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Introduction
Tony Fahey, Michelle Norris and Catherine Anne Field
Introduction
This book provides an analysis of over a decade of social change and public policy intervention in seven social housing neighbourhoods in Ireland, viewed in the context of national and European trends in urban neighbourhood disadvantage and renewal. It emerges from a research project on the seven neighbourhoods carried out between late 2007 and early 2009, which extended an earlier study of the same neighbourhoods carried out by more or less the same group of researchers in 1997–8 (see Fahey, 1999, for an account of the earlier study). The more recent study thus took the form of a ten-year follow-up to that original work. Although there were some differences in the questions asked and research methods employed in the original and follow-up phases, the project as a whole offers a quasi-longitudinal perspective on the trajectory of seven social housing neighbourhoods during a ten-year period in Ireland, when the economy boomed and the state greatly expanded its policy responses to the problems of poor urban neighbourhoods. The interest of the study thus lies in the decade-wide then-and-now character of the analysis it provides and its detailed examination of how national trends and policies are reflected in the circumstances of particular neighbourhoods.
In this book, the researchers who conducted the study draw on the knowledge they accumulated from the initial and follow-up phases to present and analyse aspects of the life of the neighbourhoods and their development over the ten years encompassed by the study. The chapters in the book are separately authored. The topic each contributing author deals with and the approach adopted, in part, reflect his or her individual expertise and perspective but together the contributions seek to build what we hope is an inclusive and coherent picture. Most of the analyses focus on what happened over the ten-year period in the seven neighbourhoods, taking account of initial conditions as reported in the original study and attempting to trace the trajectories that led to outcomes that could be observed ten years later. The book thus expands on the original study primarily by adding a ten-year time dimension but also by reflecting further on the lessons to be learned from the experiences of the seven neighbourhoods over the whole period and what these might mean for policy.
Themes
As part of that further reflection, we develop the concept of ‘social liveability’ in the present book and use it as a framework within which to restate key insights from the original study and focus the findings of the follow-up (see below for an outline of the origins of this concept). This concept is intended to draw attention to the attractiveness of neighbourhoods in residential terms as a feature that is analytically distinct from their level of social disadvantage and warrants attention in its own right from academic analysis and policy intervention. It emerged early on in our study of the seven neighbourhoods that wide variation between and within them in their attractiveness to residents was one of their most evident and striking features. One only had to walk into the neighbourhoods to see that some were physically neat, orderly and little different in appearance from surrounding middle-class neighbourhoods (save perhaps for the sometimes smaller size of dwellings), while others were dilapidated, rubbish strewn, defaced with graffiti, bare of foliage and sometimes pock-marked with empty, boarded-up units. In some cases, that contrast leaped out within a two-minute walk in the same neighbourhood as one turned from a well-settled and thriving street or road or block of flats in a particular housing development to its twin around the corner that could be a depressing picture of shabbiness. Interviews with residents and analysis of housing allocations backed up these visible contrasts in that areas that looked well typically were in high demand – they had waiting lists of prospective tenants who wanted to get in or, in the case of social housing that had been purchased by tenants, commanded reasonable prices in the housing market. Areas that looked distressed, by contrast, had waiting lists of tenants seeking to transfer elsewhere or had experienced a collapse in prices for privatised dwellings. The differing levels of attractiveness of a neighbourhood to residents were thus evident not only in sharp differences in visual appeal but also through residents’ revealed preferences as expressed either by actual movement into or out of the neighbourhood or by waiting lists in the case of social housing tenants or house prices in the case of private purchasers (see further below on the concept of liveability).
In light of their origins in broadly similar socioeconomic contexts and physical design configurations, that variation between and within social housing neighbourhoods, in our view, was a puzzle. Why did neighbourhoods – or parts of neighbourhoods – that fundamentally were so similar turn out so differently? Why did some tip over into spirals of decline, while the majority settled and evolved into unremarkable and broadly well-integrated residential environments? Why was it necessary to mount massive programmes of ‘regeneration’ in some areas (which often involved extensive demolition of sometimes relatively new housing) and not in similar areas nearby?
It seemed important to try to answer these questions, in part because of the harm that was caused to residents in areas where failures of liveability occurred – whatever disadvantage those residents may have experienced as low-income households could be made worse by the sharp deterioration in the quality of the local environment that neighbourhood failure entailed. A better understanding of how such deterioration happened and how it might be averted thus seemed worthwhile. There was also a concern about the waste of public resources that occurred when the decline of a neighbourhood caused what was often expensive and well-built social housing to fall into ruination. In addition, it seemed important to highlight these wide contrasts and the exceptional nature of truly bad outcomes in order to combat the negative stereotyping of social housing that often cropped up in public discourse and provided an ill-informed influence on housing policy decisions.
From the outset, then, our approach focused on differentiation as a key feature of social housing neighbourhoods. That approach acknowledges the general risk factors that affect most social housing – high concentrations of low-income households, low educational levels in the resident population, high unemployment rates, insufficient local amenities and facilities, urban design features that are not always suitable, and so on. When it comes to accounting for the fate of neighbourhoods, these risk factors have some explanatory purchase, not least because they indicate why failures of liveability typically occur in social housing rather than in areas of private middle-class housing. These factors are also important in their own right because they point to limitations in the life chances of those affected that warrant being tackled by public policy.
