UK Housing Policy Research Articles

Review of Brian Lund 2019: Housing in the United Kingdom: Whose Crisis? Palgrave Macmillan

It takes real expertise as well as a love of bad news to write consistently and coherently about the disastrous development of UK housing, which means Brian Lund must have both in abundance. He has been prolifically chronicling the ups and (mainly) downs of UK housing policy for several decades, drawing on his fairly […]

The assetisation of housing: A macroeconomic resource

The most significant episode in the assetisation of housing (underpinning its financialisation) is often understood to be the economic restructuring that took place during the 1980s – particularly deregulation of the banking sector and credit liberalisation. Research has reported on the housing ‘investor subject’ that emerged during this time, as an integral part of the transition towards financialised economies. This article provides new evidence about the housing consumer subject, and its place in this transition, by drilling into UK housing policy history and its discourses around the consumer relationship with housing. Using archive data from the Parliamentary and National Archives alongside interviews with key informers, we illustrate three cases of housing policy development in which the consumer demand for, and relationship with, housing is discursively reconditioned. We conclude that the housing investor subject was pursued in housing policy reform and its discourses well before the 1980s and the economic reforms commonly identified as the causes of financialisation. In addition, these discourses are found to have been reconditioned in order to align with broader macroeconomic policy concerns of the time. The article therefore provides a rare view of assetisation from within the state apparatus, revealing how housing policy and its discourses around consumption became functionally integrated within wider macroeconomic goals.

Subjective well-being in housing purchasing: Evidence with survey data from the U.K. housing residential market

This paper empirically investigates the role of subjective well-being in the UK housing residential purchasing. Based on micro data and spanning the period 2009–2016, the empirical results show that subjective well-being exerts a positive effect on individuals’ housing purchasing. The findings survive robustness in which homeowners and tenants are explicitly separated, with the stronger effect coming from the tenants group. The findings also provide solid evidence that both the wealth and the public provisions/infrastructure channels seem to importantly drive the link between well-being and housing purchasing decisions. The results are expected to provide substantial implications to UK housing policy makers and regulators in relevance to housing policies.

Risk, commercialism and social purpose: Repositioning the English housing association sector

Originally seen as the ‘third arm’ of UK housing policy, the independent, not-for-profit housing association sector had long been seen as effective in ‘filling the gap’ where the state or market were unable to provide for households in need. Since the 1980s in particular, successive governments had viewed housing associations in favourable terms as efficient, semi-autonomous social businesses, capable of leveraging significant private funding. By 2015, in contrast, central government had come to perceive the sector as inefficient, bureaucratic and wasteful of public subsidy. Making use of institutional theory, this paper considers this paradigm shift and examines the organisational responses to an increasingly challenging operating environment. By focusing, in particular, on large London housing associations, the paper analyses their strategic decision-making to address the opportunities and threats presented. The paper argues that in facing an era of minimal subsidy, low security and high risk, the 2015 reforms represent a critical juncture for the sector. Housing organisations face a stark dilemma about whether to continue a strategy of ‘profit for purpose’ or to embrace an unambiguously commercial ethos. The article contends that the trajectory of decision-making (although not unidirectional) leads ultimately towards an increased exposure to risk and vulnerability to changes in the housing market. More fundamentally, the attempt to reconcile social and commercial logics is likely to have wider consequences for the legitimacy of the sector.

Rethinking Domicide: Towards an Expanded Critical Geography of Home

AbstractDomicide, the intentional destruction of home, is a concept first conceived by Canadian geographers Porteous and Smith in 2001. In the current global sociopolitical landscape, domicide and its impact is writ large, present in both the Global North and South, and spanning a variety of scales, from mass displacement through the Syrian civil war to controversial UK housing policy. However, it has been under‐represented in critical geographies of home literature. This paper calls for a resurrection and recasting of the term, highlighting the multitude of contexts in which rethinking domicide provides an important contribution towards the expansion of critical geographies of home scholarship. The paper focuses on four areas of geography in which scholars have begun to explore and extend the term: emerging literature concerning homeunmaking; socio‐symbolic domicide in the geopolitical context; domicide and heteronormativity in post‐disaster home loss; and agency and resistance to domicide through both political activism and banal resistances of the everyday. In sum, this fourfold exploration highlights both the current and potential contributions of domicide towards expanding critical geographies of home.

