The People's Home?

Social Rented Housing in Europe and America

Michael Harloe

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780631186427
• eBook ISBN: 9781444399400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

The People's Home is a magisterial examination of the development of social rented housing over the last hundred years in six advanced capitalist countries - Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the USA.

1

Social Housing and the ‘Social Question’ : Housing Reform Before 1914

There are several dangers in looking back at the origins of social policies and reform from the vantage point of the late twentieth century. Perhaps the most obvious is a tendency to see the past through a frame of reference which is set by the contemporary vocabulary of concepts, theories and concerns – ignoring the ways in which time and circumstance have altered all of these. A related danger is to misinterpret history by turning it into a teleology, selecting out the evidence to demonstrate an almost inevitable progression of social policy development from its earliest origins to its modern forms. A further problem is to assume too simple and direct a connection between the objective needs to which social reform was purportedly a response, the campaigns of those elites who argued for reforms and the actual development of social policies. Often each of these were related only in limited ways to each of the others.

In reconstructing the history of housing reform, in particular in examining the emergence of social rented housing, we face all these difficulties. Just to illustrate the points made above briefly, first, there are problems of vocabulary. In the past hundred years the meanings and therefore the social significance of words and concepts have changed in ways which are crucially important to note. For example, ‘public health’ now refers to the control and elimination of physical disease. But in the nineteenth century it carried a far wider burden of meaning encompassing moral and social ‘health’ too. More precisely still, the concern was with the ‘health’ of the new working class and this concern was motivated by the actual or presumed consequences of this class’s condition for the dominant social and economic order. This concern is reiterated time and time again in the contemporary writings of social reformers, for example the American reformer Alfred T. White, who, writing in 1879, stated:

[t]he badly constructed, unventilated, dark and foul tenement houses of New York… are the nurseries of the epidemics which spread with certain destructiveness into the fairest homes; they are the hiding places of the local banditti; they are the cradles of the insane who fill the asylums and of the paupers who throng the almshouses… they produce these noxious and unhappy elements of society as surely as the harvest follows the sowing (cited in Lubove, 1974: 35).

Therefore, the nineteenth-century concern with public health incorporated a whole range of issues lying at the very heart of capitalist society itself.

In fact, the social reformers who campaigned over issues of housing and public health were concerned with a much more fundamental issue, variously described as the ‘social question’ or, in a telling phrase, ‘the dangerous classes’.¹ Their activities were in no simple sense a response to narrowly conceived housing or health needs. These issues were not, as they were later to become, or apparently become, separate fields of social policy, the province of bureaucrats and specialists, divorced from each other and from broader questions of the reproduction and maintenance of the capitalist social formation, with relatively separate sets of issues and debates specific to each policy area. It follows that viewing the early history of, for example, housing reform as if it had a logic and meaning which related purely to a conception of housing needs and policies as they have since become institutionalized within academic and political discourses is inadequate and misleading. Rather, as Niethammer (1981: 31) has suggested, the early debates over housing reform were ‘the experimental formulation of a new paradigm of social control’.

Teleological explanations of, for example, the emergence of social housing, seeing it as an inevitable outcome of the failure of other solutions to the ‘housing problem’ pervade the conventional housing histories. Thus Daunton (1983; 1984) has criticized some of the leading accounts of British housing for their ‘Whig’ interpretation of history (see also Englander, 1983). Such accounts are defective because, among other reasons, they not only abstract ‘housing’ from the broader context noted above, but also falsely privilege one often quite minor and highly contentious strand in the arguments of housing reformers in the era before 1914, and suggest that social housing had a much more central role in reformist debates and proposals than in practice it did have. They also tend to perpetuate what Marcuse (1986a) has called the myth of the benevolent state, or at least the myth of a benevolent governing elite, which, once it had recognized that the needs of the working class for housing could be met in no other way, responded accordingly. However, teleology is also to be found in the accounts of those who seek to explain housing developments as some inevitable outcome of working-class struggle or the needs of industry for the reproduction of labour power (for example, Community Development Project (CDP), 1976; Ginsburg, 1979). The problem here is not that class struggle or the interests of industrial capital were wholly irrelevant to the course of history, but that the relationships of these and other factors to this history were far from simple and thus are not matters to be taken for granted by the analyst. What links there were, if any, varied over time and from country to country. So these connections have to be established by research, not just assumed to exist from the outset.

