Social Housing in London
AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield
The composition of social housing in London varies greatly, especially when considering the elaborate territories of social housing that string one particular project after another. Each has its own distinctive proportion of leaseholds and renters, of leaseholders that bought cheaply under the “right to buy” policies of the Thatcher era, and those who acquired them under subsequent renditions of this policy. Each has its own form of management and specific relationships between those that nominally “own” them—such as local states, charities, trusts, community development groups, cooperatives, or private development companies—and the internal configurations of owners and renters on particular management committees, often supplemented by the authority of “extra-parliamentary” groupings that might exert control over specific facets of the housing scheme.
Schemes are also subject to various development plans, upgrades, privatizations, mandates to house specific kinds of residents, average lengths of stay, securitization of income streams, and work-arounds. Schemes vary in the ratio of space per person given the year of construction and the prevailing regulations at the time, and so they vary in terms of relative density, as various degrees of oversight also render some more susceptible to informal arrangements than others. The distribution of residential experiences is also intensely racialized in terms of capacities to acquire housing assets, to mobilize household and ethnic networks, and secure preferential treatment.
While all of these settings may nominally fall under the supervision of specific boroughs, regulatory frameworks or sectoral authorities, they each embody distinctive residential experiences that exist side by side. While not existing as thoroughly compartmentalized bastions, they still instill territories with a multiplicity of residential dispositions that themselves leak through each other in terms of an array of lateral exchanges among residents through different associations, gangs, religious institutions, and informal contacts.
