No DSS, no smokers, no pets

I liked being at school. I had my reasons at the time, but now it’s more admiration for the mix of people that you knew there as friends, or at the very least as people you would acknowledge if you saw them out of school. The comprehensive secondary school puts the rest of the country to shame in terms of its social mix. I spent my compulsory education with people that were better and worse off than me economically and socially, and at the time we were all just mates and ignorant of it. I had friends who lived in places I’d feel apprehensive walking around now, places the news and political leaders would tell me I’m right to feel apprehensive about. And at the other end of the scale there were friends living in places I’d now describe as elitist. What an incredible training it was back then though, showing that we could all get on.

Kids aren’t necessarily braver or more naïve if they’ll happily hang around ‘dodgy’ places and people; it’s just that they are closer to the school years when they had to talk to the bad guys and gals, and thought little of it. If you made the hard nuts laugh or could respond to them personably then they’d often be all right with you in that arbitrary, thump two, let one go approach. The context of school gave you a vague familiarity with most of the people there, which meant that you could actually talk to some of the violent pupils. You could even tell some of them (but definitely not all of them) when they were being dickheads. Now those people are making court appearances and getting violent with people who never shared a playground with them, and who never give strangers the time of day.

Perhaps you think thugs don’t deserve conversation, maybe they don’t. Certainly you shouldn’t have to charm your way out of verbal or physical abuse from every man and his dangerous dog. The thing is, some thugs, or abrasive people, are actually hostile because they can see you ignoring them. In silence there’s no way for them to differentiate between you and the people who only speak to them to have a go (telling off, not being a hero). Both aggressive oik and passer by will wonder what the other is silently thinking of them, but it tends to be the former that acts on their imagination in a way that can go from antisocial all the way up to a giggling in court manslaughter charge. They either see or project some kind of snub or slur to themselves, or arrogance in the silent passer by. I’m petrified of raising my head and saying ‘alright’ but it does actually work sometimes.

Where all of this happy clappy community talk is heading is social housing (a slightly broader term than council housing), the realm of Lewis Mumford and town planning. Broken Britain…that loathsome buzzword, but let’s assume for now that your yob, thug, school bully or hard nut is a perfect archetype of him or herself. Let’s say these people are bastards or bitches through and through, and are destined and happy to steal, give abuse and assault others. Fine, but what about the their hangers on—those two or three that were all right when you used to talk to them at school? What do you think they’ll be like a few years after leaving education, having lived in an area where lots of other bullies, hard nuts and the like all compete with each other? How happy would you be to walk past one of them when they’re standing at the end of the road with a big group of mates? What is it like for the not-so-antisocial people who live in the same area? It doesn’t bear thinking about…but of course it does bear thinking about; the former proposition is part of the problem.

How about if the hangers on lived on your street instead, or even the bully? Imagine if they grew up living alongside some of your friends as well as some of theirs, amongst the whole spectrum of the other residents—white collar to blue collar to popped collar, donkey jacket to Armani. You’d have all spoken to each other every now and then. You and the old bullies and hard nuts are similar ages…maybe you went to house parties and offered each other lifts occasionally. They would be no richer and you would be no poorer in this situation - you would just happen to be able live in the same street because the houses are different prices and mixed tenure. That situation is a long way off being common in the housing market—if it is even a goal—but there should at least be evidence of it in our public housing. However…

In December 2008, developers reached deals with councils to cut out the affordable homes in new social housing developments. This means that it is no longer compulsory to include private owner homes in housing association developments, or social rent/shared equity homes in private house-builder developments. Previously, Section 106 of the 1990 Town and Country Planning Act only granted planning permission on the condition that 25-50 percent of the homes built were for social rent or shared equity. The Times noted in 2008: ‘Since the 1980s policymakers have backed integrated developments where subsidised rented housing is evenly mixed with shared equity and full-ownership homes. There has been plenty of evidence that mixed housing boosts the prospects of poorer groups, raises employment and cuts crime.’ The fear is that an end to mixed tenure estates will create council ‘ghettos’, only increasing the disparity in living conditions between people living in public housing and those in private homes.

The deals appear to be making the best out of a bad situation, ensuring that new social housing gets built, and that construction continues despite the financial climate leaving house-builders reluctant to start financially risky developments. Failures in mixed tenure are older than the economic crisis however. Both media and political figures have noted the growing division between those in public and private housing since the 1970s. In May 2009 the Independent discussed a report by the Fabian Society:

By splitting up those living in public and private housing, successive governments have fostered suspicion towards those who live on council estates. Research for the study found that a third of those polled felt people living on council estates had "nothing in common with them", and 60 per cent of those believed that mixed housing would be a bad idea.

Meanwhile 2010 sees regular news stories with headings like: work begins on first new council houses in [insert town/county here] for thirty years. The hope is that some of these homes will move into shared ownership as the country recovers from the recession. Others have argued for alternatives though. An Audit Commission report from last September stated that ‘[i]mproving the housing stock that already exists will help more people than building new houses, but more homes are also needed in most places in the country.’

Solutions have also been offered for keeping a social mix in housing estates. Back in December 2008 the Times quoted David Orr of the National Housing Federation: ‘We are not going to back the mono-tenure estates of the past. Half of our housing developments are small, with ten to twenty homes, which could be scattered next to existing private homes.’ [1] Not everybody in the existing homes might agree, as the Fabian Society study showed, but it is a good way of conserving both space and mixed tenure.

Top down encouragement of mixed tenure isn’t enough to guarantee that will we all talk to each other before judging though. Back in 1999 the Independent reported on a Demos research project. They had found that, although residents of some mixed tenure estates integrated more than those of others, overall the tenants and the homeowners didn’t tend to mix. Time we went back to school.

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[1] Jill Sherman, ‘Council ghettos may return as recession kills mixed estates’, TimesOnline, 12^th December 2008, <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5327836.ece>.