Finally, there is the problematic nature of the relationship between the objective housing conditions of the working class, the slums, squalor and misery so graphically portrayed by the mass of empirical research generated and utilized by the early housing reformers, the reformers’ own proposals and the forms taken by the emergent state involvement in housing. The simplistic model which assumes a humanitarian response to perceived needs on the part of the reformers, followed in due time by an inevitable governmental response, bears little resemblance to historical reality. The reformers did not simply respond to need, they had their own perceptions of the housing conditions of the working class, why they existed, and why and how they should – or should not – be addressed by the state. The evidence of these conditions and the language of humanitarianism was often deployed by the reformers but the purposes which lay behind these efforts related to the material and social interests which the reformers sought to sustain, and these were rarely those of the working class. As a German housing reformer noted:

[t]he propertied classes must be shaken from their slumber; they must finally be made to realise that even if they make the greatest sacrifices, that these, as Chamberlain recently said in London, are but a limited and very modest premium with which to buy protection against the epidemics and the social revolution which must surely come, unless we can prevent the lower classes of our great cities being reduced to animal and barbaric existence by the awfulness of their housing conditions (Gustav Schmoller, cited in Bullock and Read, 1985: 52).

Moreover, there are equally problematic connections between the concerns of these reforming elites and the factors which motivated state action. Just to give one example, John Foster (1979) has pointed out that in late Victorian Britain, Parliament tended to pass housing legislation when the London housing market was relatively oversupplied with housing, not when it was in crisis. A similar relationship between the timing of increased tenement house regulation and the state of the property market has been noted by A. Jackson (1976), in his study of New York housing. In such circumstances increased regulation, which had the effect of reducing the supply of slum housing and driving up rents, was in the clear interests of the major property owners. Such developments may have been lent a cloak of respectability by the rhetoric of housing reformers, but were hardly brought about by this means.

Many similar points have been explored in a paper by Topalov (1985), which considers the limitations of many of the ‘first-generation’ attempts by Marxist analysts in the 1970s to move away from conventional approaches to the study of social policy, and in particular, housing policy. Topalov is concerned to argue for a new approach to the understanding of social policies ‘from below’, suggesting that the study of social policies in a fragmented and overspecialized way is inadequate. This narrow and abstracted view – already criticized above – began to develop as bourgeois reformers decomposed the ‘social question’ into a range of specific problems and policies designed to address specific ‘needs’ and is now entrenched in academic organization and practice. Both conventional and the more recent Marxist studies share an approach which takes for granted as the object of research one of these fragmented fields of enquiry, seeking – without much success – to trace direct causal links between unique sets of policies and their effects on social and economic contradictions. However, there is no neatly compartmentalized relationship between, on the one hand, a specific set of social policies, and, on the other, the practices of the ‘working class categories who are the target of social policies’. In reality, ‘all these piecemeal state actions act together on the reproduction and transformation of the working class as both a labour force and as a danger to the capitalist order in the production process, as well as on society at large’ (Topalov, 1985: 267–8). Faced with this problem, many recent writers have sought a functionalist short cut, assuming a unique connection between specific policies and, for example, the resolution in practice of the problems of labour power reproduction, social integration or whatever is thrown up by the evolution of capitalism. Topalov argues convincingly that the mistake is to start from, and be contained within, the confines of social policy as it is defined by the state itself (a similar point is made by Taylor-Gooby and Dale, 1981). Instead, one must consider the broader field of social practices and their determinations, the real object of concern for social policies.

Although Topalov wishes to direct attention away from a single-minded obsession with state policy as the object for research, he is not suggesting that research into state policies or social reform movements should be abandoned, only that the limitations of such studies will not be overcome until one examines ‘from below’ how working-class ways of life were actually changed by, and in reaction to, state intervention. However, some progress can be made towards a more adequate analysis even if the focus is on an examination of state policies and social reform movements. This is because the connections between a concern for reform and the broad project of controlling the ‘dangerous classes’ and sustaining hegemony were often clearly expressed in the reformers’ discourses and arguments. By simply reconstructing these discourses not much can be said about their consequences for the working class. However, one can correct the distorted understanding of the housing reform movement that has been produced by a ‘reading’ of the history of the period which fails to grasp that the explicit object of reform was the ‘condition of the working class’, and that the reasons for the reform proposals had little to do with the simple recognition of ‘needs’ or humanitarian impulses. This is the mythology that much ‘state-centred’ social policy research has left unquestioned. In addition, one can also explore some aspects of the response, if any, of the organized working class to these reforms. In short, there can be a more adequate account of social policy ‘from above’ than much recent work which abstracts housing reform from its wider social, economic and political context and thus imposes an oversimplified and misleading set of ‘explanations’ on the historical record.

