The People's Home? E-Book

Michael Harloe

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Studies in Urban and Social Change
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1225

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The People's Home is a magisterial examination of the development of social rented housing over the last hundred years in six advanced capitalist countries - Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the USA.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Social Housing and Welfare Capitalism

Notes

1 Social Housing and the ‘Social Question’: Housing Reform Before 1914

REINTERPRETING HOUSING REFORM

THE NETHERLANDS: SOCIAL HOUSING AS A ‘PRIVATE INITIATIVE’

DENMARK: THE COOPERATIVE APPROACH

BRITAIN: THE DEBATE OVER REFORM

FRANCE: LIBERALISM AND REPRESSION

GERMANY: NEGATIVE INTEGRATION AND SELF-HELP HOUSING

THE UNITED STATES: REGULATING THE TENEMENTS

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HOUSING REFORM

CONCLUSION: THE LEGACIES OF EARLY HOUSING REFORM

Notes

2 The Temporary Solution: Social Housing after the Great War

THE EXIGENCIES OF WAR

HOUSING AND THE WAR

POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION AND THE RETURN TO ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’

SOCIAL HOUSING AND THE ‘GUARANTEE AGAINST REVOLUTION’

Notes

3 Social Housing in the Depression

ECONOMIC CHAOS AND RECOVERY

POLITICAL RESPONSES TO THE CRISIS

THE ROLE OF HOUSING IN THE ECONOMIC CRISIS AND RECOVERY

CONCLUSION: THREE MODELS OF SOCIAL HOUSING

NOTES

4 The Golden Age: Social Housing in an Era of Reconstruction and Growth

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION AND MODERNIZATION

THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

SOCIAL HOUSING IN EUROPE – AN OVERVIEW

THE RISE AND FALL OF SOCIAL HOUSING

THE RISE AND FALL OF SOCIAL HOUSING

Notes

5 Residualism Revived: Social Housing in the Contemporary Era

ECONOMIC RECESSION AND RESTRUCTURING

THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC INSECURITY

SOCIAL HOUSING IN DECLINE

CONCLUSION: RESIDUALIZATION OR REFORMATION?

Notes

6 Social Housing and Theories of Social Policy

THEORIES OF SOCIAL POLICY

HOUSING AS SOCIAL POLICY

HOUSING AND THEORIES OF SOCIAL POLICY

THE SPECIFICITY OF HOUSING IN THE WELFARE STATE

THE SWEDISH CASE - BUILDING THE ‘PEOPLE’S HOME’

CONCLUSION: SOCIAL HOUSING AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Studies in Urban and Social Change

Published by Blackwell in association with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Series editors: Chris Pickvance, Margit Mayer and John Walton

Published

The City Builders

Susan S. Fainstein

Divided Cities

Susan S. Fainstein, Ian Gordon, and Michael Harloe (eds)

Fragmented Societies

Enzo Mingione

Free Markets and Food Riots

John Walton and David Seddon

The Resources of Poverty

Mercedes González de la Rocha

Post-Fordism

Ash Amin (ed.)

The People's Home?

Social Rented Housing in Europe and America

Michael Harloe

Forthcoming

Cities after Socialism

Michael Harloe, Ivan Szelenyi and Gregory Andrusz (eds)

Urban Social Movements and the State

Margit Mayer

Copyright © Michael Harloe 1995

The right of Michael Harloe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 1995

Blackwell Publishers, the publishing imprint of

Basil Blackwell Ltd

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UK

Basil Blackwell Inc. 238 Main Street

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harloe, Michael.

The people's home?: social rented housing in Europe and America/Michael Harloe

p. cm. — (Studies in urban and social change) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–631–18182-2. – ISBN 0–631–18642-5

1. Public housing-Europe-History. 2. Public housing–United States–History. 3. Housing policy –Europe–History. 4. Housing policy–United States–History. 5. Rental housing–Government policy–Europe–History. 6. Rental housingGovernment policy–United States–History. I. Title. II. Series.

HD7288.78.E85H37 1995

363.5' 85' 094 – dc20

94–15837

Preface

As explained in the Introduction, this book has been many years in the making. The number of those who have assisted runs into three figures. They have all contributed to my knowledge of social housing in six countries. None can be blamed for the use which I have made of this knowledge.

