Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing


    The big debate about today’s public housing is whether it’s a commodity or an entitlement, depending on whether the opinion is from the right or left wing of the debate. Th next issue, though not really a debate, is who’s responsible for the terrible condition of public housing. Municipal Dreams is all about Britain’s public housing (known as Council Flats or Council Estates) and whether it’s a model of progress or a model of what to avoid.

    John Boughton begins with the origins of British public housing and how it replaced the Dickens-era slums. Parliament passed a law in 1866 that allowed town councils to buy land and tear ir down for new housing (an early form of eminent domain) though there was no quality control. The author brings up a builder’s journal from 1869, which criticizes Liverpool’s St. Martin’s cottages for their terrible appearance. Though he doesn’t expressly mention it, finding any kind of financing for a building project would have been difficult in Victorian England; it seems unlikely that British banks were eager to lend money to builders, unlike the USA, where J.P. Morgan loved giving loans to big business. The next problem is that nobody wanted to go into property management. While the author cites some Victorian-era public housing that still stands, and built with good quality, they are few and far between. Where would a town council have gotten financing for a building project in the 1800’s? Did the council members want to get stuck being a landlord? Who would oversee collecting the rents and keeping track of repairs? It’s a problem that began the minute public housing began.

    Dullness and banality are another issue in the book, not as pressing as quality, but still a factor in the housing and its effect on the community. The author’s example is the Becontree Estate, where all the houses are identical, and that was a shock to the townspeople when it was constructed. They were used to the traditional asymmetrical British architecture, where each house was built according to the builder’s own plan. Then there’s the Honor Oak Estate, slightly less banal, and recently refurbished. I suspect that one of the issues here is the fact that the public housing was designed for multitudes, as opposed the one family. In earlier times, a wealthy man would hire a builder to design and build his house according to three things; the condition of his land, the needs of the homeowner, and how much money they could afford to spend. Any builder in this day and age will have to factor in the same three things, or it won’t work. But in the origins of public housing, the builders were constructing a whole block of houses at once, so there was no individuality to them. Then in contrast to what I mentioned before, the land wasn’t always the best available, so you had mold and damp. The residents had no say in the building process, and there wasn’t much oversight to the materials used.

    The next topic the author writes is how the public housing was badly needed in the first place. The old housing stock from earlier times was crumbling, and had terrible sanitation (and probably a firetrap too) so it made sense to get rid of it. Replacing the filthy housing could also prevent outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and others. After WWII, not only were the old houses crumbling, but a lot of them were bombed and burned. The city of Birmingham built the Castle Vale Estate, with low-rise blocks and a few tower blocks, and everything was great…until the shoddy construction began to fight back! First the pipes leaked, then the leaking pipes were not replaced, then the leaking pipes eroded the plaster, then the elevators broke down, windows got stuck, doors got stuck (or wouldn’t close at all) and doorknobs came loose. Then the stuck windows let cold air in, and the non-locking doors invited crime. It was the same problem that the Pruit-Igoe houses in St. Louis had. Public housing is clearly a problem for the same reasons, no matter where in the world you build it.

    Recently, I visited Liberty Plaza in Manhattan, and saw how it looked like a British council house. The building is a tower block, with a plaza in the center, some townhouse-style units, and a stairway entrance. There was no physical barrier to keep trespassers out of the plaza, but the stairway prevented impulsive entry. This is an example of designing a building for security, so that the residents will be safe without the building becoming a fortress. It was built with quality materials that lasted for years, and the property was maintained daily, with littler swept up and graffiti painted over. There was retail space on the ground level, generating revenue for upkeep.

   The author does the best research for this book. He covers housing estates all over Britain, and explores their political and economic origins, plus the type of construction used. After reading this book, the reader is left to question whether the problem was the land, and architecture, the lack of maintenance, the lack of funding for maintenance, or general neglect of the poor. He does not say whether the public housing estates effectively Gerrymandered the votes, nor does he say whether this was the design or a side effect. Maybe the reason includes all of the above?

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