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Tony Blair's vision for us all to be middle class suits me fine. Presumably, if we translate this into housing terms, it means that we will all become aspiring home owners with unlimited access to low cost home ownership.

In this visionary world, we, the 'professional' social housing class, would be obliged to patronise only those who really could not afford even the smallest ownership share. No doubt, as professionals, we will continue to provide homes that either look like social housing or are, as the phrase goes, 'innovative'. The usual suspect estates have two possible futures: they will either be refurbished in bright colours with mean glass porches and timber knee rails, or they will be knocked down and rebuilt as social sector homes with bright colours, mean glass porches and timber knee rails. Social sector rented homes will be demolished and replaced... with social sector rented homes.

Housing estates are history, an artificial concept from a patronising age. Estates are full of people on low incomes, many of them benefit-dependant or unemployed. This creates a cycle of increasingly concentrated deprivation that gets harder to break.

Housing management similarly adds to the problem it is trying to solve. By 'managing' people, housing managers create dependency and a need for involvement and participation. If we got things right in the first place we wouldn't have to be reactive. Yes, we should be working to develop communities and yes, we should aim to bolster social inclusion - but we don't have to do this on the back of social housing. Social housing tenants are a captive audience. They are manipulated into involvement whether they like it or not, by professional housing types who make a living out of it.

Do social housing tenants really want to be managed ? Are owner occupiers managed by their building societies? Do they want to be? Certainly, shared owners do not want to be patronised. They simply want a decent home of their choice at a reasonable price and to be left alone until they want something - customer service.

Most social housing tenants want the same thing: a decent-looking home that doesn't brand them as beneficiaries of the state; an affordable home that they have chosen to live in; a home that will be repaired effectively. If they want anything else it should be delivered with real customer service, not patronising housing management.

The Social Exclusion unit established that there are 1400 particularly disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the country, many in London. Some 18 action teams were set up to look at ways of improving these neighbourhoods - getting it right. A number of worthy housing professionals were asked to sit on those teams. My heart sank when I looked through the list of appointees and realised that there was not a single home ownership expert named among them. It did cross my mind to wonder how many of them were home owners - and how many had lived in social sector estates.

Despite my cynicism, I took heart from a growing perception among ministers and local authorities that the country cannot afford to simply rebuild social housing estates. The fact that simply replacing them, without attempting some form of social engineering to ensure sustainability, was no longer feasible, seemed to be sinking in. We were beginning to realise that every estate and every neighbourhood needs a balance - between low rent, market rent, low cost ownership and outright ownership. For sustainability, we need people who are willing to invest in an area for the long term. These are the folk who will cause family and social networks to be strengthened.

So why is it that we professionals merely replace social housing estates with slightly better social housing estates - usually single tenure, with perhaps a few shared ownership homes as a concession? Why do we never return to traditional street patterns with regular looking houses and real multi-tenure providing homes people will live in because they choose to, not because they have to? Ridiculously, this would be radical. And it is radical, because the professional social housing world guards its power to patronise and manipulate. If sustainable progress is to be made, the politics of social housing have to change.

With proper planning, we could return to 'regular' housing with undifferentiated tenure and we could engineer balanced communities. Particular areas would no longer be concentrations of deprivation. Deprivation would still be there - people's economic and social lives do not miraculously improve just because of better homes - but it would be scattered. The poor would still be poor. But they would not have to live in municipalist homes on godforsaken bleak estates.

Maybe the tide is turning. We have the urban task force looking at ways to tempt people back to the cities, in spite of Lord Rogers and his friends, who still call for architect-designed high density flats. What would really create sustainability is affordable, family homes with gardens. These are homes that will nourish family networks, and will allow our working nurses or bus drivers to live close to town, instead of being stuck out in the burbs because it is cheaper. Truly appealing homes will stop the drift of economically active families out of areas like Lambeth and Southwark. Why not have some affordable shared ownership houses? That seems radical.

So what is really happening? The LCHO programme, which should be flourishing, withers further. Estate are regenerated - but on the basis of reprovision of rented homes. Very few local authorities take the long view.

Will social tenants living on estates vote for politicians who encourage long-term strategic thinking? Let us hope the Social Exclusion Unit's action team on unpopular housing is bold enough to suggest a radical break-up of social housing estates, with funds provided for balanced, multi-tenure communities. They could write legislation to demand it. Without legislation, the much-needed sea-change will not happen, because it is not politically expedient in the short term. Too many have vested interests in the status quo.