David Clapham

Housing Management, Consumers and Citizens

Preface. Part 1. The Context 1. Introduction: The Changing Face of Housing and Local Government 2. Consumers of Citizens? Part 2. The Actors 3. Housing Managers 4. Councillors 5. Tenants 6. Tenants Associations Part 3. The Outcomes 7. Tenants, Housing Managers and Councillors 8. Conclusion: Tenant-Landlord Relationships and the Future of Coouncil Housing

Rationing, Choice and Constraint: The Allocation of Public Housing in Glasgow

Social segregation in public housing has usually been explained in institutional terms by reference to the policies and practices of the local authority. This paper draws on data from a household survey of new council tenants in Glasgow to demonstrate that the outcome of the rationing process cannot be attributed to factors originating at the level of the institution alone. The research examines stages of the allocation process, in particular the behaviour of applicants in expressing preferences and their propensity to reject offers, as well as institutional factors. It is suggested that household choice behaviour, which is related to income, is important in determining social patterns in council housing.

Allocation systems and housing choice

This article examines the major approach to the study of allocation in British public housing, i.e. the institutional approach. It argues that the approach is unsatisfactory because it ignores factors which originate from outside of the institutional context and also the interaction between the individual household and the institution. These drawbacks can be remedied by focusing on the choices facing households, by using household choice models similar to those used in studying the movement of households in the private market. It is only by using this approach that the major problems of allocation in British public housing will be identified.

Housing choice and search strategies within an administered housing system

In this paper findings are presented concerning the behaviour of households moving into and within the public-housing sector in a major British city. In contrast to most research on the public sector, the approach adopted is explicitly derived from theories and studies of housing choice and search. Data from an extensive household survey of new council tenants are used to demonstrate that households undertake a range of search strategies which are associated with different housing outcomes. In particular, variations are shown to exist in stressors and subsequent search behaviour, in information usage, in evaluation strategies, and in spatial patterns.

Importing housing policy: Housing co‐operatives in Britain and Scandinavia

Aspects of housing policy are often seen to be transferable across national boundaries, even though the economic and political contexts are different. This paper examines co‐ownership, a policy initiative which was imported to Britain from Scandinavia in the 1960s and which had a short and problematic life. It analyses the reasons for the failure of co‐ownership in Britain but suggests that it may be possible to establish new forms of co‐operative housing on a larger scale in future.

Management of the local state: the example of corporate planning

Every so often a management technique is discovered and held out to be deprivation and other urban problems. Decentralisation is the current example but in the late 1960s and early 1970s this place was held by corporate planning. This article analyses the rise and fall of corporate planning and attempts to untangle the interests involved in its implementato underestimate the independent powers of the state apparatus to block Few workers in local government or recipients of its services take any part in the esoteric debate concerning abstract models of management and planning and their application to local government. This debate is restricted to a small circle of academics who assess alternative models in a limited, technical way divorced from the reality of the political and social context within which local government operates. However, once in a while, one of the ideas generated in this debate escapes and is taken up and implemented on a significant scale by local authorities. Academics aware of potential consultancy earnings abandon their scientific detachment and enthusiastically espouse the idea, making exaggerated claims for it as the panacea for all urban problems. The current example of this is management decentralisation which as an idea has been around for a long time but has recently ’caught on’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s corporate planning was held to be the solution to all the ills of local government. It was said to offer a way of ensuring that local government services were delivered efficiently and were planned to meet effectively the needs of the increasingly complex urban environment and it constituted one of the major hopes for alleviating the newly recognised ill of ’urban deprivation’. Of course, corporate planning did not live up to these claims and it has now faded into the distant memory even if it has left some legacy in the structures and processes of local authorities. At first glance, it is tempting to dismiss