My early work on social rented housing was carried out in conjunction with my former colleague at the University of Essex, Maartje Martens (now at the University of Utrecht). It was part of a larger programme of collaborative research on housing in Europe and America, beginning at the start of the 1980s, which also involved Michael Ball (now at South Bank University, London). Jointly and separately the three of us have published the results of this work – on housing and social theory, home ownership, private and social rented housing, housing finance and housing construction – in a series of books and articles over the past decade. This book is one of the last, delayed products of our joint endeavours. Working alongside and arguing with Mike and Maartje has been a productive and intellectually stimulating experience, for which I thank them.

A second debt of gratitude is owed to five people who each worked as consultants, sometimes on more than one occasion, during the course of the research projects on which this book is based. They are Christian Topalov (France), Eberhard Muhlich (Germany), Hedvig Vestergaard (Denmark), Jan van der Schaar (Netherlands) and Peter Marcuse (USA). Not only did they respond without protest to my endless demands for information but, as leading students of housing in their own countries, their analytical insights also benefited me enormously.

Work of this nature, extending over many years and involving extensive periods spent in each country, interviewing, making documentary searches and working with my consultant colleagues, would not have been possible without major financial support. At one time or another almost all the major sources of social science funding in the UK have given assistance for individual projects. These have resulted in the series of publications noted above as well as this volume. I acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Leverhulme Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (formerly the SSRC), the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Anglo-German Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation and the Fuller Memorial Fund of the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. I am also grateful to the Urban Research Program in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, and its Director Professor Pat Troy, for enabling me to spend time there in 1991, as a Visiting Fellow, working on this book. Thanks are also due to Chris Paris (formerly at the University of Canberra, now at Magee College, University of Ulster) for encouraging and assisting me to spend some time at the ANU.

Finally, thanks are due to the many librarians and libraries that have helped me during the course of this work. In particular, I have benefited from the use of my own institution's library and from several periods spent in the Avery Library at Columbia University, as well as numerous electronic visits to the catalogue of the University of California.

It is customary for authors to devote a few words to thanking their spouse, children and secretaries for their support. However, typing this book is one of the few chores that I have not inflicted on my Department's secretaries in recent years. And mere words cannot convey what my wife and family have contributed to my life, although they might be able to contribute some frank remarks about what this book, and its author, have done to them!

Michael Harloe

Colchester

Introduction: Social Housing and Welfare Capitalism

The title of this book – The People’s Home – appropriates a word – folkhemmet – frequently used to characterize the distinctive approach adopted by the Swedish Social Democratic Party to the building of what was seen for many years as the most developed form of welfare capitalist regime in the world. It was first used in 1928 by one of the key figures of Swedish Social Democracy, later Prime Minister, Per Albin Hansson.1Folkhemmet was a vision of a society with social, economic and political citizenship for all. Social citizenship would be based on the universalistic provision of social services in a decommodified form, that is, on the basis of need, not ability to pay. Such a regime, as Esping-Andersen has pointed out, differs sharply from varieties of welfare capitalism based on conservative ideologies, which seek to preserve and strengthen the divisions of class, status and power arising from the capitalist organization of the economy and society. It also differs from the liberal reform model, which seeks to temper the consequences of capitalism by redistributing some of its output, without challenging the system in any more fundamental way. In contrast, what Hansson and his colleagues had in mind was a welfare regime in which ‘social policy became pivotal for the general plan to transform capitalism’ (Esping-Andersen, 1987a: 83).

In fact, Swedish social democracy failed to bring about the transformation in its economic system envisaged by the doctrine of folkhemmet.2 However, although Hansson’s radical, transformative purpose was not realized, large parts of the Swedish dream home were constructed during the post-war years.3 In The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), Esping-Andersen assembles various statistical indicators to describe the nature of the welfare regimes in 18 advanced capitalist countries. Sweden is notable for having one of the lowest levels of means-tested poor relief (as a proportion of all public social expenditure) and of expenditure on private pensions and health care. It also has one of the highest levels of universality in state benefits for sickness, unemployment and retirement and of the lowest differentials between the maximum and minimum payments provided under these schemes.

