Social structures

Political pressure is mounting to build social and private housing on the same estates. The Urban Task Force urged planners to ensure that all new developments and re-developments contain a mixture of tenures. The Government repeatedly declares that it is in favour of creating balanced communities.

Many developers and planners are not, however, convinced of their merits. In particular, most discussions about mixed tenure developments contain a scattering of anecdotes about tensions or disputes between owners and tenants. Land values for private developments also tend to be lower if social housing is required to be integrated into the development. Owners apparently have little appetite for living together with tenants of social housing.

At Demos, we've been investigating the extent of these problems. With support from the Housing Corporation and National House-Building Council we've interviewed 1,000 residents of ten mixed tenure estates around the country. Their views help clarify the benefits and costs of such developments.

The first clear message which residents gave us was "don't get too worked up about a mix". All told, about a quarter thought that mixing private and social housing had caused benefits and another quarter thought that it had brought problems. About half simply felt that it made no difference.

Even among those residents who expressed an opinion about mixing tenures, the problems or benefits they perceived were usually relatively minor. Many of those who identified benefits simply thought that it was a good idea for a range of people to live in the same area. Often they had a gut feeling that separating richer and poorer groups in different areas was wrong.

Those who perceived problems were often owners who felt that the environment was not being sufficiently cared for by the social housing landlord or residents. But still only a third of owners perceived any problems. A couple of estates also experienced more general tensions between the tenure groups. However, such problems appeared to have no impact on people's overall feelings about living on the estate. Those who perceived problems were no less satisfied with their estate than those who had no such concerns. Given the stories of problems between tenants and owners which circulate in the housing world, most of us will probably be reassured by these findings.

Like any areas with diverse populations, mechanisms which help people live together are important on mixed estates. Action against anti-social behaviour, the presence of on-site caretakers and community workers and security conscious design had helped increase residents satisfaction on many of our best estates. What the Demos research shows is that with such management, developers and landlords should have few fears about building mixed estates. We hope that message will gradually permeate across the population as a whole and land prices for mixed developments rise accordingly.

The debates about mixed tenure estates do not, however, stop with residents' perceptions. The impact of mixing on the image of the estate, the local economy, services and community are often held to be beneficial.

Although we did not study all of these issues, some useful findings arise from the Demos research. In particular, we considered the impact on fostering local inlcusive communities.

The research shows that estate-wide communities are rare in general, whether mixed or not. Sociologists have long shown that many people perceive their local community to be very local indeed - just a few streets. Likewise, they tend only to know people in their street or, if they are parents, through their children's local school. The same is true on mixed tenure estates. On the ten estates which we studied, the majority of residents knew almost no-one else on the estate beyond their street.

The reason for restricted contact is relatively straightforward: few people socialise with other residents when they use estate amenities.

Local shops, pubs and cafes are visited frequently, but only a tiny minority get to know others through them. Community groups forge links between their users, but typically only one in seven people use their local community centre. In contrast, nearly 80 per cent had got to know their immediate neighbours.

Given such limited estate-wide societies, simply building private and social housing on the same estate rarely makes them feel included in the same community. Nor does support and friendship tend to develop between the residents of different tenures. On estates in which private and social housing is segregated into different roads, only about one in five of the people we interviewed knew the name of even one resident with a different tenure. Some of these estates were fairly new. Contact will increase over time. But many are likely to remain demarcated into different street societies. To foster more of a sense of inclusive society, private and social housing needs to be integrated on the same streets.

The common reaction to such street level mixing from many housing managers and developers is that it creates problems. The Demos research suggests that these problems may have been exaggerated. While a significant minority of owners say that they would rather live on different streets, most of the people we spoke to who actually lived on mixed streets were happy. In fact, more were satisfied with the cleanliness of the local environment, security and levels of noise and the like than those who lived in segregated estates. Slightly fewer reported mixing to have created any problems.

The reasons why street level mixing had created more satisfied residents is not completely clear. On one or two segregation estates, resentment had developed between owners and social housing tenants in adjacent sections, which might have reduced satisfaction. Possibly some of the estates in which the social and private housing were mixed on the same street were just better planned and managed. Whatever the exact reasons, the examples we studied demonstrate that street level integration of private and social housing can be successful.

We are not starry-eyed about even the impact of street level mixing on creating a sense of inclusion. Many people have so little to do with their neighbours that the mix of people they live amongst is irrelevant to their sense of community or inclusion. Differences in economic circumstances can reinforce that detachment from others. In rare circumstances, close proximity to others with much more or less wealth can foster resentment or snobbery. But if I was planning a mixed development I would integrate the tenures on the same street.