letter in Hackney Gazette (June 2004)
Posted: June 23, 2004 Filed under: Elections, Media Comments Off on letter in Hackney Gazette (June 2004)The Independent Working Class Association would like to thank everyone who voted for our candidate Lorna Reid in the London mayoral election.
It is clear from the results that the majority of our votes came from areas such as Hackney and Islington where we have been active on local level for some time.
Unlike the other parties, the IWCA isn’t mainly about elections – we ran a mayoral campaign to raise awareness of our community politics in working class areas. We would therefore like to invite any Hackney residents (whether they voted for us or not) who are concerned about anti-social behaviour, housing repairs and transfers, or defending our vital community facilities from privatisation to get in touch.
Carl Taylor
Hackney IWCA
Hackney Independent Kids Cinema – most successful yet!
Posted: June 17, 2004 Filed under: Community Facilities, Events Comments Off on Hackney Independent Kids Cinema – most successful yet!The Hackney Independent Kids’ Cinema is a series of film shows put on for local kids in community centres, with the help and support of Tenants Associations.
Over the recent half term holiday, we put on showings of “Finding Nemo” at Goldsmith’s and Haggerston Estates. The events were the most successful yet, with over 80 kids attending.
The IWCA has always made a point of getting involved in the local community. We argue that young people need more facilities and more investment in their future, and that working class areas have suffered most with council cutbacks. These events are one way for us to put our money where our mouth is.
June 10th election results spell out IWCA potential
Posted: June 17, 2004 Filed under: Elections Comments Off on June 10th election results spell out IWCA potentialThe election results in Oxford and London have spelt out the IWCA’s political potential with a huge capital P. Though the primary reason for standing in the Mayoral election was to increase the IWCA profile, the actual results demonstrate the numbers reached by our message-over 49,000 Londoners put their cross against IWCA candidate Lorna Reid.
In Oxford the IWCA, in winning three seats, will undoubtedly be one of the main dynamics in what is now a hung council after Labour lost overall control.
For a party which put up its first candidates in May 2002 this demonstrates fairly dramatic progress and something one might have imagined the media would have had the good grace to acknowlege. Far from it.
Papers like the Guardian, while lauding the Oxford Greens capture of four seats, insist on describing the three succesful IWCA candidates as ‘independents’. The BBC meanwhile sought to explain away the IWCA success as part of the ‘anti-war protest vote’. Even on the day after the election and six weeks of campaigning, The Independent decided their readers would benefit from knowing that Lorna Reid is a member of a party called ‘Independent Work’.
To get the full flavour of the IWCA gains it is to necessary to compare and contrast results with other parties the media regard as the radical alternative. Respect, headed up by renegade MP George Galloway, received substantial pre-election coverage as did the BNP, while the IWCA was never mentioned even once. Moreover, acccording to both Respect and the BNP each spent around £250,000 on self promotion. Even these extravagant amounts pale when set against the £2 million reportedly invested by the UKIP. Money and the media were not the only areas where the IWCA was at a disadvantage. According to some the BNP has a membership of about 5,000 while Respect is actively sponsored by various Muslim groups and the SWP. Despite this, Respect have so far emerged from the elections without a single candidate elected, while the BNP made a net gain of one councillor. In addition the BNP and Respect stood candidates in every constituency for the assembly while the IWCA only put up a candidate for Mayor.
In discussing performance and overall potential it is useful to draw a comparison between the IWCA, BNP, and Respect where the parties went head-to-head on a more level playing field. By this we mean the London constituencies where the Lorna Reid’s campaign either captured the attention of the local media, resulting in some favourable, albiet limited, publicity, or where through bashing the pavement IWCA activists carved out a profile for itself simply by going door-to-door on the working class estates.
