Housing Displacement

Conceptual and Methodological Issue

Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Maria Persdotter, Emil Pull, Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Maria Persdotter, Emil Pull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429762796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Residential Architecture

This book examines reasons, processes and consequences of housing displacement in different geographical contexts. It explores displacement as a prime act of housing injustice – a central issue in urban injustices.

With international case studies from the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, this book explores how housing displacement processes are more diverse and mutate into more new forms than have been acknowledged in the literature. It emphasizes a need to look beyond the existing rich gentrification literature to give primacy to researching processes of displacement to understand the socio-spatial change in the city. Although it is empirically and methodologically demanding for several reasons, studying displacement highlights gentrification's unjust nature as well as the unjust housing policies in cities and neighborhoods that are simply not undergoing gentrification. The book also demonstrates how expulsion, though under-researched, has become a vital component of contemporary advanced capitalism, and how a focus on gentrification has hindered a potential focus on its flipside of 'displacement', as well as the study of the occurrence of poor cleansing from a long-term historical perspective.

This book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on housing displacement to academics and researchers in the fields of urban studies, housing, citizenship and migration studies interested in housing policies and governance practices at the urban scale.

1 Council estate renewal in London
The challenges of evidencing its gentrification-induced displacement

Phil Hubbard and Loretta Lees

Introduction

It was in London that Ruth Glass famously first diagnosed (classic) gentrification in the 1960s, alerting us to the class-based improvement of inner-city districts that, over time, displaced low-income residents and inverted many of the key assumptions of the Chicago School’s ecological models dominant at the time (see Lees et al., 2008, Chapter 2). But this 1960s gentrification was by no means the first wave of activity displacing lower-income residents from the capital, with earlier rounds of state-sponsored redevelopment having targeted inner-city ‘slums’ in the immediate post-war era, decanting large numbers of lower-income residents to distant New Towns and satellite communities to enable the development of council estates built on modernist assumptions (Tunstall and Lowe, 2012). The scale of ambition was impressive, with mass production techniques used to produce subsidized council housing at an unprecedented rate and nearly half a million new homes added to London’s housing stock by the 1960s. Young and Wilmott (1957) famously documented the problems that beset those displaced from the East End ‘slums’ as they struggled to acclimatize to their new council estate surroundings: anonymity, isolation, status competition, lack of facilities, and even neurosis. The mass removal of established communities – and a programme of dispersal that tore apart existing social networks – was to have long-lasting legacies, and the attempts to rebuild functioning communities were often fraught and drawn-out affairs.

More recently, from the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, London’s council estates have been facing a ‘new’ urban renewal that threatens to repeat many of the mistakes of post-war urban renewal, which displaced and disrupted local communities and exacerbated the social problems slum clearance was meant to solve. With the nation’s highest land values and greatest housing pressures, London is at the forefront of a ‘new’ urban renewal that has identified many of its council estates as fit only for demolition; the rhetoric of ‘sink estates’ has come to the fore, with politicians bemoaning the concentrated poverty and social malaise that they identify as characteristic of post-war council estates. For example, the much-maligned Aylesbury estate in Southwark was the launching pad for New Labour’s urban renaissance vision in the late 1990s, a vision that promoted mixed-income communities to replace estates that were depicted (often wrongly) as crime-ridden and dysfunctional (Lees, 2014a). More recently, the Coalition and Conservative governments have similarly spoken of regenerating neglected estates, and they have used the imagery of brutal modernist architectural estates constructed in the 1960s as a way of promoting a new wave of regeneration that will supposedly re/connect or knit these estates ‘back to the mainstream’ (Campkin, 2017).

While the rhetoric of sink estates (Slater, 2018) glosses over the diversity of community and spatial forms these estates take, the idea that something needs to be done about London’s post-war council estates is now largely taken for granted. Analyses that identified the pivotal role estate residents played in the English riots of 2011 (see Till, 2013), as well as current concerns about knife crime in the capital, help consolidate the idea that these spaces need to be regenerated. At the same time, the housing affordability crisis is also being used to argue that many of the larger, high rise estates – once depicted as high density – are not densely-occupied enough. A government-sponsored report by Savills in collaboration with the Space Syntax group promotes the adoption of a ‘complete streets’ model of redevelopment rather than a ‘block-based’ one (Campkin, 2017; see Create Streets, http://dev.createstreets.com/). This type of model posits that high-rise development surrounded by communal and collective areas of public space (e.g., gardens, playgrounds, and drying areas) breeds neglect of public space, an argument that can be traced back to ‘defensible space’ arguments in the 1970s and 1980s (see Jacobs and Lees, 2015; Lees and Warwick, forthcoming); is wasteful of resource; and does not constitute ‘the best and highest’ form of land use. This implies that the redevelopment of London’s council estates is morally, socially, and economically necessary – with estates themselves being identified as de facto brownfield sites and hence suitable for new housing even though they are already home to long-established communities, many of these multi-class, multi-cultural, and multi-ethnic in character.

