Please explain about "council houses" and "housing estates" (UK)

Factual Questions
1

Having just received The Beatles Anthology as a Christmas gift, I note that, except for Lennon, they all grew up in what they call “council houses”, or on “housing estates”. What American context could this housing situation be compared to? I’m tempted to think of what we call “the projects” here, but the UK version doesn’t appear to look quite as bad as that.

Do housing estates still exist? How do/did they fit into the socio-economic context? Was there a stigma attached to living in a council house, or was it the way most people lived?

2

I always took “housing estates” to mean housing developments or subdivisions; large groups of similar houses built around the same time, which can come in a variety of price ranges.

Council houses or flats are government subisdized housing, though. Maybe not the projects, exactly, probably more analogous to section 8 housing.

3

‘Housing estates’ are indeed large developments (often containing very little variety in design) built at the same time.

Council dwellings (houses or flats) are owned by local government authorities (councils) and rented out to individuals or families; they are usually allocated by the council (rather than chosen by the tenant); there are large housing estates where 50% or more of the houses are now privately owned; some years ago, many councils enabled tenants to buy their council properties at a discount.

Council houses and estates have something of a reputation as containing the dregs of society (PLEASE NOTE: I’m not attempting to defend this stereotype, only to describe it) - and being places where one might expect to find elevated levels of petty crime, general unrest, environmental neglect, etc…

4

Council estates have a terrible reputation.

Basically they provide housing for folk who often cannot afford to buy their own house, which would be fine if this was because of misfortune, but all too often this is not the case.

I grew up on council estates in Leeds, and the ones I lived on are among the most notorious in Europe.

Anyone who has the ability to find a job secure enough and well paid enough generally moves out and buys their own home, which means that the council estates become a community of those who cannot or will not gain good employment.

There is an idea around that if you have to pay for it, then you are more likely to take care of it, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in UK housing.

Unemployments rates on council estsates are very much higher than on private owners estates, which means that the rent due on the council estates is paid by the government, and the tenants jut do not give a damn.

In the US you have trailer trash, our equivalent is the council estate.

Someone will now come along and mention how badly I am stereoptyping whole sections of UK society, I make no apologies here, I have lived there, I have plenty of idle bastard family, I work in a prison and gues where most of the clientele live ? The exceptions being those criminals who have no home at all.

It is sad for those who live on the council estates who are law abiding, work and cause no problems to anyone, and there are also private estates in inner city areas that are terrible too, but these are also rented houses to all and anyone, and you find the same people living there too.

The problems of council estates are self perpetuating too, the schools local to such areas are often very poor, and the few good schools can do nothing for children who do not attend.Truancy rates among children living on council estates are much higher than elsewhere, and much of that truancy is known about by the parents.

As for crime being petty on council estates, where I used to live, Seacroft, there have been an increasing number of murders related to drugs over the past 3 or 4 years, I wouldn’t say that the crime is at all petty.

Do a google on Seacroft, Leeds and crime to see what I mean. You will find that up to 80% of households(the average on council estates is around 30%) living there are on state benefits, there is 34% unemployment if you count all those on the various crappy schemes designed to massage the numbers.
If you were to add all those that do not work because they are claiming sickness benefit (this keeps you off the unemployment register) that unemployment figure jumps to over 50%.
Local and national governments have no interest in chasing down the sickness benefit shirkers since it reduces official unemployment figures, but I know folk who ‘have problems with their nerves’ which is a euphamism for being a lazy twat.

I know this might seem a rant on the poorest section of UK society, but I lived there, and I know all too well why they are the poorest section, and it has less to do with governments and more to do with the lazy parasitic attitudes of the leeches living in such places.

My view is that if you lived on such an estate and worked your way out, then you deserve respect, and if you are decent and stuck on such estates, you have my sympathy, but for crying out loud, get out of there!

5

Britain does indeed have a problem with lazy, parasitic leeches living off the public trough in housing subsidised by the UK taxpayer. But enough about the royal family.

In the Dublin equivalent there are scary, decrepit five-storey walkups but there are also some very nice townhouse and semi-detached estates which you’d never guess were Corporation housing - they’re probably nicer than my own house in fact. I have no idea who gets allocated those places, and why, though.

6

Not all council houses are as described above!!! Some of them are quite nice (though these are the ones that have tended to be sold off). It is generally when you get large groups of council houses together that you start to get problems as you will always get an undesirable element living on any large estate.

7

When I was young I lived in Larne [about 20 miles from Belfast] which was dominated by 2 enormous housing estates - Craigyhill and Antiville - always at loggerheads with each other. I recently came across this website

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/3680/index.html

and it brought back a lot of memories - though I recommend that anyone having a look first looks at the dictionary page [below] to get an idea of the local dialect - unless you’re from Norn Iron, that is!!!
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/3680/glossary.htm

8

Oh dear. People claiming not to stereotype, and then going on to do just that.

