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Building on previous approaches developed under the Conservative’s during the 1980s and early 1990s, the Labour Government also used LCHO as part of regeneration strategies to tackle the effects of residualisation and ‘turn around’

“problem” social housing estates through the creation of ‘balanced communities’²⁶ (DETR, 2000a: 75). The issues faced by some tenants, including crime, poor health, low educational attainment and social stigma, were seen to be the result of their social, physical and economic isolation from ‘the mainstream’ (Rose, 2000: 1406).

Poor households were perceived to be ‘doubly disadvantaged’ through living in neighbourhoods of ‘concentrated’ poverty, with limited access to opportunities, jobs and ‘models of appropriate behaviour’ (Arthuson, 2002: 245). ‘Social exclusion’

was, to varying degrees, seen as the result of both economic restructuring and the

25. The increase in single adult households and couples taking up LCHO as opposed to families can also be attributed to the trend during the 2000s to develop small houses and flats rather than family homes (Cho and Whitehead, 2006). This is in part due to the impact of s106 agreements on housing densities. As Crook and Monk (2011) explain, in order to offset the costs of affordable housing contributions on private development sites, planning authorities have allowed higher densities on some sites (p426)

26. The idea of ‘balanced communities’ can be traced back to very early state housing interventions, and has long been seen as a desirable outcome in the construction of planned communities through Victorian era model towns and villages, to Garden Cities, New Town developments and early post-war council house construction (see Sarkissian, 1976). According to Cole and Goodchild (2001) the concept re-emerged at the centre of housing and planning policies under New Labour with a different emphasis, influenced by new approaches to social policy and in particular Giddens’ ‘Third Way’ (p353).

Third way politics advocated the need to find a ‘middle ground’ between Conservative, free market individualism, and the socialism of the old political Left (Giddens, 1998). At the heart of this approach was a concern to halt the perceived decline of civil and political engagement at the local level, by reinvigorating the social ties and networks which were seen to characterise ‘successful’ communities (Putnum, 1995: 66). Influenced by the ‘neighbourhood effects’ literature and the concept of ‘additional disadvantage’ the poorest neighbourhoods were diagnosed as suffering most from a lack of ‘social capital’ and became the prime focus of policy intervention as a result (Lupton and Fuller, 2009).

deficiencies in the behaviour of individual tenants (Cole and Goodchild, 2001: 354).

The solution to both was the creation of ‘balanced’ communities through the promotion of a ‘mix’ of different housing types and tenures, to house a range of household sizes, ages and crucially incomes (DETR, 2000: 75). The integration of better-off working and middle-income households into regeneration areas was seen to provide a range of benefits to existing residents. These included improvements to neighbourhood reputation and a reduction in place-based stigma, investment in facilities and services, greater levels of community participation and access to employment opportunities (Bond et al. 2011). The creation of socially mixed communities were also prescribed to facilitate social interaction amongst residents, thereby raising the ‘social capital’ of poorer members of a community and creating opportunities for socio-economic mobility (Cole and Goodchild, 2001: 455).

In order to ‘avoid residualisation,’ and the problems of the ‘large estates built in the past’²⁷ policy interventions focused on achieving ‘social balance’ through mixed tenure housing developments (DETR, 2000: 70-71). If social renting was taken as a proxy for poverty, disadvantage and disengagement, then the solution was seen to be the integration of home ownership into new and existing social housing

estates.²⁸ In this context, LCHO was re-orientated as a way to create ‘stable, mixed income communities,’ rather than ‘ghettos of poor and vulnerable people’²⁹ (ibid:

37). This was to be achieved by attracting wealthier households back to maligned areas, and by giving existing social tenants a ‘stake in their housing and

neighbourhoods’ through the provision of shared ownership and equity schemes thereby promoting a ‘culture of opportunity, choice and self-reliance’ (ibid). In practice, this involved both the extensive remodelling of existing social housing estates, and the development of new mixed tenure schemes by housing associations (Cole and Goodchild, 2001). Planning policies also sought to create a mixture of housing by integrating social rented and low cost home ownership units into new

27. These included older, council built modernist housing estates, and newer housing association mono-tenure developments which had been shown to exhibit similar problems of decline and stigmatisation (Page, 1993).

28 .It is interesting that despite the exposed risks of low-income home ownership (Ford, Burrows and Nettleton, 2001), and the fact that ‘half the poor’ were owner-occupiers, the tenure remained a proxy for affluence (Burrows and Wilcox, 2000).

29. The use of this language, and in particular the idea of the ‘ghetto,’ illustrates the influence that US approaches to regeneration and poverty alleviation had on the UK policy landscape. Indeed, as Lupton and Fuller (2009) argue, lessons from the HOPE VI programme were imported directly from the US through a number of site visits and exchanges (p1017).

private developments through Section 106 negotiations as a condition of planning permission.

Despite widespread policy support both in the UK and abroad, a number of studies pointed to a lack of rigour in the concepts and research behind mixed tenure strategies. Academics sought to question the ‘taken-for-granted’ benefits of the policy, which had been elevated to the status of ‘conventional wisdom’ (Bond et al.

2011: 71). A number of studies evaluating the impact of regeneration schemes found that there was a lack of interaction between tenants and home owners, and that existing residents had at best a neutral attitude towards tenure mix (Goodchild and Cole, 2001; Allen et al. 2005). Studies also questioned the assumptions made about the nature of existing communities, arguing that many social housing estates have a strong and positive sense of community already (Jupp, 1999). Policies

concerned with integration were therefore seen to threaten the solidarity of existing communities, whilst de-valuing the needs, opinion and culture of existing working-class residents (Allen, 2008). Further, the focus on ‘neighbourhood effects’ located the cause and solution to problems of poverty within the boundaries of existing neighbourhoods, rather than addressing wider structural factors and inequalities (Lupton and Fuller, 2009). As a result there was a concern that unemployment, ill-health and poor education were not addressed through neighbourhood scale

regeneration, but rather re-located as a result of the exclusion of poorer households (ibid). Although not all mixed-tenure regeneration schemes involved the dispersal of existing residents, particular programmes and most notably the Housing Market Renewal pathfinder did involve the large-scale demolition of existing housing, including low value owner occupied dwellings, and relocation of existing

communities (Allen, 2008; see also chapter two section 2.6). As such New Labour’s approach to regeneration was seen as part of a move towards ‘third-wave’

gentrification, whereby the state encourages middle-class groups to ‘gentrify’

previously working-class neighbourhoods (Watt, 2009: 229-230; Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008).