Reading the article, unless I’m missing something, it sounds like people just don’t like the government housing they were given, maybe it wasn’t as good as what they had before.
They have to pay a lot to travel and visit their friends, but then again the housing is free?
A boy got his head stuck under a truck? Is that the development’s fault?
No local services like grocery is a challenge that takes some time for a market (or government) to respond to. I would hope schools and groceries and essentials begin to adapt to these new housing areas, but that’s a government control issue.
Personally, (and maybe a bit of a hot take) I expect government housing to be nothing less than a backstop before homelessness, and as such it should carry sufficient motivation to get out, but not too much motivation that you’d rather be on the streets. Because at the end of the day, a resident seeking free or subsidized housing is just a problem for the government to deal with, and governments do not have sufficient funding to deal with the problems in front of them, so things will get short changed.
I don’t expect my government to take care of me, because it couldn’t care less, and I’ve been totally screwed by broken government in the past.
> I don’t expect my government to take care of me, because it couldn’t care less, and I’ve been totally screwed by broken government in the past.
Depending on where you live and how well paid you are, 60% to 20% of your work's output goes into your government's pockets. Furthermore, the government is usually also in charge of zoning and building restrictions, thus directly responsible for homelessness (There are plenty of extremely poor countries where homelessness is virtually nonexistent. What makes people homeless is police tearing down illegal houses, not poverty).
Those are the very simple reasons people rightfully expect their government to provide them with free housing.
> "What makes people homeless is police tearing down illegal houses, not poverty"
This is a very good point, and i never see it mentioned - people will generally create their own housing out of whatever they have avaliable. These take the forms of refugee camps and slums, but they can and sometimes do evolve to something respectable over time - after all thats how housing began at the dawn of civilisation.
Now if the person's right to create his own shelter and solve his own problem has been taken away, then a substitute must be provided.
Every now and then we get people who make a mudhut or a tree house
>"A boy got his head stuck under a truck? Is that the development’s fault"
I have met people who believe homeless adults should get no help, but I have never ever met anyone who believes we should leave homeless children to starve and die.
By extension, you should not put facilities for kids in an area of obvious danger.
It's really funny... there are big cultural "differences" everyone knows -- like driving of right vs. left side, or whether once you walk in a building and up a flight of stairs, you're on the first floor or the second floor.
But then another one is that in some countries, every building is legally required to have a name... and in others it's not.
I'm from the US where the idea of giving a "name" to an average building seems bizarre -- it makes as much sense as giving a name to your sofa or to your mailbox. The building has an address, so what does it need a name for? (Unless it's a famous landmark or corporate skyscraper or something.)
But then I moved to Brazil and son of a gun, every building (even small apartment buildings) has a name, the same way a corporation is legally required to have a name. I still don't quite understand the reason. But it's similarly "common sense" there of course it has a name, it's a building! I suppose in the same way it's common sense that roads have names too, or something.
Just another one of these entirely arbitrary yet funny cultural differences.
I've found that many newer buildings in Atlanta, GA are "named." I use quotes because I don't think there's any official registry behind the name. But branding your building and marketing that brand seems to be a good way to attract tenants. I also find that many apartment and condominium complexes are named, and maybe even the separate building (but not the individual apartments, of course.)
And any houses used as museums or event spaces are named: The Margaret Mitchell House, The Castle, The Wimbish House.
In the US, I think this comes down to the developer.
When a developer creates a neighborhood, they usually give it a name. And that name usually sticks.
Likewise, when a developer creates a larger building, they might give it a name. And that name will probably stick for as long as that original owner continues to own it.
But there is also a major branding exercise here — look at the names of sporting arenas. It’s “Dodger Stadium” until Oracle decides to pay enough money to change the branding, and then it’s “Larry’s Private Blue Field Oracle Stadium That Is Occasionally Used By The Dodgers” or whatever the hell they decide to use. And that sticks until the term is up and someone else pays the license fee to change the name again.
These cultural differences may even depend on where you are in the US. Nearly every apartment building around me in Seattle has a name. Much of this is for marketing I’m sure, but this includes many of the buildings built in the 60s and 70s.
The people paying to put the building up like to name things because it's part of their branding (so, a security company building a head office may call that office "shield house"), or because they're trying to tie their development into local history to appeal to planning officers (so, this building is near a bus terminal, and it's on terminus street), or because the person paying the money wants to leave a bit of legacy.
A lot of aristocratic stately homes are XYZ House - there only being one privately owned palace in the UK. So I think it's just an attempt to make an office block sound way classier than it actually is.