First, to address the OP. The point that’s being made in Anthology is just that the Beatles came from working class backgrounds. Living in council housing was not a stigma or evidence of wretched poverty. It was unremarkable, common-place and usual housing for millions of working people.

Council housing is rented housing, provided by local government. The whole point of it is to provide affordable housing for those on lower wages and, inevitably, the unemployed.

No doubt this also includes the dredges of society, but there is no need to go lumping everyone else in with them. Like anything else, there’s the good with the bad. There’s good council housing, there’s bad council housing. There are poor houses that were thrown up cheaply, are badly maintain and therefore no one chooses to live there if they can at all avoid it.

But equally there are areas of very good council housing made of desirable buildings, well maintained and occupied by good tenants who care for their neighbourhood. Of course, these are also the houses that are first to get bought up thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s controversial “Right To Buy” scheme. (Otherwise known as the “House Owners Vote Tory Scam”)

Council Housing is a good idea, for low cost housing it has all the advantages of economies of scale, helps prevent exploitation of the poor by slum landlords and is at least an attempt to tackle homelessness. But it requires good management and regular investment and unfortunately it has just been a political football for the last 20 years. Some estates that require the most investment have simply been left to rot, so it’s hardly surprising that they end up as hell holes.

9

Housing estates are large housing projects funded by the government and rent out on subsidised rates. It is important for cities with a low median income (lots of low income people) like this one. Only with housing estates did we avoid a large, run-down slum-like inner city area.

10

Reason that some of those sink hole council estates need so much money investing is the behaviour of their residents.

There are few votes to be won by spending the money of those who pay the taxes on the criminal estates of the idle.

I have seen residents stripping out all the fixtures and fittings from council houses that become vacant.
The arrears in rents runs in to £billions nationally, add to that the unpaid local government tax too.

All that missing money has to be made up somehow, so the rest of the population have to cough up.

Notice that the council houses that were sold are largely in relatively small estates, notice too that those houses were sold at knock-down prices, notice that those same houses are now well cared for, their gardens are not ruins of burnt out cars, that water does not leak from cistern overflows, that gutters are maintained, that hedges and boundaries are well maintained.

Money is not just the issue, go around to the notorious estates of the type I lived on, and you will notice that even things that require no money to keep decent are not maintained, things like broken glass on the sidewalk, litter everywhere, hedges overgrown, I have seen some folk put boards up at the windows rather than report the defects to the council.
I have seen and know residents who are too lazy even to report that roofs are leaking, so that the problem when it has to be finally dealt with costs the council ten times more to repair.

You might answer that those residents have lost faith in the council repairers, and you would be right in some cases, but largely it is just bone idleness.

If it took a month for a tradesman to repair a broken window, I would simply do the job myself, and bill them for it(or hire a contractor and send the bill on - which you can do these days).
I would not simply turn up my heating, and default on my fuel bills, nor would I sit in the cold for a month waiting for the work to be done.
I have seen this many times, these folk often ask me(being an electrician) to sort out problems they have caused and which they deny, and to do it all for nothing, yet same people are totally incapable, or too lazy to even offer to try to return the favour.

11

Again, I’ll add that there are both good and bad council housing estates all over the UK. Both sets of grandparents lived in rather nice council houses in respectable areas, whereas a friend of mine lives on an estate which has way more than its fair share of problems (rioting, drug dealing and more besides).

In my opinion, council housing in itself isn’t a bad thing, and doesn’t deserve the stigma some people attach to it. As with any type of housing, it all depends on the residents who live there. From what I’ve seen, the nicer estates are the ones populated mainly by older people, who have lived there for decades. Whether they own or rent, IMHO they generally take more pride in where they live. Just my observation from what I’ve seen, certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, and no doubt there are many exceptions.

Some estates have the reputation of being a dumping ground for problem tenants. Whether or not that is true, I cannot say, but ultimately the local authority decides who lives where. If anyone can provide further info on this, I for one would be most interested in hearing it.

One thing is for sure, some estates don’t deserve the bad rap they get. A few bad tenants can spoil things for the majority, because everyone gets tarred with the same brush. The estate two streets away from me is exactly like that - people speak of it as some kind of cesspool, when really it isn’t. One or two trashy families does not a bad area make :rolleyes:.

12

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Futile Gesture *
**Oh dear. People claiming not to stereotype, and then going on to do just that.

OOPS - hope that wasn’t me you were accusing of stereotyping!

Having been a working class kid from a council estate - I’d deny that absolutely. I put that website up because I found it very funny and thought it would give folks a laugh - and an idea of the Norn Iron accent!

