Introduction

Housing marks out and shapes disadvantaged areas, creating the physical conditions that help or hinder family futures. It is a dominant issue in the lives of families because it links with so many aspects of local life including neighbours, schools, the local environment and income. When housing conditions are poor, environments deteriorate, people with little choice get trapped and social problems become magnified. So housing underlines the wider problems families face. Housing is far more than a box on the ground that shelters people in their private lives; it is shaped by its owners, its age, its occupants and by the wider local environment. In this chapter we look at basic housing conditions, investment in housing upgrading, the social and management problems attached to social renting and the regeneration programmes the areas underwent during our visits. The 200 families, from many different backgrounds, live in these areas mainly because they cannot pay their full housing costs. So social landlords play a dominant role in their lives as housing and regeneration agencies.

Resident owner-occupiers are in a minority in all the disadvantaged areas we explored, and most bought their homes from the council under the Right to Buy, tying their housing investment into the social makeup of the areas. This pattern is common in low-income areas across the country. The small number of older terraced properties in the two inner-city areas are a little different, as they have increasingly been bought and done up by incoming ‘gentrifiers’, and were traditionally owned by low-income families or private landlords or local housing associations; a handful of the families lived in these terraces. There are new blocks of flats being built for higher-income, younger households in the two London areas. The families did not regard these new flats as housing they could possibly aspire to. First, we look at the way housing is owned, then at who occupies it, and then at wider repercussions of these patterns.