For more details on the IWCA’s Mayoral Campaign see IWCA national site
Spring 2004 Newsletter
Posted: May 23, 2004 Filed under: Community Facilities, Elections, Gentrification / Regeneration, Haggerston, Labour Party, Newsletters, Olympics, Privatisation / Sell Offs, Shoreditch, Tenants & Residents Associations Comments Off on Spring 2004 Newsletter
OPEN LETTER TO HAGGERSTON RESIDENTS
by Nusret Sen, Peter Sutton and Carl Taylor
Two years ago we stood in the council elections as independent working class candidates. We argued New Labour only represents the middle class in this area – they act in the interest of loft-dwelling City workers and their developer friends . We said that the working class majority in the area needed independent representation. We wanted to put your issues first and after talking to over 1000 people on estates in the ward we campaigned on the issues of crime and anti-social behaviour, housing repairs and transfers, and defending our vital community facilities.
Against a Labour Party bankrolled by big business we did well. With no experience of standing in an election before, we came within 90 votes of winning. We were the closest to beating Labour anywhere in the Hackney South and Shoreditch constituency. More people voted in Haggerston than in neighbouring wards, mainly because people who don’t normally vote saw us as something different and gave us a chance.
But Labour scraped back in. Since then what have they done?
• Haggerston pool is still shut (and now Clissold pool in Stoke Newington is shut as well)
• Laburnum School was closed despite protests from parents and the community
• Estate management has been handed over to private companies – tenants and leaseholders weren’t even given the choice of staying with the council
• Grant funding to Apples & Pears adventure playground and the One O’clock club has been cut
There will be another council election in two years time. It is our view that Labour do not deserve to keep representing this ward. We think there should be another independent working class challenge to Labour – whether this is us, or other independent working class candidates. That challenge has already begun. We know how to fight elections now, but we also understand that community politics is not about ticking a box once every four years. It’s about our involvement in the day to day issues of Haggerston. We will work with anyone who wants to fight Labour’s plans for privatising and gentrifying this area.
NEWS UPDATES
Tenants Petition ShOW over New Development
Activists from the Shoreditch Tenants Association have been petitioning the estates in the Pitfield Street area of Hoxton about the proposed redevelopment of the old cinema. Shoreditch Our Way (ShOW) have pushed a bid for the site, currently a warehouse. They say they want to reopen it as a community cinema. However, the planning application leaves it open for “mixed use”. Local residents are clear that while they would welcome a local community cinema — including a Saturday Morning Club for local children — they object to more yuppie flats and late-night bars. In short, local people do not want the so-called Shoreditch “cultural quarter”, with its high prices and anti-social behaviour, to creep further North from Hoxton Square into residential areas. Shoreditch T/A’s petition will be submitted to both ShOW and Hackney Council’s Planning Office.
£30 million – Down the Drain?
Hackney hit the headlines again with the closure of the £30million Clissold Leisure Centre. During the last election, the IWCA campaigned for “the re-opening of Haggerston Pool as a publicly owned facility at affordable prices.” A fraction of the cost of Clissold would have refurbished Haggerston Pool, but New Labour preferred to open their very own Millennium Dome in the borough instead.
Working Class Candidate for London Mayor
The IWCA recently announced its candidate for the London Mayoral election on June 10th. Lorna Reid, 39, is an advice worker who lives on a council estate in Islington. She aims to give a voice to the concerns of the millions of working class people in London who find they are ignored by the mainstream parties. The message she is sending is: “We live here too!”
More information: http://www.iwca.info
Get Involved with Community Politics!
This newsletter is put together by community activists who want to work together to defend working class interests in Haggerston and Hackney. If you would like to work with us then contact 020 7684 1743
The Truth about the Olympics
Ken Livingstone and New Labour are promoting the lower Lea Valley for the 2012 Olympic Games. While vital sports provision for the rest of us continues to be cut (bear in mind that dozens of football pitches on the marshes will be lost to make way for a coach park), what is being kept quiet is the plan if the Olympics doesn’t happen.
Thousands of jobs will be lost from the hundreds of local companies who will be evicted, so that thousands of riverside flats for Canary Wharf yuppies can be built.
