Devalued places

This chapter explores how pre-regeneration estates became devalued places, largely connected to neoliberalisation and austerity policies and effects. Five devaluation strands are analysed: overcrowding, landlord neglect, population transience, crime and disorder, and stigmatisation. Overcrowded families living in small flats were unable to transfer to larger properties because social housing has contracted, trapping them in dwellings that no longer felt like home – un-homing. Although properties and estates were physically solid, they had been neglected due to inadequate investment, repairs and maintenance services. Landlord transfers (from the Greater London Council to the borough councils), plus managerialist restructuring (outsourcing and cutting back caretakers), also contributed to tenants’ complaints about living in a worsening environment. London estates have become more transient places due to the Right-to-Buy because of increased private landlordism, tenants and Airbnb guests. Crime, fear of crime and anti-social behaviour were important issues at some estates, but less so at others. Estates have become symbolically devalued via mass media territorial stigmatisation which has been exacerbated by austerity-related ‘poverty porn’ TV programmes. Despite such devaluations, residents generally positively valued their homes and estates (Chapter 6), and there was no mass desire to leave unlike in the case of US public housing projects (Wacquant).