REINTERPRETING HOUSING REFORM

In his paper Topalov (1985) sketches in some of the salient issues which those who examine the history of reform, studying the reformers’ arguments and the responses to them, soon discover. For example, he notes that organized labour was frequently indifferent or hostile to these reforms in their early stages and that, in so far as claims were made by the exploited working class, they were transformed, reformulated and displaced by state policies. He also notes the strong cross-national similarities between the reformers’ proposals in all those countries affected by the Industrial Revolution towards the end of the nineteenth century. He writes:

[t]hey express the realization that repressing working class revolts is not enough, they have to be prevented… Everywhere the same kind of tasks are identified as necessary to fulfil this aim. Progressive employers will more effectively enforce their rule within the firm by ‘rationalising’ production, that is by increasingly depriving producers of any control over the work process. Social reformers and the state will try to reshape workers’ habits outside the workplace, especially through far-reaching changes in the urban environment (Topalov, 1985: 259).

Topalov adds that this project led naturally to the multitude of enquiries into the state of the object to be transformed, namely the worker, and the imposition of a framework of analysis on these data. But this analysis had a particular purpose, it ‘hardly shed light on workers’ actual practices… [t]hey cannot comprehend the rationality of the latter, which is determined by the reality of and resistance to exploitation and to accompanying discipline outside the workplace. Workers’ practices are indeed observed and disguised in ways which fragment social reality in order to yield manageable objects for social policies’ (Topalov, 1985: 260).

As Topalov notes, at the centre of this analytical schema lay a classification of workers which linked position in the labour market (or outside it) to an imputed level of morality and what might be described as a ‘potential for salvation’, i.e. for social integration. He writes that workers are classified as

skilled, deskilled, or unskilled; permanent or casual; factory, workshop or home working; native or immigrant; poor to be relieved or outcasts to be locked up [he could have added ‘deserving or undeserving’]. The problem at hand is to give some intelligibility to these various classifications. This can be done by identifying which moral tendencies, or cultural systems… accompany the material conditions, so as to discriminate between three populations. Standing between adapted workers and undeserving poor are those who may be saved or civilised. Repressive policies deal with outcasts who are to be if possible eliminated, driven into workhouses or ousted through immigration. Reform policies… are chiefly targeted towards those who might be reshaped so as to comply with the norms of a swiftly changing industrial capitalism (Topalov, 1985: 260).

In a later section of this chapter we note several examples of this type of analysis of the working class by housing reformers, together with the connections that were made between an assessment of ‘reformability’ and specific proposals for reform. One of the most complete statements of this type of analysis was contained in the first ever US government report on housing, published in 1895. It reads:

differentiation of the great mass… of working people is a necessary preliminary to the statement of conclusions. In the first place there is the artisan element. Members of this class are in receipt of fair wages. As a rule, they are steady, thrifty and socially ambitious. They are good tenants… They can pay sufficient rent for good houses, and for them builders, whether private individuals or model companies… can and usually do make satisfactory provision.

The next step in the gradation is occupied by individuals who have not mounted quite so high in the social scale. One section has been unfortunate, and… has become discouraged in the effort to maintain a fair standard of existence. The other includes those prone to be lazy or careless, and those who are not particularly intelligent or ambitious or are possessed of bad habits. Both sections… are not desirable tenants. The first section of this class is generally that which model enterprises of a philanthropic character have attempted to deal with, though the greater number of model agencies have designedly left them out… They need looking after, and they are the class with which lady rent collectors should establish reciprocal relations of business and sympathetic interest…

The third section includes the incorrigible, the drunkard, the criminal, the immoral, the lazy, and the shiftless… as Lord Shaftesbury significantly remarks, they have hardly any domestic or civilized feelings. There must be an entire change of policy on the part of the governing bodies towards this class. Lord Provost Russell of Edinburgh goes so far as to say that they should be driven from their hiding places into municipal lodging houses, where they could be under police control, the sexes separated, and the children placed in institutions where they might grow up useful members of society…

The slum must go. Not only is it a menace to public health, but it is a moral fester wherein character is being continually debauched and the evils which afflict civilization recruited (US Commissioner for Labor, 1895: 439–42).

Topalov also refers to the role that the extended notion of ‘public health’, already discussed above, played in the reformers’ discourses. He writes: ‘[a] key word characterized one of the main ways to reform: cleansing – that is transforming the physical environment of working-class life in order to change its social reality’ (Topalov, 1985: 261). This hygienism gave rise to an urban reform plan, involving architects, urban planners and housing reformers, based on environmental determinism. He could have added that once this movement got under way and became entrenched in the bureaucracy and in professional organizations, what started out as means to a broader end – environmental reform as a method of redetermining social reality – soon became, at least for its supporters and those whom it employed, an end in itself, so helping to fragment and obscure what was originally a unified approach, not to urban reform per se but to social reform and the problem of the ‘dangerous classes’.

