# BritDopers: Explain a council house **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 13, 2010, 10:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336 "2010-03-13T10:24:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2010, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336/21 "2010-03-14T02:04:19Z")
> [@code\_grey](#): > > perhaps there were big changes in the type of people who lived there in 70s and in 2004? If things went seriously downhill, then both **Blake** and **Rayne Man** can be right at the same time. In the past maybe people there were decent employed citizens with low salaries, and now maybe they are mostly unemployed underclass type of people. O tempora o mores and so forth. Possibly, but I do not think that is the issue. It is certainly the case that in the '60s and '70s _some_ council estates (and tower blocks, etc.) were seriously crappy, and that _some_ council tenants (and very possibly a higher proportion of them than of private renters and home owners) were low-lifes. I doubt that **Rayne Man** would disagree. Also, of course, given the way these things work, it was the worst estates and the worst tenants who tended to get most of the media publicity. What I, found objectionable about **Blake** ’s posts was that he seemed to be tarring all council estates and tenants with the same brush, equating the decent majority of both homes and occupants with the worst few, the ones that got the media attention. ---
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2010, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336/22 "2010-03-14T18:44:44Z")
Just a quick note that as an American I’ve found this thread to be both fascinating and very informative. I’ve learned more about housing in the UK in the last 20 minutes than I have in the last 30 years! And the only reason I opened this thread was because it made me think of a line from the first episode of The Young Ones when Vyvien keeps yelling, “We got a letter from the **council**!!” ---
**Author:** ![MarcusF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/67e7ee/32.png) [@MarcusF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MarcusF)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2010, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336/23 "2010-03-14T21:45:06Z")
I think it’s come out in the discussion but I think the picture a Brit would get from hearing someone grew up on a council estate has changed over the last thirty years. Up until the eighties (Maggie Thatcher and all that), hearing someone came from a council estate would suggest they were from a working class background (“blue collar” in American parlance) but not that they were necessarily very poor or uneducated. As **Rayne Man** says many residents were semi-skilled and skilled workers with real terms increases in earnings each year. As noted, in many cities there was almost no decent private rental sector and mortgages were hard to get so there was little stigma to being on a good council estate. There were really bad sink estates but all locals could and would distinguish between the good and the bad estates. It was hard to get a house on a good estate and people strived to keep it. Actually it was a good option as the rents were low and the quality of the better houses high. (And not all the houses were small, we have five bedroom semis around here that used to be council homes.) Knowing that Elton John grew up on a council estate in the north London suburbs, about all I would read into this would be that his parents were not professionals but I would not be able to guess whether his dad was absent, unemployed, a skilled worker or a self employed tradesman. These days it is different. There are not many council estates left. Certainly around here (not sure about the major cities) social housing is provided by “Housing Associations” not by the local council. These Associations are not for profit organisations that bought the council houses (the ones not sold off to the sitting tenants) from the councils in the nineties and noughties and rent them out at controlled rates. If I heard someone these days was growing up on a council estate I am afraid I would start making assumptions about their family. I would assume they were - for some reason poor - possibly out of work or a single parent family. Not saying this assumption would be right but that would be the image that came to my mind. ---
**Author:** ![zelie\_zelerton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/59ef9b/32.png) [@zelie\_zelerton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zelie_zelerton)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2010, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336/24 "2010-03-14T21:48:49Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > A council house is pubic housing. It is very basic housing, semi-detached if you;re lucky, most likely blocks of units, built very cheaply and provided by the state at a nominal rate. > > Council housing is provided to those who can’t afford normal housing, which effectively translates to borderline poverty. So it’s occupied by the chronically unemployed, the unemployable, drug addicts, mental patients, single parents, old age pensioners (retirees on Social Security in US terms) and so forth. > > It has a largely deserved reputation for being very basic, very cramped, often borderline substandard accommodation. Council housing estates generally have about the social charm and crime status that you would expect when you consider the close living quarters and the types of people being housed there. > > If you translate council housing as the US “projects” then you’re going to get a pretty good handle on the implications of living in council housing. The person/family in question is so incapable of obtainaing money that they can’t even afford to pay the rent. Historically council housing was filled with the uneducated and unskilled, with a reputation of being the unwashed. Since WWII that “unwashed” reputation has grown worse, and it is now largely seen as being the domain of those who are lost causes. > > So the fact that somebody could rise from council housing to become a millionaire celebrity is a literal rags to riches story. If you are too young to remember the world prior tot he 80s, it was even more amazing because coming from that background was not itself selling point as it became afterwards fro many musical styles. So someone like Elton John was seen to have managed to get to where he did despite having everything stacked against him. Rather than argue this nonsense I’d like you to provide cites from authoritative sources to back up every statement there please. ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2010, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336/25 "2010-03-14T21:52:33Z")
My father was a professional man and he readily moved into public housing when this town (one of the New Towns that were an initiative of the 1945 Labour government) was built in 1951. So did lots of other middle-class people at that time - there was no stigma attached to it and lots of people were happy to come and live here in a newly constructed (on the nucleus of an older one) town. Owning your house was, until quite recently, a very uncommon thing for working people to do, or to aspire to. You expected to rent from **someone** , whether a private landlord or, less commonly, a charity like the Peabody Trust, and at least council house rents were controlled and were maintained properly by the public works department. That stigma didn’t begin to attach to council housing until, say, the 1970s when the inadequacy of some of the 1960s construction began to be apparent. The sentiments expressed about Margaret Thatcher here are just one example of how she remains a deeply divisive figure here - I often think she is more popular in America than here. ---
**Author:** ![Pushkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee59a6/32.png) [@Pushkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pushkin)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2010, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336/26 "2010-03-14T22:32:43Z")
As an aside, the stock of “social housing” in Northern Ireland is meant to be above the average in the UK ([cite](http://www.northernireland.gov.uk/news/news-dsd/news-dsd-june-2009/news-dsd-220609-condition-of-housing.htm)) and I have to say, I’ve privately rented a room in many worse places than the pad my ex and our daughter inhabit. All for a rent on a par with what she would be paying (if she worked of course) for her entire house. As another aside, the danger of having a gable end house on such an estate is [one of these](http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=gable+end+mural+northern+ireland&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&start=0). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/britdopers-explain-a-council-house/532336.md?page=1)