It’s all in the mix
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Of all the conventions governing the way we build and manage our housing, mixed tenure is probably the most powerful. Huge mono-tenure estates too often failed their tenants by fuelling deprivation and adding still further to the stigmatisation of social housing.
The alternative vision - sustainable communities where renters live side by side with owner occupiers - has, rightly, been at the heart of housing policy for years now. Mixed-tenure estates may not always have been popular with estate agents, and they may not, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has pointed out, have lived up to some of the wilder claims made for them.
Yet by and large they have worked for the people who live in them.
But for how much longer? The model which allowed so many mixed-tenure schemes to get off the ground is broken. Mortgage companies aren’t lending, buyers aren’t buying and chief executives and finance directors aren’t going ahead with developments that don’t stack up. Housing associations are desperately trying to switch homes they had planned to sell over to rent.
And now Sir Bob Kerslake, the man tasked with delivering the new sustainable communities we need, has conceded that the make-up of new estates will have to change.
That will be a challenge to manage. As Sir Bob suggests, a return to huge socially rented estates would be a mistake. But there are dangers too in pushing too hard for new models of rent to buy and homeownership schemes.
As a Housing Corporation report warns this week, new first-time buyers could be tempted into homeownership at a time when house prices are set to plunge even further. Who will pick up the pieces when they face negative equity, repossession or eviction?
We should not give up on the mixed-tenure ideal. But we should be wary in troubled times of adding to the problem of marginal homeownership.
People deserve a choice of tenure which is sustainable not only for communities in which they live, but also for them.
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Readers' comments (1)
Jim Paton | 08/11/2008 0:30 am
Mixed tenure is not sustainable, neither does it work for people who live on such estates. I am one of the people for whom it doesn't work.
On a council estate of 100 flats we have (or had until recently) no fewer than 5 different types of tenure;
Secure periodic tenants,
Long tenants (or "leaseholders") who have exercised RTB or their successors in title,
Private AS tenants of the above (leaseholder / landlord sometimes effectively untraceable),
Tenants of RSLs holding flats on some obscure arrangement, presumably a fixed-term lease,
Tenants of the council in flats managed by a RSL under a management agreement (no longer the case).
The above mess is completely unmanageable, entrenches stigmatisation and social exclusion, and is an obstacle to coherent organisation or action by residents. It engenders permanent chaos rather than sustainability.
The most excluded and marginalised group on any council estate are the private AS tenants, now sometimes numerous. They have no stake in the estate and, lacking security of tenure, neither the confidence nor any good reason to be involved in its future. This creates the opposite of sustainable communities, but is a neglected aspect of RTB.
Even where large numbers of RTB flats have not changed hands and ended up at the bottom of the "buy to let" pool, there are still inherent problems. Time and time again, Secure tenants press for improvements to the appearance and amenities of their estates. Long tenants often end up opposing the improvements, not because they want to live in a dump any more than anyone else, but because they will have to pay through their service charges and cannot afford it. Apart from recent developments, the argument that it will improve the value of their homes cuts little ice with those who have no intention of selling but simply want a home for the rest of their days. The long tenants who bought with the intention of selling as soon as possible and moving on with a nice profit have largely done so long ago.
Sustainability requires at least a minimal unity of interest amongst residents. Mixed tenure prevents that. It may -I don't know- work on estates comprised of houses where RTB resulted in freeholds, but not on estates consisting of blocks of flats where RTB produces long tenancies and the pressure of service charges.
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