Finally, Topalov refers to some of the sources of variation and conflict in the reform movement. Although there were some common features in reformist programmes, they were neither consistently organized nor did they necessarily achieve their aims. There were arguments between differing groups and opposition from industrial and property interests, organized labour and politicians. A key issue was the relative roles of the state and private initiative. One conclusion that can be drawn from this observation is that the broader socio-economic and political context within which reform occurred has to be incorporated in any analysis of reform in order to make sense of its specific trajectories. A further consequence is that cross-national studies are invaluable in this respect, highlighting the nationally specific ways in which a broadly similar project of social reform, arising in consequence of a broadly similar process of capitalist industrialization and urbanization and the creation of a new working class, resulted in nationally specific institutions and practices. Furthermore, this exploration of crossnational variations is crucial for the subsequent understanding of the ways in which policies evolved in the years after the First World War because, although the later development of policies was a response to new conditions, the institutions and practices which evolved before 1914, and the social interests which were associated with them, had a continuing influence on how these policies were formulated. And some of these variations continue to have significance almost a century later.

The following sections of this chapter consider some of the salient contours of the housing reform movement and the state’s response to it in the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain, France, Germany and the United States. Such an exercise is fraught with difficulties, especially within the limits of a single chapter. But, at the risk of a certain oversimplification and superficiality, some sense of the distinctive ways in which housing reform and housing policies were socially constructed in each nation can be conveyed.

In each case the first requirement is to consider some of the important contextual factors. Although the ‘social question’ arose in each country in response to broadly similar developments, there are also important differences in these developments and the importance which reforming elites placed on the ‘housing question’ compared to issues of workplace regulation, the extension of suffrage, education, and so on. Moreover, the scale and pace of capitalist industrialization and urbanization also varied and thus affected the salience of the housing issue. In addition, there were important differences in general social, economic and political structures. These affected matters such as the nature of the political resistance to reform, the extent to which sections of the working class could gain access to adequate housing through the private market without the intervention of the state, and the ways in which such intervention could be made politically acceptable. Such considerations helped in turn to determine the nature and range of acceptable ‘solutions’ to the housing problem in each country. These solutions will be briefly reviewed. Finally, the question of what role, if any, working-class organization and pressure played in shaping the course of housing reform in its early years will be discussed.

THE NETHERLANDS: SOCIAL HOUSING AS A ‘PRIVATE INITIATIVE’

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands was still in the long decline which followed its period of political and economic dominance in the seventeenth century.² Industrial development was slow, up to about 1850 the rural population was increasing faster than the urban population.³ In the second half of the century industrialization accelerated but the urban population began to increase rapidly only in the last 30 or so years of the century. This growth was centred on Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague. But even by the end of the century only about one- third of the population lived in cities and towns of any magnitude and it was not until after 1945 that the rural to urban transition was completed. Nevertheless, by the last years of the nineteenth century, the nexus of issues that comprised the ‘social question’ was evident.

Political development was also slow, for example, in comparison with Britain and France. Purely monarchical rule did not end until 1840, and the rise of the middle class and its liberal ideology and politics was also slower to develop. But in 1848 a new constitution was adopted, based on a limited franchise. There followed a period of Liberal-dominated government which lasted until the end of the century. These years were also marked by the emergence of a key division in Dutch politics, which has been of considerable significance for the structuring of social policy, based on religion rather than class. In the nineteenth century the major division was between the secular Liberals and the Protestant- dominated Confessionals although, in comparison with some other countries (for example Belgium), liberalism took a less extreme form in Holland. Organized party politics in the modern sense began to form only in the late 1870s when the Protestant Anti- Revolutionary Party (ARP) developed the first party programme which included some references to protective legislation for the working class. Labour organization also evolved rather slowly, there was some development of trade unions after 1865 but these tended to be anti-socialist. There was also a Calvinist-based workers’ association.

In the Great Depression, which affected all the capitalist economies from the early 1870s into the 1890s, the Dutch economy stagnated. In the 1880s there was some growth in unemployment and social tension and a Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) emerged in the 1890s as large-scale industrialization took off. However, it was not until just before the First World War that organized labour became a significant industrial and parliamentary force. Then it chose to reject the opportunity to form a governing alliance with the radical liberal movement which had developed in the preceding decades. Therefore, the impact of organized labour on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction: Social Housing and Welfare Capitalism
• 1: Social Housing and the ‘Social Question’: Housing Reform Before 1914
• 2: The Temporary Solution: Social Housing after the Great War
• 3: Social Housing in the Depression
• 4: The Golden Age: Social Housing in an Era of Reconstruction and Growth
• 5: Residualism Revived: Social Housing in the Contemporary Era
• 6: Social Housing and Theories of Social Policy
• Bibiliography
• Index