As an example, here's a "House" not far from where I live:
In the US, we mostly don't name buildings. There are some high profile exceptions, but largely, you'd send mail to a numbered address:
Joe Smith, Unit 123B, 1234 Something Street, Virginia, 20191, USA
And in conversation, when describing where you live, you'd say the street name or neighborhood name. And, if needed, the street address as above.
Apartment buildings often have names, but, in my experience, they're rarely used outside real estate listings.
In NYC, most of the housing projects have names like "the donovan houses" or "clairmont estates." It might not be super common like in britain but we do have it here.
Yeah, same here in DC. But, at least here, you rarely refer to the building that way. Mail will be the numerical street address, not building name. In casual discussion, we'd likely say "I live on the 2000 block of Constitution Ave" instead of "I live the Yuppiemont Building" (Watergate and similar high profile boilings being the exception).
For the most part, yes. The farm might also have a name (chosen by the current owners, not particularly in common use, etc).
There was also a nationwide initiative to make addresses more standardized inside a county. So the address for a house might be on a numbered road and reflect the location of that property along the road (this is just a common pattern, not a top down standard).
Pretty much everything in rural areas in the UK is just done b y names of properties along with the area or nearest village - some roads do have names but they tend to only be used by locals (and no signposts, of course).
Mind you all properties have postcodes and most roads have a designation of some kind - mind you I couldn't tell you the number of the road we live near without looking it up.
The best UK mailing label I've seen (on a 19th? century wooden crate bound for Dunvegan Castle) was:
Route via Derby, Grantham, Ft William, Mallaig, David McBrayne's steamer to Armadale, and road delivery to Dunvegan.
Do the postal codes uniquely ID a residence on their own? My dad's old address (from his youth) was:
The Coolins, Emma Terrace, Blairgowrie PH10 6JA
Does the code get the package to the right address on it's own? I'm guessing not, but the UK does use alpha-numeric codes (US is numeric only), so has a broader range of codes available for fine-tuning delivery.
Blair House is... a house. A family named Blair used to live in it. So, not really parallel to the British usage of "House" for structures like the BBC headquarters, "Broadcasting House", which have never had residential usage, and are in no way suited for it.
Sure, I can name lots of structures in the US that have names, but they are far from the majority, and I an unaware of any legal weight for the name (IDK if UK building names have legal weight either though...)
Honestly sounds like it's not an issue of "zoning" so much as people exploiting government funds to house the poor in cheap, isolated locations.
I lived in a office-to-studio conversion for six years and it was great. But it was also within walking distance of basically everything I wanted to do.
What's wrong with housing the poor in cheap isolated areas? If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town. Doesn't the government fund cheap houses on purpose to prevent homelessness? Where's the exploitation? If the poor are too deserving for cheap housing, then who does deserve it?
Isolation makes the poor poorer. If you look at what happened in the slum clearance programs in the United States, we tried to fix people problems by bulldozing buildings. If you think about the needs of people without a prefix, the obviousness of some problems pop out. “Poor people” are “people”, and if you think that way, the issue of being a 50 minute bus ride from groceries should become apparent to you.
The South Bronx is a great obvious example. 300k+ people were displaced directly by the construction of the Bruckner and other expressways, and probably twice that were indirectly displaced as their neighborhoods were shattered by the construction and impacts of running superhighways through. Landlords abandoned or torched thousands of buildings in the 70s.
The answer to the housing issue was building big public housing projects in disconnected, cheap areas, which rapidly became magnets for crime and misery. Try feeding a family when no groceries exist — fast food and bodega food only.
If you look at old neighborhoods and cities, the poor were present and integrated in broader society. They may have been marginalized, but they weren’t set aside like dirty dishes in the sink.
> What's wrong with housing the poor in cheap isolated areas?
The thrust of the article is that no one should really be living in those places.
Living in an isolated area is fine if you have access to transportation.
The implication of the article is that there isn't adequate public transportation and the people don't have cars.
Basically, if you house someone in a place that sets them up for failure, how grateful can you really expect them to be?
> If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town.
The lady in the article said she couldn't work because she spent half her day getting her kids to / from school. That is different from being unwilling to work.
Maybe the residents are unwilling to work, but maybe it's a matter of them being too far away from jobs to realistically get one.
> Where's the exploitation?
The implication of the article is that the exploitation is by the property developers who converted the office space into something that qualified for government housing money, but wasn't really suitable for people to live in.
If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town
Maybe that works in the UK, but in the US, at least where I live, we have rules about the poor. You can't be getting benefits and at the same time not be going to work. You used to be able to do that, like a few decades ago or whatever, but not nowadays. If you're poor, you can not work if you want, but you won't get benefits. As soon as you sign up for benefits where I live, they will assign you work, and your new employer has to keep them informed of your performance. Most states would call it something like "work-fare", or "w2", or something like that. There may still be states where you can get benefits without working? But I'd imagine there aren't too many of them, if any.
