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For a long time now, mainstream media has served as a platform for people in power.  Increasingly, the same article regurgitated appears over and over.  Prime Minister Tony Blair and people like him in positions of power, and their lackeys and press releases, are always quoted foremost and last.  The realities on the ground are hardly recognised.

So when there’s a voice seeking to hold up a mirror to the meaning of events, it’s like a cold shower.  Help Us Somebody: The Demolition of the Elderly (The London Press) is reviewed in this month’s edition of the Housing Monthly Diary (www.uk-housing.co.uk/HMD).  It focuses on the demolition of prefab homes in Newport (Gwent) and Bristol, and the human cost of ‘urban regeneration.’  What follows is a quote from the Housing Monthly Diary review:

“The hidden devastation, albeit hard to prove, is the forced upheaval of the elderly - many of whom are said to be unwell - from their homes. It is alleged to sometimes consequence in premature ending of life, due to the anxieties, stress and fear created in those affected.”

The oral histories recorded in Help Us Somebody: The Demolition of the Elderly are the voices of some of society’s poorest in capital and most vulnerable people.

Some of the inhabitants of areas targeted for clearance programmes are inevitably owner-occupiers.  When the “forced upheaval” of owner-occupiers through the blunt process of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) is implemented, it must legally be for the benefit of communities, not a developer.  But while developers are doing nicely, are communities really benefiting?

Politicians and developers talk of progress: ‘Urban regeneration’ is supposed to reverse the downward trend of districts blighted by high unemployment, poor housing, and social exclusion from more prosperous districts. The old ball-and-chain as an instrument of housing policy clears the way for new build housing, but necessarily - when housing and land become investments - only a small proportion of these new homes are aimed at low-income earners and therefore local residents.  That business and community goals fundamentally differ is common sense.

In top-down, market-led urban regeneration, house price rises indicate ‘success.’  This is good news for homeowners, but there can be no ‘trickle-down’ effect.  Clearly the decision to make rising house prices favourable is against the interests of society’s poorer members - the non-owners.

Report no. 1981 in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s ‘Findings’ series analyses the difficulties working households, aged under 39 years, faced in buying a first home in every local authority area of the UK in 2005.  Since 2005, it got harder.  Add to this the increasing lack of affordable rented accommodation and we have a recipe for disaster, and not, as the Government would have it, social inclusion.

The bulk of a statutorily minimum income is eaten up by the cost of rent/mortgage and council tax payments.  There is insufficient remaining income to cover the costs of a good quality of life.
 
Until inequalities in wealth are corrected, taxpayers can expect to shoulder the additional costs arising from unaffordable housing and overcrowding, not least of all in health and policing budgets.  Meanwhile business carries on as normal, however distasteful.

Faced with critically overcrowded jails, the Home Office was even considering a “buy to let” scheme under which the public could buy shares in new prisons.  This is perhaps the next must-have property portfolio accessory, alongside holiday homes and rental investments.  At all levels of society, profitability comes first.

Private developers can now bid for Social Housing Grant money - previously restricted for not-for profit housing associations.  And 17January 2007 signalled the start of merger between the Housing Corporation (responsible for not-for profit social housing) and English Partnerships, the national land and regeneration agency heavily reliant on the private sector, to form ‘Communities England.’

All the while new social accommodation has been dramatically cut, and more and more old council accommodation is undergoing transfer from municipal control.  In 1979, half of the UK population lived in rented council accommodation; now that figure is one-eighth of the population.  Increasingly marginalised and left behind in the race for homeownership, a significant number of people continue to inhabit the parallel world of ‘sink’ estates.
 
Tenants up and down the country are turning out at the ballot box to choose the security, accountability and transparency of local government, or moving to some other ownership to unlock the funding needed for crucial repairs.  The political reality ensures they can’t have both, as a web of paths arrive at a predetermined outcome.

The traditional role of local authorities as providing is being phased out.  And the regeneration projects are getting bigger with more powerful consortia of interested parties taking the floor.  This is big business indeed.  Naturally there is a resulting decrease in focus on local concerns and the wishes of the communities affected.

It is not the intention to oppose demolition as a tool of regeneration in principal but in current practice.  In the past, the availability of council housing protected people against the ‘free market.’  All around us is the evidence of what happens when a pillar holding up the welfare state - in this case council housing - crumbles.  What is needed is bottom-up regeneration, less jargon, more honesty, and strategies that challenge the conventional wisdom that the market is the only way to organise society.  It is not.

Sarah Skilton.