Ironically, however, even the Swedish People’s Home never fully accommodated and made decommodified provision for one of the most basic of human and social needs – shelter.4 In a recent analysis, Lundqvist (1992) has examined why ‘the peoples’ home [became] too expensive for the welfare state’, and why, by the 1990s, public involvement in housing was shifting ‘from the comprehensive and general to the supplementary and specific’ (see also Lundqvist et al., 1990; Elander and Stromberg, 1992). More generally, as Torgerson (1987) vividly remarks, housing has been the ‘wobbly pillar under the welfare state’ in many countries. The question mark in the title of this book is a perhaps over-economical way of indicating that the history of social rented housing provides evidence for this conclusion. As well as examining some of the evidence, this work seeks to understand why housing, through programmes of social rented housing in particular, has not taken a place alongside other significantly decommodified aspects of social provision, such as health, education and income maintenance, as one of the central pillars of the welfare state. Instead, it has retained an ambiguous and shifting status on the margins of the welfare state, the least decommodified and the most market-determined of the conventionally accepted constituent elements of such states. In some English translations folkhemmet becomes ‘the house for all the people’. This book explains why social housing has always fallen short of this ideal.

In discussing ‘the institutional peculiarity of housing as a welfare state component’, Torgerson (1987) points out that the three major domains of welfare capitalist regimes – pensions, schooling and health – have some common characteristics. These include a system and organization of provision which is under state control or regulation, with a universalistic remit to provide for eligible and needy members of the population, and which stands apart from the institutions, operational rationale and allocative rules of the private market. As Torgerson notes, ‘in all these respects the domain of housing stands out like a sore thumb’.

In accounting for these differences, Torgerson refers to the permanency of the possession of housing once it has been acquired, which, he contends, means that housing as a commodity or good is very different from other goods’ (i.e. health care, education and income maintenance). This seems a rather unconvincing explanation of why ‘housing stands out like a sore thumb’. However, the suggestion that housing, as a commodity, differs from health, education and pensions merits closer inspection. This is because the private market provision of housing for the mass of the population as a capitalist commodity, and the system of private property ownership on which this provision rests, has been a core element in the capitalist organization of society and the economy from the earliest years. Historically, industrial, property and financial capital have been the motive forces driving the system. The production of housing as a commodity involves all these forms of capital. Thus anything more than a limited and partial decommodification of housing is likely to provoke intense resistance. In contrast, although the penetration of capitalist relations into mass provision for pensions, health and education has been significant, especially in recent decades (and for far longer in certain countries), historically, for large sections of the population, the alternative to provision through the welfare state was very little provision at all, rather than commodified provision. In short, housing, like food production, has provided large-scale and profitable opportunities for capitalism in ways that have not been nearly so evident (or took longer to develop) in the other spheres of provision for human needs that we have been discussing.

Even more abstractly, one can suggest that in capitalist societies there tends to be an inverse relationship between the degree to which there are major opportunities for private accumulation in various aspects of human needs provision, and the extent to which such provision may, in certain historical conjunctures, be wholly or partly decommodified. This book, which examines the development of social rented housing in six countries – Britain, (the former West) Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United States – provides evidence to support such a proposition. Housing, just because it is a capitalist commodity which, in normal times, can be profitably provided to the majority of the population, has never been likely to become as decommodified a form of provision as those other forms for which there has been far less solvable demand (although, in the current era, these services are increasingly being commodified or ‘marketized’ in various ways).

When viewed from this perspective, the interesting question, which this book explores, does not concern why housing has been such a marginal component of the welfare state but rather why it has sometimes been provided through the agency of the state in a partially decommodified form. More specifically, the examination will centre not on the ways in which the state has supported market forms of housing provision, either private renting or home ownership, but when, how and why the state’s housing activities have been directed towards supplanting or making good a lack of these market forms through programmes of social rented housing.5

The analysis presented in this book is the end point of an endeavour to understand the nature of housing in capitalist societies which began in the 1970s. An early study with colleagues, The Organization of Housing. Public and private enterprise in London (Harloe, Issacharoff and Minns, 1974), concluded that the housing system was disorganized, characterized by competing agencies and contradictory demands and objectives. Conventional social policy analysis, which assumed that there was a fairly direct relationship in welfare state regimes between the existence of housing needs and state policies which responded to them, could provide no satisfactory answer to this problem. By the mid-1970s neo-Marxist analyses were pointing to the necessarily contradictory nature of state urban and social policies in capitalist societies (see, for example, Castells, 1978; Ginsburg, 1979; Gough, 1979). However, while such theories moved the analysis on to an altogether more fruitful level, they also proved defective. In particular, as critics noted, the observation that housing and other urban policies had a certain functionality for capitalism left unanswered why this should be so and how it came about (Harloe, 1979).