Important as these risk factors are in themselves, however, they do not account for the differentiation that occurs within social housing, particularly when we recall the micro-level on which that differentiation can sometimes occur. The usually cited risk factors are distributed too widely and uniformly in the social housing sector and are too inconsistently linked to the circumstances of particular neighbourhoods to explain their contrasting outcomes. In fact, from our survey of the largely successful history of social housing in Ireland in the original study (Fahey, 1999), it emerged that urban areas with concentrations of socially disadvantaged tenant households succeeded more often than they failed. The most common outcome was that they created settled, liveable neighbourhoods that merged seamlessly into the general urban housing fabric. With the passage of time and the operation of tenant purchase schemes, those areas often blended into the private housing sector and their original social housing neighbourhoods were largely forgotten.
Another way ofstating this outcome is that while all problematic neighbourhoods had relatively disadvantaged resident populations, only a minority of disadvantaged population clusters generated unliveable neighbourhoods. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed that the link between the social profile of the resident population and the social quality of the neighbourhood environment contained an element of reverse causality: the emergence of the first signs of deterioration in a social housing complex or neighbourhood could prompt a flight of better-functioning households and set in train a downward local spiral of weakening social composition and worsening liveability in the locality.
This perspective, therefore, considers neighbourhood liveability and the social profile of the resident population as analytically distinct issues, while also recognising that they are closely interlinked. In the original study, as we sought to disentangle these two elements and focus more closely on liveability, we concluded that physical factors – the location, build quality, housing type, and size of neighbourhoods – could be important influences but usually were of secondary significance. Social factors, rather, were the primary proximate influence. As a general rule, people were willing to live in poor buildings if the quality of community and neighbourhood life was good, but they were unwilling to live in good buildings if they considered the quality of community/neighbourhood life to be poor (Norris, 1999).
Examining what the crucial social influences were, we pointed to the central role of highly contingent micro-level factors that in their most proximate and visible form turned on aspects of local social order or what is now often referred to as community safety. These factors undoubtedly were rooted in macro-social conditions but at local level were uneven and unpredictable in their pattern of occurrence. They usually emanated from small numbers of troubled and disruptive households or individuals whose ‘acting out’ behaviour in public spaces in particular areas lay at the core of the more damaging forms of neighbourhood liveability problems. These problems could manifest themselves in the form of noisy or unruly neighbours, vandalism, joy-riding, harassment, or levels of criminality ranging from petty burglary and local drug dealing through to serious organised gang violence. In some (though not all) of the neighbourhoods in our study, illegal drugs were at the centre of many social order problems, though the nature of the activities involved varied and changed over time, ranging from drug dealing and drug taking in public spaces to violent conflict between drug-dealing gangs (see Chapter 8). The typical view of residents in locations most affected by factors such as these was that while community was strong and supportive in the area, the social quality of the locality was undermined by small groups of neighbours who behaved in these disruptive ways and blighted the lives of those around them (for a similar picture of micro-variation in disadvantaged communities in Ireland and its links with social order problems see Hourigan’s account of ‘micro-social systems’ in disadvantaged areas in Limerick city – Hourigan, 2011, pp. 60–73).
Residents considered that they suffered doubly from the disruptive minorities – first because they were often the direct victims of their actions, and second because the disruptive few undermined the reputation of neighbourhoods and gave rise to a stigma that affected all residents equally. The distinction drawn by residents between the ‘sound’ majority and the few disruptive troublemakers undoubtedly oversimplified reality, but it nevertheless seemed to capture an important part of the dynamic of decline in unsuccessful neighbourhoods (O’Higgins, 1999).
While the majority of residents often considered themselves the victims of troublemaking minorities within neighbourhoods, those troublemakers, viewed from a different perspective, often emerged as victims themselves. They typically came from dysfunctional family backgrounds or suffered from problems such as mental illness, personality disorders, drug or alcohol dependence, or a persistent history of personal failure and low self-esteem. Many thus had difficulties and rights that needed to be taken into account in devising remedies for troubled neighbourhoods, though in instances where disruptive behaviour had escalated into criminality, the urgent primary requirement from a neighbourhood protection point of view was effective policing to remove or contain the threat the behaviour represented.
Furthermore, when it came to services, the inability of particular relevant services to deal with the needs and problems of these small segments of the population could be identified as a central problem in its own right, over and above any general limitations in services as a means to address wider patterns of social disadvantage. General improvements in service quality thus needed to include measures to reach out to the most marginalised families and individuals – what Hourigan (2011) calls the ‘disadvantaged of the disadvantaged’. The study concurred with criticisms of the historically poor estate management record of local authorities but also found that moves towards a more hands-on responsive management approach had been in place since the early 1990s. The impact of that development had not become evident by the time the study was carried out (Guerin, 1999).
The conclusions and recommendations of the original study highlighted the need for social housing policy and practice to focus on social order issues and move them to the top of the agenda as a necessary first step in regenerating problem neighbourhoods. It pointed in particular to the need to put in place both preventive and treatment measures that would target those who were the cause of disruption and provide them with the supports and controls that would enable them to integrate more effectively into the community. However, it also emphasised the importance of not overstating the prevalence or severity of social problems in local authority housing, in view of the large segments of the social housing sector where these problems were absent or slight (Fahey, 1999).
From original study to follow-up
Social housing is intended to alleviate social deprivation, yet by the 1980s and 1990s, in Ireland as in many other countries in Europe, it was often blamed for worsening the plight of the poor. The most common criticism was that it concentrated deprived people into large, unattractive, poorly serviced neighbourhoods and so fomented social problems – poverty, crime, drug addiction, vandalism, and alienation – and provided a poor physical and social environment for personal wellbeing and family life (Emms, 1990). The 1997–8 study sought to test this view in the Irish case by...