"No zoning" is has its merits, but the core problem here is no regulation.
If each house took up one whole floor, there wouldn't be an article.
These people are here, presumably, because it's the best thing they can afford. If you followed them from here to another location - the stories probably would different but equally difficult/terrible.
It takes effort, for sure, but good public housing can work.
Good public housing only works if the government (and the people) want it to. In this case no one cared about who would live there, and stuck them in a place people should not live. Likely someone made a large fortune and gave zero concerns about the residents, and the government got poor people out of sight and out of mind.
The core problem here isn't no regulation. It's government regulating by subsidy and causing these otherwise non-viable office to apartment conversions to spring up where they shouldn't have. You get what you incentivize.
This isn't a no-zoning issue. It's an issue with the government subsidizing something that it shouldn't have subsidized. So if you consider subsidies for particular uses to be under the umbrella of zoning it's a zoning issue that wouldn't be present with less zoning.
Shoving residential units into downmarket commercial office space sure sounds like a zoning issue to me.
The article even states that this issue isn’t issue outside of England, as local control in Wales and Scotland (ie zoning among other things) prevents obviously stupid things like this from happening.
> There have been drug dealing and knife fights in her block. There is “always shouting and arguing”, she says. “The children are frightened.”
The key point about the issue, in my opinion, is that it's not the type of building or the location that makes it a terrible place to live there, it's the neighbors. Don't get me wrong, the location and floor plan aren't helping, but they're not the issue why most large scale public housing projects fail.
Architecture doesn't create crime, but it may well look that way because we generally build the cheapest way possible when building public houses for socially-challenged people. But it's still the people that create the problems, not the building. The next generations that grows up in those buildings aren't being shaped by the building itself, they're shaped by the culture that the inhabitants create.
But community can grow, even from indecent housing, and then turn around and make the housing decent.
It seems to me this is a social issue, not an architectural, or even a directly economic one. I'll guess these are mostly immigrants, corralled far from the rest of society by short-sighted and rather mean government policy.
Before lockdown, I would stay in cheap hotels relatively often - eg Travelodge, our form of motel. One bed, a TV, a teasmaid.
There would generally be two types of common guests. Workmen in the area to build something, tradespeople, or those the council was housing.
Typically it would be a mum and a couple of kids, up in the morning by 8am in their school uniform. These places don't serve food, and you'd see people leave with a couple of bags or boxes, as they get shunted elsewhere.
I'm glad they were not out on the street, but it broke my heart every time I saw it. I could well understand a parent thinking that a stable location would be better than shifting from one B&B to another. The lack of social housing is a genuine disgrace, and these resi conversions are absolutely not the answer.
I believe from my reading that it's government housing.
As in: You would are poor and qualify for housing assistance. Here is your housing.
What most people might be envisioning is more of a stipend system, where you can live wherever you want, and the government just gives you money towards rent.
I believe this is more of a prescribed housing situation.
This article is really trying to put a negative spin on something that could easily have been spun in a positive way. There's nothing clearly wrong with them, just a long list of minor discomforts from the author's perspective. Poor people have to live in posh houses with a garden and not a "once-fashionable" style? They even mention the council missing out on planning fees as a downside! What?! Since when are planning fees supposed to fund the council's other activities besides planning the building the developer is paying for?
We are talking about things like fire safety and crime.
A friend of mine is renovating his place in Scotland and the planning process demanded that a bedroom must have a window to be avaliable as a fire escape and the kitchen must be isolated with a fire door.
Now there appear to be apartments without windows at all, with narrow corridors, clogged with bycycles. It sounds like Grenfell Tower N2 coming right up - half the people inside won't make it out alive.
The Guardian’s whole act is middle class people telling working class people that they should think and act more like them. But most of the working class people don’t read the Guardian so it’s just shouting into a bubble.
They have to pay a lot to travel and visit their friends, but then again the housing is free?
A boy got his head stuck under a truck? Is that the development’s fault?
No local services like grocery is a challenge that takes some time for a market (or government) to respond to. I would hope schools and groceries and essentials begin to adapt to these new housing areas, but that’s a government control issue.
Personally, (and maybe a bit of a hot take) I expect government housing to be nothing less than a backstop before homelessness, and as such it should carry sufficient motivation to get out, but not too much motivation that you’d rather be on the streets. Because at the end of the day, a resident seeking free or subsidized housing is just a problem for the government to deal with, and governments do not have sufficient funding to deal with the problems in front of them, so things will get short changed.
I don’t expect my government to take care of me, because it couldn’t care less, and I’ve been totally screwed by broken government in the past.