In two papers published at the beginning of the 1980s (one with my colleague Maartje Martens), I attempted to develop a more satisfactory meta-theoretical framework for the analysis of housing markets and policies than those adopted by conventional social policy analysts or much of the neo-Marxist work then current, and to sketch out an empirically grounded theorization of the historically varying forms of housing provision in the six countries discussed in this book (Harloe, 1981; Harloe and Martens, 1984). Subsequently, working in collaboration with Michael Ball, who had developed his own critique of conventional neo-classical urban and housing economics, we argued that the changing nature of housing provision can most usefully be conceived in terms of changes in distinctively constituted ‘structures of housing provision’ (Ball, 1986; Ball, Harloe and Martens, 1988; Ball and Harloe, 1992). Very simply, this recognizes that housing provision is a social construct, that ‘there are combinations of social agents involved in housing provision that relate to each other in empirically observable ways’ (Ball and Harloe, 1992: 3). Moreover, structures of housing provision are embedded in the wider economic, social and political structures of society. Therefore, any narrowly conceived examination of the agents and social relationships implicated in housing provision and its development only leads to some equally narrow and misleading answers to the ‘when, how and why’ questions mentioned above. Any account of social housing development which just focuses on the responses of governments and social housing landlords to consumer demands and needs may have a certain descriptive value. However, as this study demonstrates, there are many other agents and sets of social relationships which have helped to determine the history of this form of housing provision. In fact, this approach to the analysis of social housing is merely one example of the more general observation made by Esping- Andersen (1987b: 6), that ‘social policy must be viewed as integral to the social and economic order’. This requires ‘institutional analyses that analytically situate social policy in relation to its reciprocal political and economic institutions’.

The general concept of a structure of housing provision, it is worth underlining, is meta-theoretic in nature. It is merely a means to an end – the production of theories of housing development, that is, causally based explanations of when, how and why certain developments do or do not occur. The principal objective of this book is to provide just such a theory of the development of social rented housing in a selection of advanced capitalist countries. As already mentioned, a first attempt to do this was published in the early 1980s (Harloe, 1981). This paper, on the ‘recommodification of housing’, combined some fairly elementary, largely deductive propositions about the class-divided nature of production and consumption in capitalist societies with some of the early results of research in Western Europe and the USA. The general conclusion was that housing provision in these societies had evolved, under the impact of major changes in social, economic and political structures and relationships, through three stages. Under conditions of early capitalist industrialization and urbanization most housing had been provided as a commodity by private landlords. However, for reasons described briefly in this paper, and subsequently analysed in greater depth in Harloe (1985), this form of provision was in long-term decline, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. For ever larger proportions of the population it was being replaced by a separate commodified form of provision, the mass market in home ownership.6 The third, relatively decommodified form of large-scale provision, social rented housing, was seen as the product of a relatively brief period, notably the years after the Second World War, when the private rental market’s inability to provide mass housing was already well advanced (and made worse by the effects of war), but when the necessary economic and other conditions for the growth of mass home ownership were still absent from most of the societies in question. Therefore, the recommodification referred to in the title of the paper denoted both the long-term transition from one form of capitalist housing commodity to another and the more recent displacement of the relatively decommodified form, social rented housing, by the new commodity form, mass home ownership.

There is much that still seems valid in this analysis of capitalist housing provision, its historical transformations and the reasons for the varying fortunes of social rented housing. Most importantly, I have found no reason to reject the paper’s proposition that housing will normally be provided in capitalist societies in commodified rather than decommodified forms and that it is only when adequate provision in commodified form is not possible (even with state support) and when this situation has some broader significance for the dominant social and economic order, that recourse is made to large-scale, partially decommodified, state-subsidized and politically controlled mass social rented housing (the significance of the reference to ‘mass’ social housing will be discussed below). The 1981 paper also referred to other aspects of the history of social rented housing which will be considered in detail in these pages, such as the link between mass programmes of social rented housing and economic reconstruction and modernization after the Second World War, the strategic ‘targeting’ of these programmes on economically and politically significant sections of the population and the failure of social democracy to develop and sustain any radical alternative to the limited forms of decommodified housing which did develop, or to resist their eventual effacement by the new form of commodified mass provision, home ownership.