Given current budgetary constraints, few local authorities are in a position to redevelop these estates alone; the preferred solution is to transfer these assets to private developers, who will demolish most of what currently stands and replace it with a mix of affordable and market rate housing, increasing the overall number of housing units available. While this means that state assets are being ceded to the private sector, the need to increase the overall housing supply via densification of these estates justifies this solution. The Mayor of London’s Housing Strategy (2014: 59) called for the ‘vast development potential in London’s existing affordable housing estates’ to be unlocked through private redevelopment. To ‘kick-start and accelerate’ that process, the Tory government launched a GBP 150 million Estate Regeneration Programme of loans to private developers ‘redeveloping existing estates’ on ‘a mixed tenure basis’ (Homes and Communities Agency, 2014), continuing New Labour’s mixed community policy of ‘gentrification by stealth’ (Lees, 2008; Bridge et al., 2011). The London Assembly (2015: 14) estimated that in the preceding decade, fifty former council estates across London received planning permission for partial or complete demolition and redevelopment at higher densities. As we describe below, this appears a gross under-estimate of the extent of the demolitions undertaken; irrespective, the number of households ‘decanted’ from these estates is clearly considerable, and the cumulative impacts on residents (both tenants and leaseholders) who have already been displaced or are still waiting to be decanted is potentially life-changing.

The displacements associated with the redevelopment of London’s council estates are significant in number and escalating, but as yet, there has been little attention given to these – most of the extant literature on this regeneration focuses on resistance rather than the rehousing of those who are removed on either a short or long-term basis (see, e.g., Watt, 2016). There are manifold reasons for this, not least the fact that ‘displacement is much harder to detect than gentrification’ (Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2019). As we describe below, while it is theoretically possible to use existing sources to demonstrate the socio-economic uplift of specific neighbourhoods, the range of data available for actually tracking the journeys of the displaced is frustratingly limited. Governmental agencies are seemingly uninterested in where former council estate residents move to, only concerned that they have been ‘decanted’ to allow demolition to begin. This means we are left to piece together disparate evidence to try to estimate the extent of displacement associated with the redevelopment of London’s housing estates – something that matters profoundly given the potential impact that rehousing has on the thousands affected by this ‘new urban renewal’.

The challenge of evidencing displacement from London’s council estates

The focus on displacement (and those displaced) has a patchy history in the gentrification literature, with recent commentary lamenting the effective ‘“displacement” of displacement’ (Helbrecht, 2018: 2). Work in gentrification studies has historically tended to focus on middle-class gentrifiers and the production of gentrified living spaces (Slater et al., 2004; Huse, 2014; Paton, 2014) rather than the consequences for low-income groups. Hence, Helbrecht (2018: 2) describes the gentrification literature as ‘a one-eyed cyclops that operates with an enormous intellectual bias because it observes only the upgrading aspect of the gentrification process while ignoring displacement’. Displacement has consequently been coined as the ‘dark side’ of gentrification (Baeten et al., 2017: 645), an observation that begs a more detailed investigation of the different forms and modalities of gentrification-induced displacement.

In many ways, the lack of data on the numbers displaced has allowed governments, policy-makers, and planners to pursue strategies of gentrification unchallenged by statistical evidence of what is often mooted as its most negative impact: the displacement of long-term residents (Atkinson, 2000). This point is doubly relevant in the context of the state’s effective hand-over of council estates in London to private developers. While local government appears to see displacement of tenants and leaseholders a price worth paying in return for an increased housing supply in the capital, if those displaced cannot afford (or find) decent housing elsewhere or cannot afford to return to the redeveloped estate once complete, then the costs of renewal may well outweigh the benefits for the city’s population. Here, the social costs of displacement – namely, the psychological impact of moving to a new neighbourhood and potentially failing to re-establish meaningful social networks and connections – are potentially massive if one considers the ‘decanting’ of residents as a form of violence.

Foregrounding violence in discussions of displacement may seem extreme when, in some studies, the effects of displacement seem relatively benign (but see Elliot-Cooper et al., 2019). For instance, Young and Wilmott’s (1957) classic study of kinship in east London identified many individuals who actually found displacement to have a beneficial impact on their lives, with an enforced move from the inner city to their new estates bringing them heating, running water, indoor toilets, and multiple bedrooms. Longitudinal research in Glasgow by Kearns and Mason (2013, 2015) likewise suggests that there might be a difference in the ‘psychosocial’ impacts of displacement between those willing to move and those who are reluctant displacees. Reporting deleterious health outcomes for those displaced from central Glasgow housing estates, their conclusion was that ‘most of those who moved considered that they had “bettered” their residential conditions, though again less so in neighbourhood than in dwelling terms’ (Kearns and Mason, 2013: 195). The latter observation is important given the argument that ‘working-class’ people are said to exhibit a phenomenological understanding of their home and neighbourhood as a ‘comfortable lived space’ rather than a financial investment (Davidson and Lees, 2010). Thus, even if displaced residents receive the market value for their loss of property, it is impossible to compensate them for the longing and isolation that are often felt when their home is lost. In some cases, a new place may never feel truly like home; no matter how many new friends are made or how much better a new house may be, the memories of their original home and neighbourhood will always remind the displaced of their loss (Jones, 2015). The paradox here is that the ‘objective’ social good which derives from moving to a ‘better’ neighbourhood becomes a form of ‘systemic violence’ – not always a physical violence directly executed by individuals, but one that ‘operates anonymously, systemically and invisibly through the very way society is organised’ (Baeten et al., 2017: 643).

Of course, much here depends on where displaced residents relocate to. Crawford and Sainsbury (2017) argue that rehousing displaced residents across a range of locations may contribute to a loss of social networks and associated social capital (see also Posthumus et al., 2013). Lyons (1996) reports that, given the choice, lower-status households tend to move more locally than more affluent ones, reflecting both their restricted choices as well as their desi...