitating the Former Socialistic Public Housing Areas in Beijing

Privatisation of Housing in Post-Soviet Russia: A New Understanding of Home?

This article is concerned with the attitudes of the nascent Russian ‘middle class’ towards the privatisation of housing. It focuses on the questions of whether private ownership had an impact on these people's understanding of ‘home’, whether it resulted in greater satisfaction with their housing, and whether it gave them the sense of being ‘stakeholders’ in Russian society. The principal research method was a questionnaire emailed to people in Moscow, St Petersburg and three provincial cities. A history of housing in Soviet Russia is also provided, along with an overview of research on housing and the home in other industrialised countries.