However, this book describes a more complex history which requires a more developed analysis. First, there has not been one but three broadly defined structures of social housing provision. These I have labelled as the ‘residual’, ‘mass’ and ‘workers’ cooperative’ models.7 They first emerged as ideas and in practice in housing reform discourse, early legislation and pioneering projects in the years around the First World War. For reasons discussed in the book, the workers’ cooperative model, which in many cases involved a radical attempt to replace commodified forms of housing provision by a decommodified alternative, was later repressed or absorbed within the structures and practices of state-regulated and financed mass social housing. Consequently, the history of social rented housing divides into several distinctive stages, when one or other of the mass and residualized forms of provision was dominant. Of course, such periodizations offer a clear but oversimplified chronology of transitions in housing systems. These actually take place over many years, with varied national patterns and time- scales. Nevertheless, this study concludes that four periods of unequal length can be identified. In two, a short period after the First World War and a much longer period after the Second World War, the mass model prevailed. In the other two periods, the later 1920s and 1930s and the years since the mid-1970s, the residual model has been dominant. However, this chronology applies only to the five European countries listed earlier. The history of public housing in America has been that of a residualized form of provision for all but the earliest years of its existence.8

A further conclusion, developed in this work and missing from the earlier paper, is that, from the interwar period onwards, the residual form of provision has been incorporated within welfare capitalist regimes on a more or less permanent basis. In other words, this is the normal form of social rented housing provision in ‘normal’ times. The mass model, which cuts across private market provision more significantly than the residual form, gains major significance and state support only in ‘abnormal’ times, that is, when varying combinations of social, economic and political circumstances limit the scope for private provision and when this limitation is of strategic significance for certain aspects of the maintenance and development of the capitalist social and economic system.

The core of the book is structured around these four phases of social housing development, exploring how and why each model became dominant, and was later supplanted, describing and analysing the major social, economic and political dimensions of the two models (plus the third more vestigial workers’ cooperative model), providing the empirical evidence for the theory of social rented housing in the welfare capitalist regimes outlined in this Introduction.

Finally, the earlier paper made only very limited references to the changing social, economic and political context to social housing development. This book pays far more attention to relating social housing to changes in what have been called the social structures of accumulation. As Block (1987: 23) explains, this concept refers to the fact that ‘each period of capitalist expansion creates a particular set of social arrangements to sustain the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. Particular configurations of urban growth, particular types of financial and governmental mechanisms for structuring demand, and specific ways of organising the relations between workers and employers are constitutive of each phase of capitalist expansion’ (for a broadly similar approach see Gourevitch, 1986). Block adds that social structures of accumulation are always time- limited in their effectiveness, there is a process of growth and decay. Eventually, normally after ‘dramatic political-economic deterioration ... forces are mobilized to establish new social structures of accumulation’ (Block 1987: 23).

As we shall see, each of the four stages of social housing development examined in this book occurred at different stages in the emergence, growth and decline of three identifiable social structures of accumulation. The first was liberal capitalism, the initial form created by the Industrial Revolution which reached its peak in the late nineteenth century. Its dissolution was hastened by the First World War and, despite a concerted attempt to revive the system after 1918, the events of 1929–32 marked its death-knell. The second welfare capitalist (or, as some prefer, Fordist) structure of accumulation began to emerge in the interwar period (earlier in some respects in America than in Europe), came to dominance in the years after 1945 but, from the 1960s, became increasingly unstable and conflict-ridden.9 The final phase of this regime occurred in the years after the mid-1970s recession. The consequences of its breakdown, in terms of economic instability, industrial and labour market restructuring, political realignments and new patterns of social stratification and social divisions, are still being worked through. How to describe and analyse the emergent social structure of accumulation, and even how to label it, is uncertain. Current attempts are shaped by the varied theoretical perspectives and specific concerns of those who seek to analyse this new era.10

In each of these periods the role of the state in relation to the market and civil society has differed. While there were also differences between nations during each period, there have been some broad cross-national similarities. These are well recognized: the growth of state regulation of parts of civil society and the economy under liberal capitalism – but within narrow boundaries; the assumption by the state of far wider responsibilities for steering the economy and shaping civil society (especially through social policies) in the welfare capitalist era; the abandonment of many of these commitments over the past two decades, together with the adoption of a new set of social and economic priorities.

Chapter 1 discusses how most early proposals and projects for housing reform developed out of a more general, elite-led concern about the ‘social question’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these were shaped and constrained by the conception of the role of the state in relation to the market and the political and economic structures of the era. However, it also refers to less well-documented struggles by early working-class organizations to provide their own housing during this phase of liberal capitalist development, in which workers were excluded from many of the social, economic and political rights of citizenship.

