Before reviewing the evidence, it is useful to consider the nature of the problem that requires solving. Two forces, more than anything else, have shaped the geography of social exclusion over the last twenty years. One is economic restructuring which eliminated three million blue collar jobs leaving industrial communities disheartened and ill-equipped to win new work from the rising knowledge-based industries. The other is housing policy, which slashed new housing investment and sold a third of the social housing stock at exactly the wrong time, when more was needed to accommodate the growing number of households with no income from work.
The outcome of restructuring was the collapse of an industrial way of life that previously supported reasonably stable employment and family structures. Housing policy compounded the problem and gave it a local spatial dimension, creating new zones of deprivation, many in areas which housed old industrial communities, and half of them centred on social housing estates. In the wake of this social and economic turbulence, these areas have taken on a new character which increasingly reflects the influence of poverty and the lack of jobs - family breakdown, low achievement, alcohol and drug abuse and crime. These are the symptoms of area deprivation and social exclusion, and increasingly they are found in social housing.
How can we ensure that new estates do not degenerate the same way, and how confident can we be that the million new social rented homes needed over the next twenty years will be in communities and neighbourhoods where people want to live? The objective must be to build neighbourhoods that are 'good enough' for people to want to live there, with communities in which people are not rich, not poor; not all unemployed, but not all in work either; some with children, some without; old, young and in between; that share the social norms and values of mainstream society and are strong enough to absorb their share of people with problems without being overcome by them. Communities that will assert and secure their right to safety, security, and a good quality of life; that can survive without external intervention; that don't continually need 'fixing'; communities that are, in short, sustainable.
So what can mixed tenure estates offer? In principle, a good deal. Mixing tenure is chiefly a means of providing a wider diversity of incomes and other household characteristics in a new estate or neighbourhood. Nobody can say for sure what difference tenure by itself makes. However, the attributes of a mixed tenure estate depend crucially on the proportion of owners to tenants and the way the tenures are physically mixed - whether integrated, or separated, within the estate. Subject to how these criteria are met, when compared to social rented estates, mixed tenure developments are likely to have higher incomes, lower child densities, more two adult households, many more working adults, a wider mix of economic groups, interaction between children from a wider range of social backgrounds, and more people with 'clout' who can champion the estate or neighbourhood to officialdom.
Some of these effects are physical - less wear and tear, graffiti and vandalism; a better appearance and so on - which combined with good estate management can make a significant contribution to preventing estate deterioration. Others relate to the social dynamics of an estate and to setting its ethos and behavioural norms, underpinning the social gains of a more mixed community, and some of these have an impact on the prevention of social exclusion, as well as neighbourhood decline. For instance, the higher proportion of people with full time jobs who live on mixed tenure estates and each day travel to work elsewhere makes it impossible for such places to become isolated communities, disconnected from mainstream values and the labour market (although individuals might be).
But what of the wider claims for mixed and balanced communities? Some of the evidence is controversial, because causal relationships are still unclear. Two areas - education and jobs - are worth focusing on because these are the ones that the government hopes will be key to solving social exclusion in the long term.
There is evidence that the social composition of a neighbourhood, or of an estate large enough to make a significant contribution to the intake of a local school, can affect the quality of education received by children who live there. The message is clear: schools with a high proportion of children from poor backgrounds are likely to get significantly worse GCSE results than schools with a more mixed intake. What causes this - ability of intake, quality of teaching, inadequate funding or poor leadership - is a subject of much debate. But would children from poor backgrounds fare any better if they lived and went to school in an area that was not poor? Recent results from America suggest they would. In a closely monitored housing mobility programme, the children of families who moved from some of the poorest inner city estates to middle class neighbourhoods achieved significantly better results when they switched schools. American academics are still arguing about causal mechanisms, but the outcome speaks for itself: children written off as part of an 'underclass' completed high school, and some went on to university, when given the same educational opportunities as middle class children. In both the UK and the US, the evidence suggests that neighbourhood poverty is a barrier to the fulfilment of educational potential.
There is yet little hard data from the UK of the effect that living in a mixed income area has on job prospects, although a Demos project is investigating a 'networks of opportunity' thesis and is due to report later this summer. In the US, the housing mobility project also found that jobless adults were more likely to find jobs when they moved to middle class areas where job opportunities were better. The crucial difference was the supply of jobs, not motivation or lack of job readiness.
From the evidence, building new estates for more mixed communities gives them a better chance of becoming sustainable neighbourhoods. For estates in advanced decline, more will be needed, but a better social and economic balance could give critical support to the government's other 'joined up' measures for tackling inequality, educational disadvantage, and social exclusion. Housing policy needs to recognise its own pivotal role in forming areas of concentrated deprivation; building more mixed and balanced communities could contribute crucially to making these areas into places where people want to live and bring up their families.
Source
Housing Today
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