Camden Tenants Fight Housing Privatisation
Housing Minister, Keith Hill called tenants in Camden “irrational” after they threw out government plans to hand their homes over to an ‘Arms Length Management Organisation’ (ALMO). More than 3 out of 4 tenants voted against the ALMO, rejecting the advice of Labour councillors, highly-paid consultants and top council officers. ALMOs are limited companies, set up to run council housing but tenants realised that it would quickly be sold off to a housing association. There has to be another vote before this can happen, but the ALMO is just a half-way house which the Council uses to get tenants used to the idea that Council housing should be privately run.
Minister Keith Hill has shown the contempt he has for tenants who don’t just go along with Labour’s privatisation plans and who want improved council housing with no strings attached. Watch out for Labour’s plans for bringing in an ALMO in Hackney.
New Labour – Privatise Locally, Privatise Globally
The charity War on Want has recently criticised the government severely for tie-ing overseas aid to the privatisation of public services. Hackney residents have become very familiar with New Labour’s fetish for privatisation. However, until recently most of us didn’t know that New Labour’s commitment to selling off everything that moves also extends to Africa, Asia and South America…
Plug is pulled on showpiece sports centre
Posted: March 26, 2004 Filed under: Community Facilities, Media Comments Off on Plug is pulled on showpiece sports centre(from Guardian website Saturday February 7, 2004)
The fanfare which greeted the £31m Clissold leisure centre could scarcely have been louder. A state of the art sports facility in one of the poorest boroughs in the country, the design was paraded around the the world by the British Council, the Foreign Office and the Millennium Commission.
It was one of “12 for 2000”; buildings meant to symbolise a brave new century and lauded as “prime examples of the excellence of British architecture and design”. But after less than two years the aluminium and glass complex – hailed for its “functional modernism” – has been shut on safety grounds.
The centre, in Hackney, east London, is plagued by flaws which have seen walls cracking, roofs leaking, water pouring into the electrical fittings and drains backing up. The showpiece swimming pools are seriously damaged and the walls of the squash courts are crumbling.
As the adults and children who used the centre troop by, the tubular automatic doors stay shut. A single security guard sits in the gloomy half-light of the reception area.
A building meant to raise the spirits has begun to appear drab. On the side overlooking the street and a school, two large glass panels have been broken and one is held together with sticking tape. As the school emptied last week, a boy with tousled brown hair crossed the road to pick at the jagged glass.
The centre closed last November, initially for a week, which was extended to three months. But the problems are so serious that some of those involved cannot be certain that it will ever open again. When it closed, a sign was pasted up to reassure the public that the closure would only last three months. The deadline has since been erased with Tippex.
Beleaguered
Last week, amid growing public disquiet about the loss of what had become a much loved facility and concern about the colossal waste of public money, the beleaguered council sent in an architect to find out what could have gone so wrong. But following comments from the Audit Commission which suggest the building has “systematic design faults”, the council has also sent for its lawyers.
Diane Abbott, the local MP, said: “This may have been feted as one of 12 millennium projects but because of the design, it was very difficult to build. The local authority were the project managers. Why take delivery of a building that was not fit for its use?” She said the debacle had hit the area hard and may require a public inquiry. “This building sucked up money that could have been used on other facilities. Other pools were closed. It is a lovely looking building but I think the design may have been too clever for its own good.”
Eric Ollerenshaw, the leader of Hackney’s Tories, said the closure was embarrassing for all concerned. “This was seen as a key symbol in the revival of Hackney. Much was said about serving the diverse communities and they were going to have things like special sessions for Muslim ladies. But then they had to scrap that be cause the whole thing is glass and they realised that everyone would be able to see in. There was to be a glass viewing area too, but health and safety officials would not allow it to be used because they considered it unsafe.”
Mr Ollerenshaw said councillors and residents were desperate for information. “It is Hackney’s own Millennium Dome fiasco and the majority of councillors have not got a clue what is going on because we are told this is in the hands of the lawyers and it is all confidential.”
