Margaret Thatcher sold off public housing to create "the dignity of ownership" and today 40% of that housing is owned by gouging landlords

a post by Cory Doctorow for the Boing Boing blog

This is not intended to be a political post but a reality check on the provision of publicly-funded housing. H.



The theory behind Margaret Thatcher's sell-off of publicly funded council housing under the "right to buy" scheme was that poor people would buy their houses and then the structural factors keeping them poor would vanish in a puff of smoke, and the poor people would stop being poor (also, and as a completely unintentional side-effect, owning a home is correlated with voting for Tories and renting is correlated with voting Labour, but again, that was totally not what old Maggie was thinking, honestly).

The right-to-buy programme helped fuel the housing bubble in which quasi-state media like the BBC and Channel 4 ran dozens of hours of programming a week urging people to apply for credit, "do up" flats, and flip them to other people who'd applied for credit and wanted to "do up" the flat, because that couldn't possibly ever go wrong.

Today, 40% of that publicly built, publicly subsidised housing stock is in the hands of private landlords. Council housing schemes have been largely replaced by vouchers that poor people can use to pay their rents, and rents – uncontained by public subsidy – have soared, representing a wealth-transfer to landlord from both poor people and the taxpayers who fund the vouchers.

Landlords continue to snap up ex-council housing. Poverty in the UK is at levels unseen since the time of Dickens. Housing poverty is a major co-contributor to food poverty and other forms of dire privation. Moreover, the 40% figure is low, because many private landlords don't disclose that they're letting out their flats.

Continue reading

---

Making the middle classes on shifting ground? Residential status, performativity and middle-class subjectivities in contemporary London

an article by Michaela Benson and Emma Jackson (Goldsmith's College, University of London, UK) published in The British Journal of Sociology Volume 68 Issue 2 (June 2017)

Abstract

This paper argues that shifts in access to housing – both in relation to rental and ownership – disrupt middle-class reproduction in ways that fundamentally influence class formation. While property ownership has had a long association with middle-class identities, status and distinction, an increasingly competitive rental market alongside inflated property prices has impacted on expectations and anxieties over housing futures.

In this paper, we consider two key questions:

1. What happens to middle-class identities under the conditions of this wider structural change?
2. How do the middle classes variously manoeuvre within this?

Drawing on empirical research conducted in London, we demonstrate that becoming an owner-occupier may be fractured along lines of class but also along the axes of age, wealth and timing, particularly as this relates to the housing market. It builds on understandings of residential status and place as central to the formation of class, orienting this around the recognition of both people and place as mutable, emphasizing that changing economic and social processes generate new class positionalities and strategies for class reproduction.

We argue that these processes are writ large in practices of belonging and claims to place, with wider repercussions within the urban landscape.

---