First published in 1993 by Routledge
This edition first published in 2021
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1993 A. Power 2021 New Preface A. Power
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ISBN: 978-0-367-64519-9 (Set)
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ISBN: 978-0-367-68463-1 (Volume 17) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-00-313781-8 (Volume 17) (ebk)
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New Preface to the Re-issue of 2021
Anne Power
Hovels to High Rise was triggered in the mid to late 1980s by my work on the growing problem of difficult to let council estates all over the United Kingdom. Many different European housing experts came to visit the Priority Estates Project, a Labour-backed scheme, funded by the new Conservative government, to tackle deep-set organisational, social, economic and environmental problems in unpopular estates. I was then invited to visit other European countries to see how they ran their estates. It became immediately obvious that there were very different housing histories, polices and ownership patterns in different European countries, shaped by very different histories.
British history produced contrasting housing compared with other countries we studied France, Germany, Denmark and Ireland. For example, France and Germany had been at war for 70 years virtually uninterrupted by the time of the Second World War. This created huge housing deficits, with a shortage of 14 million homes in France and 12 million additional refugees in Germany immediately after the Second World War. In both countries, infrastructure was massively damaged.
In contrast, Denmarks long tradition of participation and grassroots democracy, traceable back to the Vikings, shaped the way that social housing was developed and governed, with tenants playing a major role. In Ireland, land ownership has great symbolic value, due partly to the occupation of Ireland by Britain over a very long time, and the long-term impacts of famine and emigration. In Britain, the government played a dominant role in developing housing, mainly because of the all-powerful and controlling state-run systems that were put in place in WW1 and again in WW2. The contrasting patterns, shaped by history, are still visible today.
A common trend towards state intervention emerged, particularly after WW2, because of the urgency of building homes at scale following the war. As a result, mass housing estates appeared in every European country. High rise estates became the standard form of building between the 1960s and 1980s. Streets in the Sky became an infectious idea.
In spite of this common pattern of post-war, subsidised estate building, housing policy evolved differently on the continent compared with Britain, where government dominated along party political lines and where housing has long been a political football. In other countries housing development was framed by government but delivered through independent but regulated organisations, broadly similar to housing associations today.
In several countries co-operative housing associations dominated, particularly in Denmark and Scandinavian countries, but they were also common in Germany. In France subsidised landlords, sponsored by local authorities or private companies, built out large state-driven urban development zones. These diverse organisations operated at arms-length from government. Ireland developed a distinctive pattern of council building, with a main purpose to sell homes on to sitting tenants. Apart from one post-war high-rise estate, where the Right to Buy did not apply, the vast majority of council homes in Ireland are now owned by former tenants. All these different systems produced subsidised housing estates for rent, and particularly on the continent, mostly in high rise blocks.
There are some unique historical events that make European housing fascinating. For example, the development of the Neue Heimat housing company in Germany, owned by major trade unions and leading banks, was caught up in a corruption scandal through its profit-making activities that led to its collapse and sale for 1 Deutschmark. As a result, all German social landlords were converted to private landlords, including in the former East Germany following reunification. Germany adopted changes in its approach to mass housing as a result of the Neue Heimat scandal, by abolishing the special status of social landlords and making all rented housing, whether built with government subsidy or private money, effectively private renting, albeit still highly regulated. Now private renting makes up nearly half of all stock, but privatised housing associations can provide below market rents and local government can subsidise the rents in order to secure access for nominated low income households. Germanys unique system continues to strongly favour renting.
In the UK there has been a shift away from supporting local authorities as landlords. A third of local authority stock was sold to sitting tenants, much of which has been converted to private renting. Another third has been transferred to housing associations, leaving just one-third in the ownership of local authorities, as support shifted to housing associations and arms-lengths management structures. Now it favours minimally regulated private renting, which is growing very fast.
Denmark also introduced a special subsidy giving tenants the Right to Buy in certain areas in order to prevent poverty concentrations, but estate boards, with tenants in the majority, resisted this policy, to protect co-operative community structures.
In spite of contrasts there are striking similarities in the problems facing mass housing estates across Europe: their design; the cost of managing and maintaining them; poverty concentrations resulting from their intrinsic unpopularity; the concertation of immigrants, ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups such as the homeless and unemployed. The difficulties in managing and funding mass housing estates and their growing unpopularity provoked a common policy shift across Europe against mass housing in favour of inner-city renewal and mixed communities, with a more grounded management style and a diversification of uses.
Today social housing in all countries is still in high demand for those on low incomes and those with the least choice. This obviously creates exclusionary pressures on social housing. In Denmark, integrated housing is strongly favoured, yet the proportion of low income and ethnic minority families has risen quickly. Broadly the same applies in the UK and France. However, during one of my research trips, I visited a very large estate in West Berlin that had previously been a social housing estate subsidized by government. The now private housing association landlord, fully owned by the city of Berlin, did not accept Turkish families on this large estate because Turkish and German people do not get on, so whats the point of housing them together, the head of the housing association explained. In the former East Berlin in another very large estate, doctors and other professions still lived on the formerly publicly owned housing estates, now run as a private rented estate. The policy under the East German communist regime favoured social mixing and residents themselves resisted changing it.