It should all have been so different. The centre was funded by Hackney with “match funding” from the government’s sporting quango, Sport England. The original estimated cost was £7m but that soon proved woefully inaccurate. As costs grew and the intricacies of building what had been designed became apparent, so did the delays and the centre opened two years late.
Greg McNeill ran the Clissold Swimming Club there, teaching youngsters how to swim and then coaching them to county competition standard. “People who used the centre on a daily basis were complaining from day one,” he said. “There were leaks, the plumbing system didn’t work properly. It wasn’t safe to use the showers because you got scalded or frozen. The ceiling started falling down because of the damp and condensation. When we said all this we were called whingers.”
Ken Worpole, of the Clissold Users’ Group, said many preferred a less elaborate design. “I think their heads were dizzied by this wonderful architecture. It is the wrong building at the wrong time in the wrong place fulfilling the wrong function.”
Web protest
Hackney is in a bind. The centre is in Stoke Newington, where working-class families live alongside middle-class professionals. Both grow angrier by the day, at the loss of the centre and a perceived dearth of information. A well-used website fuels the protest campaign.
But with the possibility of a legal case, the council feels the less said publicly the better. That strategy may be legally sound but it is politically problematic. A spokeswoman said: “We have a duty to defend the financial interests of the Hackney council tax payer, which is why we have been robustly pursuing this action since we were advised by counsel that we had a good case.”
Despite repeated requests, no one was available for comment at the award winning architects Hodder Associates, based in Manchester. That silence speaks volumes in east London, where officials mourn not just the loss of much-needed sports facilities but the chance to kickstart regeneration with a world-class building.
Pipe Down – article from Private Eye
Posted: March 26, 2004 Filed under: Gentrification / Regeneration, Hackney Council Comments Off on Pipe Down – article from Private EyeResidents of a run-down London estate who worked for four years on a community-led redevelopment plan have been sold down the river by Hackney council. In another of the “hard choices” beloved of the borough¹s Labour mayor, Jules Pipe (see Eye 1100), the council has sold a piece of land vital to the plan to a private developer putting hopes for the estate¹s regeneration back by years.
Thousands of residents on Hackney’s Woodberry Down estate live in accommodation way below the government¹s “decent homes” standard. Dampness, drug dealers, vandalism, a huge backlog of repairs the estate has the full checklist of problems. Deciding that they’d had enough, a group of tenants formed an Estate Development Committee (EDC) and came up with a redevelopment plan which, until this year, had the Council¹s backing. It entailed building 350 homes on a derelict piece of land, the site of a former school. When built, these homes would be used to “decant” residents while their original houses were being rebuilt.
Now the council has decided to cancel the community-supported plan and sell the school site to an unnamed developer for £17m. The developer will be free to sell 210 homes to the private sector, while providing just 120 “social housing” units. The original estate will be transferred to a housing association and rebuilt eventually. But no housing association has been chosen and plans for the compulsory purchase of alternative sites for the “decanting” process are at a very early stage so the whole process could take years.
Veronica Mensah, a member of the EDC, said the residents felt very badly let down: “People who have devoted a lot of their time to planning for a positive future on this estate are now losing hope. The stress and anxiety which the state of housing here causes people is unbelievable. This, though, is typical of Hackney Council.”
Londoners Demand Share of Olympic Gold
Posted: January 31, 2004 Filed under: Olympics Comments Off on Londoners Demand Share of Olympic GoldIn an article from the Guardian, TELCO (East London Communities Organsiation) make some interesting demands on the strategists behind London’s Olympic bid for 2012, demands that the IWCA would probably share in many ways. With the first of many promises broken by planners (proposing car parks on Hackney Marshes and forcing the possible closure of Sunday League football there) can we expect them to seriously take into account the views and needs of Hackney’s working class majority? TELCO’s demands are a positive step, but we can’t be under any illusions that the developers and planners will really listen to us in the long run.
Cast iron guarantees of jobs, wage levels and proper compensation are being demanded by residents and businesses in London as the price for their cooperation with Britain’s Olympic bid.
