The Fall and Rise of Social Housing: 100 Years on 20 Estates

Abstract

Becky Tunstall’s new book, The Fall and Rise of Social Housing: 100 Years on 20 Estates, makes a good companion to Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City (2011). While Glaeser demonstrated that the concentration of urban poor is not necessarily negative, Tunstall shows the flip side of the coin: managing and assisting urban disadvantaged groups through public housing projects is a challenging and costly undertaking. Starting with a 1984 study of twenty unpopular council estates that eventually turned into a study of nineteen mostly somewhat less popular than average mixed-tenure neighborhoods, Tunstall takes her readers on a fascinating journey of the social housing history in the UK. The book consists of three parts. The five chapters in part I give background information about data and research methods. Tunstall admitted that the sample in this book is not representative of the public housing stock in the UK. Specifically, the twenty estates are located in urban areas with high proportions of social housing and working-class residents as well as high rates of deprivation. “These areas were disproportionally affected by destructuralisation, unemployment and loss of population over the 20th century” (p. 294). Therefore, from a public policy point of view, it is an important sample to study. Although Tunstall briefly mentioned the key findings in chapter 1 and summarized the analysis in chapters 2 and 3, she included just enough information for readers to understand the structure and scope of her analysis, yet still keep them curious about the rest of the book. In the second part of the book, nearly forty years’ worth of research findings are vividly and systematically illustrated through the lived experience of sitting tenants and estate managers as well as the author’s personal observations. The nine chapters in this part provide detailed qualitative and quantitative evidence of the twenty estates on seven important dimensions of estates’ problem and success, and residents’ experiences: housing quality, safety and order, popularity, resident social mix, access to opportunities, housing survival, and housing tenure. Tunstall adopted an impartial position when presenting a wealth of empirical evidence in this part of the book. She left room for reader to process the information and to form their assessment of the evidence before presenting her own analysis in part III. It is intriguing and engaging to go through nearly two hundred pages without encountering any strong opinions from the author. Part III of the book drives home the key arguments made in chapter 1. While her way of collecting and presenting empirical evidence is similar to Jane Jacob’s groundlevel-view approach (1961), Tunstall’s analytical style is close to Glaeser’s (Scott 2012). Specifically, Tunstall did not study social housing in isolation; instead, she assesses the failures and successes of these estates “in the context of changes that affected society, housing and social housing nationwide over estate lifetime” (p. 246). She argued that “assessment of success depends not only on the dimensions being considered, and who is making the judgement, but also on when the judgement is made” (p. 291), and “estate level and local change needs to be recalibrated against changes at national level” (p. 286). The fall of these social housing estates is mainly EC O N O M IC G EO G R A PH Y