Chapter 2 deals with the period immediately after the First World War when there was a struggle for survival by the agencies and institutions of liberal capitalism in the face of a new militancy and new demands from the organized working class and sections of the middle class. This produced the circumstance which led, for a brief period, to the large-scale implementation of programmes of mass social housing in most of the countries with which we are concerned (the reasons why this did not occur in two of them, France and the USA, are also discussed). The chapter also describes how, when the challenge posed by this post-war crisis was defused, the commitment to mass social housing provision was rapidly renounced, to be replaced, if at all, by a much smaller scale of residualized provision, targeted on the urban poor and, especially, on the removal of the urban slum.

However, as chapter 2 describes, while liberal capitalism won the battle, it had already lost the war, a fact which only became evident with the final collapse of the post-1918 attempts to turn the economic clock back to the pre-war era, signalled by the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s. However, as this chapter demonstrates, this period of societal crisis did not lead in most cases to a reversion to mass social housing programmes. In simple terms, this was because the existence of mass unmet housing needs in the Depression years had less directly destabilizing significance for capitalist economies and social systems than it had had after 1918. Now, in most cases, unemployment was a far more important consideration and developments in social housing provision frequently derived from this circumstance. Again, America provided a partial exception, although even here it was the employment-generating possibilities of the first ever federally subsidized public housing programme which provided a considerable part of the rationale for its implementation. The links between macro-economic developments and state-provided housing which emerged in some countries in this period may be seen as one of the early indicators of the new relationship between the state and the market, and the implications of this for social policy, that developed after 1945. However, an equally significant harbinger of the new order was the development of mass home-owner markets, suburbanization and new patterns of mass consumption linked to the rise of so-called ‘Fordist’ industries in the USA in the 1920s and in Britain in the 1930s. In the following post-war era the growth of these new forms of mass consumption, together with the economic and political structures that accompanied them, was to spread to all the countries with which we are concerned.

Chapter 3 describes what has been called the ‘golden age’ of social housing provision, the period which commenced at the end of the Second World War and came to an end around the middle of the 1970s. In Europe these decades saw the provision of mass social housing on a previously unprecedented scale. Again, the chapter argues, this was linked to the functionality of such provision for wider processes of economic, social and urban development. In America, where the new social structure of accumulation was rapidly established with less difficulty than in Europe, public housing became an ever more residualized form of provision. This change only began to occur, at a varying pace, in Europe as the initial rationale for post-war mass social housing was eroded by the very social and economic developments to which it had earlier contributed.

The onset of the first post-war depression, in the mid-1970s, whose underlying causes had been developing over the past decade or more, came just after the high point in most countries for postwar social housing production (and for the expansion of the welfare state more generally). Chapter 4, which deals with the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, examines how these years of recurrent crisis for the social structures of welfare capitalism deepened and intensified the transition to a renewed version of residual social housing provision and the decline of the mass provision. This seems likely to continue in the 1990s, even though the successive economic crises and the consequences of economic restructuring have seriously impeded the ability of the private market to provide decent and affordable housing to considerable sections of the population. A reversion to mass provision is likely to occur only if these unmet needs pose some significant problems for the emergent social structure of accumulation, as they did in the early period after 1918, and again after the Second World War, but not in the 1930s.

In a brief, more speculative passage at the end of this chapter, attention is focused on the emergence in recent years of small- scale, ‘bottom-up’ initiatives to provide forms of social rented housing which are distinctively different in various respects from the bureaucratized programmes of welfare state mass and residual provision. In some of their objectives, operating principles and forms of ownership and control, they are reminiscent of the long-obscured workers’ cooperative model. Like their predecessor, they are appearing during a time when neither the state nor the private market is able or willing to provide adequate and affordable housing for a significant section of the population. In the 1990s, as in the 1890s, these unmet needs are satisfied, after a fashion, in a variety of ways. Some of those in the most dire need, including some who are actually homeless, eventually gain access to the stocks of residualized social housing through the agency of the state, others double up or live in what they can get on the private market, enduring poor conditions and unaffordable housing payments. Only a tiny minority currently find more satisfactory solutions via the innovative forms of non-bureaucratized, ‘non-statist’ social housing provision referred to above. Even if these projects could expand to far more significant proportions, they might achieve this only at the cost of losing these distinctive characteristics (as the earlier workers’ cooperative projects did when they were absorbed within the structures and processes of mass state social housing after 1945). Nevertheless, they could provide some pointers for any attempt to revive and renew a commitment by a major political bloc (presumably social democracy or some fusion of environmental and socialist political philosophies) to a more or less radically decommodified form of housing provision.