As officials formally submitted the Olympic proposals for planning consideration, campaigners in east London have submitted a list of minimum requirements to ensure local people benefit from the massive regeneration promised.
They complain that residents in the most affected boroughs – Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest – were overlooked during the redevelopment of Docklands, Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome.
Many of the new properties were bought by outsiders and property speculators. The expectation that locals would get new, highly skilled jobs, failed to materialise.
Three hundred companies will be displaced as well as London’s biggest church, the Kingsway International Christian Centre. Land owned by a Muslim Alliance could also be affected, including the proposed site of what would be the largest mosque in Europe.
As part of their campaign for a series of “people guarantees”, the East London Community Organisations group (Telco) has told the organisers that all jobs in the Lower Lea Valley – site of the proposed Olympic zone – must pay at least £6.70 an hour.
Telco, which has 40 smaller groups under its umbrella, says all of the highly lucrative construction contracts must include clauses ensuring that at least 30% of the labour will be local. Local schools and health services must benefit from “planning gain”, whereby private firms agree to fund social improvements.
Activists also want a share of the highly paid skilled jobs. Telco wants a guaranteed sum allocated by the Learning and Skills Council to make sure locals can compete. They want a community land trust to administer housing schemes, including homes built for the Olympic village.
Affordable family housing must be set aside for those already living in the affected boroughs. Campaigners want East London University to become a sporting centre of excellence and to take responsibility for the future use of Olympic facilities.
Neil Jameson, a Telco organiser, said: “We must have these guarantees written in from the outset because history teaches us that without them we will be overlooked. We have been regularly promised bread and circuses. Historically we get the circuses but not the bread.”
“There is support for the Olympics but on our terms.”
The planning blueprint is to be considered by a committee of councillors from the four boroughs. Their task is complicated by the fact that the detailed planning application was submitted behind schedule.
Opinion polling carried out for the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, strongly suggests that Londoners support the capital’s bid for the games.
The proposed Olympic village in Stratford will leave a legacy of 5,000 homes and a giant aqua centre.
Some venues could be dismantled serving the purposes of local planners, who are reluctant to base their regeneration plans on buildings which may have little relevance after the games.
Neale Coleman, Mr Livingstone’s policy adviser on the Olympics, said he shared many Telco aspirations. “Certainly we hope to achieve higher employment and skills training in construction and a range of other jobs than achieved by similar projects.
“When people talk about the legacy of the Olympics they usually refer to buildings, but the real legacy is homes and jobs for local people. These things are important to the International Olympic Committee.”
“Irrational” Tenants Scupper Government Transfer Policy
Posted: January 29, 2004 Filed under: Privatisation / Sell Offs Comments Off on “Irrational” Tenants Scupper Government Transfer PolicyFollowing the recent rejection of ALMO (Arms Length Management Organisation) in Camden and a series of setbacks in other parts of the country, the government’s attempts to sell off council housing appear to have hit the buffers. The government hopes to rid itself of the burden of council housing by only releasing funds for ALMO, stock transfer and Private Finance Initiatives – if only it weren’t for those pesky tenants! Responding to the recent reversals, housing minister Keith Hill labelled tenants who have voted against transfers and ALMO as “irrational”. Surely the single most irrational element in this is the government’s dogmatic insistence that money should only be made available if tenants vote to end council housing. If the money’s there for schemes such as ALMO, what’s stopping them spending it on improving the quality of council housing and keeping it within council control?
We’re not under any illusions that council housing is in a healthy state – far from it. But at least with the council you have the ultimate say. If you don’t like the way they deal with it you vote them out! There’s no such say with Housing Associations and ALMOs. And with proposals for Haggerston West and Kingsland Estates in Hackney apparently only offering stock transfer options (with a smattering of private housing to appease the city workers spreading down Kingsland Road), it’s an issue that has local as well as national importance.
In a recent Guardian article “Minister refuses to back down over unpopular transfer policy”, the full scale of the government’s housing problem is revealed:
The housing minister has blamed tenants who vote against ditching their council landlords for the government’s likely failure to meet its manifesto commitment on decent homes.