‘They Seem to Divide Us’: Social Mix and Inclusion in Two Traditional Urbanist Communities

Mixed tenure communities have become an important element of UK housing policy in recent decades. Whilst valued by policy-makers for generating a range of benefits, particularly for residents living in social rented housing, the empirical literature suggests that tenure mixing is neither a sufficient nor a reliable remedy for addressing issues associated with concentrations of poverty, disadvantage and social exclusion. This paper reports on a doctoral research study that considered tenure mixing practices at two traditional urbanist communities in the UK: Poundbury, Dorchester, and New Gorbals, Glasgow. Conceptually, the paper uses Young's critiques of residential segregation and the integration ideal to evaluate the two communities. Methodologically, it draws on qualitative interviews with residents, planners and social housing providers. The research findings contradict many aspects of Young's ideal and highlight the complex and multidimensional nature of integration in practice. Reflecting on these findings, the paper identifies five housing policy and research priorities that might usefully be pursued in future work.

Parallel Lives: Towards a Greater Understanding of What Mixed Communities Can Offer

The creation of mixed communities has become a key element of UK housing policy but empirical research in such areas is limited. Through interviews with and diaries kept by residents of three mature estates, planned as mixed tenure from the start, levels of neighbourhood usage and social interaction are analysed. The techniques used deliberately replicate earlier work in mixed-tenure regeneration areas. While giving some support to the conventional wisdom that owners and renters tend to live separate lives, the distinctions are not as strong as previously suggested and the estates studied differ from each other. Explanations are drawn from both physical planning and community development. The authors indicate the parameters needed for such developments to meet residents' aspirations and draw out the lessons for policy.

Governance and sustainability in Glasgow: connecting symbolic capital and housing consumption to regeneration

To transcend a legacy of slum‐living, paternalistic provision and urban decline, Glasgow City Council has endeavoured to transform the city's fortunes by a plethora of mechanisms that have at their core the establishment of sustainable communities. Framed within a policy discourse which emphasises ‘cultural and social’ as well as ‘physical and economic’ renaissance, the crux of the Council's strategy has been to stem the migratory tide of affluent households and to empower public sector housing tenants. Drawing on Rose's (2001 Community, citizenship and the third way in Meredyth D and Minson J P eds Citizenship and cultural policy Sage) ‘ethopolitics’ we argue these developments in Glasgow reflect the wider emergence of technologies of governance in UK housing policy that seek to realign citizens’ identities with norms of active, entrepreneurial consumption.

Implications of the Rental Market for UK Housing Policy

The deregulation of the UK rental market since 1989 has made it an important component of the private housing sector. I extend the standard housing model by adding a substitute rental good to the inverted demand equation. Rents are modeled in a similar fashion, and an incomplete information model is used to analyse landlord behaviour in adjusting rental stocks. Rental data is obtained by enhancing the methodology of Weeken (2004) to reduce reliance on the inappropriate RPI rent index. Error correction models are used to test this theoretical structure; however due to lack of data in markets where adjustment is likely to be extremely slow the models are not particularly good empirical fits. Nevertheless simulation shows that under a wide range of assumptions adding the rental tenure increases the level of house building required to achieve a target level of house price growth. The views expressed in this paper are the authors own and do not reflect their employers.

A review of UK housing policy: ideology and public health

The aim of this paper is to review UK public health policy, with a specific reference to housing as a key health determinant, since its inception in the Victorian era to contemporary times. This paper reviews the role of social and private housing policy in the development of the UK public health movement, tracing its initial medical routes through to the current socio-economic model of public health. The paper establishes five distinct ideologically and philosophically driven eras, placing public health and housing within liberal (Victorian era), state interventionist (post World War 1; post World War 2), neoliberal (post 1979) and "Third Way" (post 1997) models, showing the political perspective of policy interventions and overviewing their impact on public health. The paper particularly focuses on the contemporary model of public health since the Acheson Report, and how its recommendations have found their way into policy, also the impact on housing practice. Public health is closely related to political ideology, whether driven by the State, individual or partnership arrangements. The current political system, the Third Way, seeks to promote a sustainable "social contract" between citizens and the State, public, private and voluntary organizations in delivering community-based change in areas where health inequalities can be most progressively and successfully addressed.