Despite the evident links between housing developments and the wider role played by state welfare in the changing social structures of accumulation, housing has indeed been the wobbly pillar of the welfare state, frequently seen, at least in conventional accounts, as being separate from its central concerns and programmes. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the burgeoning body of literature and theory concerning the emergence and development of welfare regimes has almost entirely ignored the role that state involvement in housing generally, and social rented housing in particular, has played in this history.11 Most theories concerning the growth of the welfare states (and, in the last decade or so, their ‘crises’) have centred on comparative studies of income maintenance programmes and the social, economic and political circumstances which gave rise to them and shaped their subsequent growth and decline. Not even health or education have been much considered in the context of general theory building, although there have, of course, been significant cross-national studies of these services.

This seems questionable, at least in so far as such theories do purport to draw conclusions about national welfare regimes as a whole, because, since Tit muss (1958) wrote on the social division of welfare in the 1950s, definitions of the content of the state’s role in welfare have been progressively widened, well beyond even a concern with state provided health and education. In addition, as Hage, Hanneman and Gergan (1989: 1) have noted, in one of the few attempts so far to present a broader-based theory of welfare state expansion (incorporating welfare, health and education policies and expenditures), ‘little work has been done on attempting to ascertain whether the role of the state in health care and welfare and education’ is similarly constituted. In fact, this work suggests that the dynamics of welfare state development do differ according to the nature of provision as ‘the interests of different classes are involved’. The last chapter of this book takes up these issues.

Notes

1 See Tilton (1990) for an account of Hansson’s role in the development of Swedish social democracy and his concept of folkhemmet.

2 See Korpi (1983); Esping-Andersen (1985); Tilton (1990); Hancock (1993) for analyses of the Swedish case and, for social democracy generally, Przeworski (1985).

3 Whether their foundations will remain solid is now in doubt, with the defeat of social democracy and the installation of a deregulating, privatizing bourgeois coalition government in 1991. This administration immediately abolished the Housing Ministry as a precursor to returning most housing provision to the market. See Elander and Stromberg (1992) and, on retrenchment in the Nordic welfare states more generally, Marklund (1988).

4 Decommodification is a slippery concept. Radical decommodification would involve the removal of any vestige of capitalist market influence over the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services and a fully socialized set of arrangements. But EspingAndersen uses the term, as it is used here, to denote a much more limited decommodification: the socialization of the distribution of welfare services.

5 The term ‘social rented housing’ has been opposed on various grounds. Currently, in Britain, some object to the term because of its use in connection with the attempts of Conservative governments since 1979 to end council housing provision and institute a system of ‘social’ rented housing based on the housing associations and private landlords. No such ideologically biased meaning attaches to its use here. Rather, the intention is to indicate that this housing is provided by various forms of organization, of which the elected local authority (hence ‘council housing’) is only one.

A second objection is that this label in fact conceals a wide range of nationally specific forms and organization of provision – varied structures of housing provision. However, much of this book is concerned with exploring these variations, so the use of the term social rented housing does not have such a consequence here. In fact, one can provide only an approximate rather than a universally applicable general definition of social rented housing. It is certainlynot a form of provision that is non-capitalist, either in terms of its immediate production or of its significance for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. But it can be differentiated from other forms of housing in three major respects:

a It is provided by landlords at a price which is not principally determined by considerations of profit. These landlords are usually formally limited to ‘non-profit’ or ‘limited-profit’ status in so far as their social housing activities are concerned. Historically, rents have usually been below the levels charged on the open market for such accommodation, although this may no longer always be so.

b It is administratively allocated according to some conception of ‘need’ (although often not to those objectively in the worst housing conditions). Ability to pay can be important but, in contrast to private market provision, is usually not the dominant determinant of allocation.

c While political decision making has an important influence on all aspects of capitalist housing provision, as do market forces, the quantity, quality and terms of provision of social rented housing are more directly and sharply affected by the former than the latter, relative to other forms of provision. Government control over social rented housing is extensive and increased as it became a central feature of state housing policies.

6 When it is viewed as an abstract tenure form, home ownership is not a creation of the modern capitalist era. What is being referred to here is a specific structure of housing provision: large-scale, capitalist organization of housing for sale as a commodity to housing consumers. Other forms of home ownership, notably those which involve elements of self-provision or petty commodity production, have been common in other eras and still persist today in the Third World and in many advanced capitalist and former state socialist countries. For an illuminating study of the emergence of mass capitalist home ownership in France, see Topalov (1987).