Appearing before a parliamentary inquiry, Keith Hill insisted that the government’s policy of hiving off council homes would not be scrapped in the face of tenant opposition to the idea. He also said he was “tearing up” former local government secretary Stephen Byers’ commitment to give all tenants the right to a decent home even if they opt to keep their council landlords.
Asked whether the government would meet its target of repairing all council homes to a decent standard by 2010, Mr Hill refused to give a straight answer. Appearing before the select committee for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister he said: “We are determined to work with local authorities to ensure the target is reached, but it takes two to tango.”
He added: “If local authorities don’t measure up to the opportunities then there’s a limit to what the government can do. There’s an additional issue if tenants themselves vote against the opportunity.” Mr Hill also conceded that the interim target of repairing a third of homes by March 2004 will not be met by the deadline, but some time “in the course of the year”.
The government insists that the extra money for meeting the target will only be available to councils that hive off their homes in one of three ways: transferring them to housing associations; switching housing management to so-called arm’s length management organisations (almos); or repairing them through a private finance initiative consortium.
That policy was thrown into doubt earlier this month by an overwhelming vote in Camden against setting up an almo. Camden has now exhausted all three of the government’s options but it still needs an extra £283m to meet the decent homes target.
Mr Hill insisted that the government’s three-option policy “had not changed in light of recent events in Camden”. He added: “There will be no so called fourth way. The cavalry will not be coming over the hill with alternatives.” But he conceded that this may mean the government misses its manifesto pledge. “You can bring a horse to water, but your can’t make it drink. We don’t want to force tenants to accept changes they don’t want.”
Mr Hill said the Camden vote was a “singular event”. He blamed an “unscrupulous” campaign by Defend Council Housing, which he dismissed as a “combination of superannuated Communists and not much younger Trotskyists”. He suggested that Camden should work with the 70% of tenants who did not vote in the ballot.
He also admitted that a vote in 2002 against transfer in Birmingham was a “setback” to the government’s policy. Birmingham requires an extra £1bn to meet the 2010 target, but it has little prospect of raising that money through the government’s three options. Mr Hill added: “I’m extremely conscious of the Birmingham experience, we are heavily engaged as a department with Birmingham in seeking a way forward.”
Mr Hill also sought to avoid the embarrassment of missing the decent homes target by watering down the wording of the commitment. Speaking after the hearing he said: “We want to ensure that every tenant who needs his or home improved has the opportunity to do that. If they chose not to that’s a matter for them.”
When it was pointed out to him that giving tenants the opportunity to improve homes was different from the manifesto commitment, Mr Hill said the government had to assume that tenants would vote “rationally”.
Hackney 143rd Best Council In Country*
Posted: December 23, 2003 Filed under: Hackney Council Comments Off on Hackney 143rd Best Council In Country*The Audit Commission’s annual report on council performances has again rated Hackney as one of the country’s worst – classed as “poor” – and most damningly awards it the lowest possible ratings for its core services and ability to improve. To those of us who’ve suffered at the hands of the council over the years, this comes as no surprise, but what is galling is Mayor Jules Pipe’s attempts to spin his way out of trouble. You can almost hear him whistling New Labour’s anthem “Things Can Only Get Better”.
According to the Evening Standard, Pipe “disputed that the council was the worst in the country. He said the fact that the ratings had only been partially updated since last year had made it impossible for them to convey major advances. “I realise there is a mountain to climb but I’m pleased we are going in the right direction,” he said. ”
While Hackney Council is identified as one of the 10 most improving councils by the Audit Commission, this isn’t really that hard to do. After all, improving on totally incompetent to massively incompetent isn’t that much of a leap. Apparent improvements in education have come at the expense of school closures – directly against the wishes of parents, pupils and staff – and amount to little more than an airbrushing out of the picture of some of the poorest areas of the borough. Meanwhile, leisure services are rightly slated at a time when the massively overbudget Clissold leisure centre is shut for repairs and the much-loved Haggerston Pool is still gathering dust.