I’m not ashamed of where I lived - we moved into one of the first post-war council houses in 1953 when I was 3 - before the plaster was even properly dry - one of my abiding memories from that time was the smell of the plaster and the bright pink walls - we weren’t allowed to decorate the house for a year or so to let the walls dry out.

Over here there are good estates and bad estates too - those that are under the control of the paramilitary hoods and those that are left alone.

13

The system here in Belfast is that while you can “request” which area you want to live in , some estates have an enormous waiting list , while others don’t. Also, some estates are totally made up of people from one side or other of the sectarian divide. If you can afford to wait, you will eventually get a house on the estate of your choice [it can take years] .

If you are on the list for emergency housing you get 3 choices offered, and if you turn down the third you have to start all over again. Some estates [those with a really bad reputation] can offer you a house within days - then it’s up to you to decide whether you could live there or not. I had to take a flat on one of the roughest estates in Coleraine when I was at university there as a single parent.

The worst part of it was trying to get repairs done - I gave the council a list of the things [about 40] that needed repair when I moved in and when I left 3 years later only about ten of those had been fixed [all very minor things]. I never got the heating fixed - though [with a small child in the flat] I asked repeatedly - so I bought one small electric heater that we moved from room to room.

The local drunks used to party on the stairs with really loud stereos, broken bottles etc - but in the 3 years I lived there I never got an offer of a better house or flat. I think at that time once they got you a place you were forgotten about - originally I was told that the move would be very short term and that I’d soon be offered something better. It never happened - so I was happy to get back to Belfast after graduation.

14

In Australia, well New South Wales at least, “Housing Commission” houses and flats had a terrible reputation, partly because many of them were British-style clustered high-rise developments of the 60s and 70s. The government seems to have realised these were a mistake, and these days “Commission houses” tend to be individual properties scattered here and there across the cities and towns. This helps residents avoid any social stigma as other people wouldn’t even know they’re in a Commision home. Apart from that one good development though, the Housing Commission has been starved of money in recent years, and existing high-rises have had their on-site offices closed, broken windows going unrepaired, junkies not chased away, etc etc.

Generally though, I agree with casdave. A guy I work with has just bought himself a beautiful new home with all the money he’s saved by having the taxpayer (ie. me) help him live in a very nice Commission house in a trendy inner-city suburb for the last twelve years. On the other hand, I’ve paid high private rentals, and am still struggling to scrape together a deposit for a flat. I think the government has its priorities seriously farked up sometimes.

15

Public housing (at least here in Victoria, but I presume other states as well) is means tested, so that as your income goes up, so does your rent. For working families, it can be cheaper to live in private accomodation because the upper limit for public housing rents is the same as ‘market’ rents…(based on comparable properties in the same area).

So Loaded, I’m wondering whether your workmate really did manage to save all that much by living in P.H. Unless he wasn’t declaring all of his income, the chances are that he was forking-out just as much for his inner-city abode as he would have done in the private market.

16

kambuckta, I know he was knocking back overtime at work so he could keep his rent down.

Another workmate is paying only double figures each week for a large flat in the same suburb as me. It’d be worth about $220 per week in the private rental market. He and his wife both have declared income including overtime, and he mamages to support his drinking, smoking, gambling, and drug habits as well as sending two kids to school. They have two cars (his wife’s Corolla was bought new in 2000).

17

That sounds familiar; when my parents tried for a council house, they put in a request for the street where my aunt lived. Quite a nice area, houses all in grade-A shape and no troublesome residents… the clerk at the council offices told them they didn’t have a chance, unless they were prepared to wait several years at the very least.

I once heard my mother mention the 3 offer rule, after which you get put to the back of the waiting list again, but wasn’t entirely sure how accurate this was. Obviously it is the case in some areas after all.

Now for another question…

Does anyone know if local authorities have official procedures for freeing up council properties which are, let’s say, underinhabited? Reason I ask is because one of my aunts had a 3-bedroom council house; over the years she got divorced, her two eldest kids grew up and left home, and finally my 19 year old cousin died in a car crash, leaving her on her own. Shortly afterwards the council approached her with an offer of a small flat, which she refused in preference for staying where she was.

Is it common practise for a local authority to offer a downsized property when a family gets smaller by one means or another? If so, is it possible they were just trying to offer my aunt something more manageable, or were they hinting that the house was going to waste with just one person living there? This is something I’ve never asked her (she would most likely consider it none of my damn business), but I wonder if anybody here has some adecdotal or inside info regarding this.

18

In Leeds and towns around it, it is not too hard to get a better house on the council.

It would be considered corrupt of course, and it is, and I know who to go to and what to say, allegedly.

I would not be at all surprised to find that there are similar “schemes” wherever there is a queue up system for public housing.