The responsible tenant: housing governance and the politics of behaviour

Writers influenced by Foucault's work on governmentality have characterised emerging forms of governance in advanced liberal democracies as being based upon ‘technologies of the self’ in which power works through the self‐regulation of subjects within constructed norms of responsible and ethical conduct. This ‘politics of behaviour’ has been particularly prominent in UK housing policy debates in relation to anti‐social behaviour, benefit reform and tenant participation. This paper argues that recent reforms are premised upon the identification of the responsible (and responsive) tenant as a central organising mechanism in new processes of housing governance. Although tenant responsibility is not a new concept, the paper argues that the nature and scope of this responsibility is currently being broadened and deepened, and discusses how this reconfiguration of responsibility reflects a wider realignment of governing identities within housing policy and practice.

Power, Discursive Space and Institutional Practices in the Construction of Housing Problems

A constructionist approach to the study of social problems and housing policy provides a theoretically informed means of analysing the ways in which housing policy is formulated and implemented. Yet despite a strong commitment by housing researchers to policy relevance, constructionist studies of how specific social problems are generated and deployed have so far made only a limited impact on housing research. The paper addresses this lacuna by first discussing important literature and the key conceptual issues in this field of study. This is followed by a discussion of two examples from recent UK housing policy (the shift in the 1980s from defining lone mothers as the victims of housing shortages to a morally questionable group subverting needs-based allocation policies and the re-emergence of anti-social behaviour as a problem on housing estates). The paper's conclusion is that the 'construction of problems' provides a rich source of new material as well as offering significant opportunities to develop a more critically informed housing research agenda.

Housing for an Urban Renaissance: Implications for Social Equity

Current UK housing policy favours high-density, mixed-use development on previously developed urban land. This ties in with a general policy to promote an 'urban renaissance', largely because of its claimed advantages for sustainability. However, there has been little testing to date of sustainability impacts in practice. This is particularly true for the social equity aspect of sustainability, despite its acknowledged centrality to the concept. This paper outlines the development of a theory of social equity in relation to urban form and presents empirical research based on this to test the case of the so-called 'compact city', that is, high-density, mixed-use urban form. The research involved a comparative investigation of a range of alleged social equity impacts in 25 medium-sized English cities of differing levels and types of compactness. The findings suggest that, in certain respects and with certain qualifications, the compact city has the potential to promote social equity. Likely benefits include reduced car dependency and lower levels of social segregation, while the main problem is likely to be a lack of affordable, decent-sized homes. Positive effects are emerging in response to re-urbanisation and development on derelict land, and the cities which most support equity appear to be those that have a large proportion of high-density housing and a large quantity of locally provided services and facilities.

Commodification, normalisation and intervention: Cultural, social and symbolic capital in housing consumption and governance

This paper relates the governance of anti-social behaviour in theUK to a wider policy conceptualisation of social housing as a flawed andproblematic form of housing consumption. Drawing on the theoretical workof Bourdieu and Foucault, the paper identifies how the habitus ofhousing consumption is shaped by acts of governance including classification,legitimisation, normalisation and targeted intervention. The paper argues thatdominant governance discourses relate problems arising within socialhousing to assumed distinctions in the cultural, social and symbolic capitalascribed to commodified and ‘branded’ housing tenures, thereby marginalisingthe importance of differential access to economic capital in the conceptualisationof UK housing policy.

UK housing policy: transferring the burden

This article looks at the UK's housing policy and the trend towards transferring the burden of providing ‘affordable’ housing from the public to the private sector. Post-war housing policy has tended to be ‘tenure neutral’, with land being allocated for housing through the planning system, but no distinction being made as to its tenure. However, there is now a move away from neutral policies. This article argues that this shift in the burden of provision from the state to the individual and private market does not lead to a more efficient system of housing and goes on to look at what control the planning system can have over tenure and housing stocks.