Jules Pipe may believe the only way is up – and that may be true – but the slash and burn strategy of this Labour administration is likely to cause more damage to Hackney’s working class majority in the process.
(* out of 150!)
'Mixed Communities' – not sustainable in the long run
Posted: December 19, 2003 Filed under: Gentrification / Regeneration, Media Comments Off on 'Mixed Communities' – not sustainable in the long run‘Mixed Communities’ – not sustainable in the long run (from London Housing magazine, December 2003) and published on IWCA National Site
The push for a greater social mix in our communities is accepted by nearly all without question as a good thing. That’s wrong, says the London Tenant Federation. All the evidence suggests gentrification on a massive scale, leaving council tenants marginalised.
Whilst the Government and housing professionals chant the mantra, “in order to be sustainable, communities must be socially mixed”, those of us living in social housing and in deprived communities have been absent from the debate.For council tenants living in London, particularly in inner London, the policy appears to mean little more than the encouragement of gentrification, and for our local authorities to sell off our homes and community facilities for development. Many of London’s council tenants feel that, far from strengthening and sustaining our communities, this approach puts their homes and communities under threat, particularly in areas that have become fashionable and where property prices are sky high.
The approach seems to fit neatly with other policies, such as the lack of positive investment in council housing, rent restructuring and proposed housing benefit reform. All have a detrimental effect on tenants living in areas with wealthy neighbours. The truth is that in London there is enormous social and economic polarisation. Inner London is the richest area in the European Union and yet the capital also contains three of the most deprived boroughs in the country. The average price of a property here is now more than £250,000, requiring a household income of £83,000 to purchase. Enclaves of wealthy, white, middle-class residents sit alongside areas with huge levels of deprivation – and the truth is that they just don’t mix.
Research by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the University of East London (UEL) finds little evidence of gentrification as a positive force. Whilst the proponents of the socially mixed communities policy will state that they are not advocating gentrification, Tim Butler at UEL suggests “nobody is in favour of gentrification and even local authorities, which wish to change their ‘social mix’ of housing or population, refer to it by any other name”.
In a study in gentrified areas of Lambeth, Islington, Hackney, Lewisham and Wandsworth, Tim Butler found “little evidence of the middle class deploying its resources for the benefits of the wider community.” He says: “London’s middle classes share a common relationship to each other which is largely exclusive of those who are not ‘people like us’ – most strikingly perhaps in relation to their ethnicity. In a city that is massively multi-ethnic, its middle classes, despite long rhetorical flushes in favour of multi-culturalism and diversity, huddle together into essentially white settlements in the inner city. Their children have friends like their parents and most of their parents’ friends are people like themselves.”
The ESRC study sought to evaluate more than 100 pieces of research predominantly in North America and in the UK. The policy context for the research was the Government’s commitment to try to encourage private sector investment in deprived and run-down areas. Its June 2002 report says that the positive impacts of gentrification were hard to find. The much “wider set of costs” included displacement of poorer households through price and rent increases, community conflict and racial tension, lower population densities and a greater take on local spending by incoming affluent households. Anecdotal evidence from London Tenant Federation meetings seems to support to this academic research. Our members note that, across London, there are examples of council estates in regeneration/stock transfer schemes that are dependent on demolition of some blocks to sell off to developers. The new apartments constructed in their place are designed with a clear separation from the social housing – most obviously aesthetically and frequently with entrances facing away from the rest of the estate. Expensive cafés and restaurants are built which then push out existing local shops. If the new wealthy residents have children, they are unlikely to attend local schools that are dominated by children from council estates. Council tenants feel that the priority for council and police resources is focused on the more expensive areas and away from our estates. If London’s council tenants are asked what we think will make our communities sustainable, we are likely to suggest: positive investment in our homes and in new council homes; rents that reflect the qualities we value in our homes rather than the area’s property values; good access to employment, leisure and youth facilities and good care for our young and old. Missing from the list though, almost certainly, will be the demand for “socially mixed communities”.
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