7 Note ‘broadly defined’ – the reference to three models does not imply that each comprises a uniformly constituted structure of housing provision, invariant cross-nationally and historically. Each model refers to a range of specific structures of provision, these vary over time and between countries. Moreover, several structures can coexist in one country at one time. For example, mass social housing has been provided in some countries at some times by housing associations and local authorities, each having somewhat differently constituted relations with their tenants and central government. For parallel examples of multiple structures of housing provision in home ownership see Martens (1990). The nature of these three models will be further explored in subsequent chapters.

8 Since the late 1960s the main focus of federal low-income housing policies – at least in relation to new supply – has been on subsidized private market provision. See Harloe (1985) for an account of these developments.

9 The terms ‘Fordism’ and ‘post-Fordism’ are now used by different authors in different ways to refer to different empirically observable phenomena. In short, the concepts have no commonly agreed theoretical status or empirical foundation. See Sayer and Walker (1992: 194–6); and Sayer (1989).

10 For example, it has been described as ‘post- or global Fordist’, ‘postmodern’, ‘post-industrial’, ‘informational’, ‘fragmented’, ‘disorganized’, a ‘regime of flexible accumulation’, the ‘service economy’, and so on (Bell, 1973; Gershuny and Miles, 1983; Lipietz, 1987; Lash and Urry, 1987; Harvey, 1989; Scott, 1988; Castells, 1989; Mingione, 1991).

11 A notable exception is Esping-Andersen (1985), although most of his subsequent work has focused on income maintenance and employment policies; see, especially, Esping-Andersen (1990).

1

Social Housing and the ‘Social Question’ : Housing Reform Before 1914

There are several dangers in looking back at the origins of social policies and reform from the vantage point of the late twentieth century. Perhaps the most obvious is a tendency to see the past through a frame of reference which is set by the contemporary vocabulary of concepts, theories and concerns – ignoring the ways in which time and circumstance have altered all of these. A related danger is to misinterpret history by turning it into a teleology, selecting out the evidence to demonstrate an almost inevitable progression of social policy development from its earliest origins to its modern forms. A further problem is to assume too simple and direct a connection between the objective needs to which social reform was purportedly a response, the campaigns of those elites who argued for reforms and the actual development of social policies. Often each of these were related only in limited ways to each of the others.

In reconstructing the history of housing reform, in particular in examining the emergence of social rented housing, we face all these difficulties. Just to illustrate the points made above briefly, first, there are problems of vocabulary. In the past hundred years the meanings and therefore the social significance of words and concepts have changed in ways which are crucially important to note. For example, ‘public health’ now refers to the control and elimination of physical disease. But in the nineteenth century it carried a far wider burden of meaning encompassing moral and social ‘health’ too. More precisely still, the concern was with the ‘health’ of the new working class and this concern was motivated by the actual or presumed consequences of this class’s condition for the dominant social and economic order. This concern is reiterated time and time again in the contemporary writings of social reformers, for example the American reformer Alfred T. White, who, writing in 1879, stated:

[t]he badly constructed, unventilated, dark and foul tenement houses of New York… are the nurseries of the epidemics which spread with certain destructiveness into the fairest homes; they are the hiding places of the local banditti; they are the cradles of the insane who fill the asylums and of the paupers who throng the almshouses… they produce these noxious and unhappy elements of society as surely as the harvest follows the sowing (cited in Lubove, 1974: 35).

Therefore, the nineteenth-century concern with public health incorporated a whole range of issues lying at the very heart of capitalist society itself.

In fact, the social reformers who campaigned over issues of housing and public health were concerned with a much more fundamental issue, variously described as the ‘social question’ or, in a telling phrase, ‘the dangerous classes’.1 Their activities were in no simple sense a response to narrowly conceived housing or health needs. These issues were not, as they were later to become, or apparently become, separate fields of social policy, the province of bureaucrats and specialists, divorced from each other and from broader questions of the reproduction and maintenance of the capitalist social formation, with relatively separate sets of issues and debates specific to each policy area. It follows that viewing the early history of, for example, housing reform as if it had a logic and meaning which related purely to a conception of housing needs and policies as they have since become institutionalized within academic and political discourses is inadequate and misleading. Rather, as Niethammer (1981: 31) has suggested, the early debates over housing reform were ‘the experimental formulation of a new paradigm of social control’.