If you have any interest in the history of the "Thatcherite revolution" in the UK, I'd urge you to read the whole article. It's well written and thoughtfully put together.

John Harris on council housing and the consequences of Right to Buy | Society | The Guardian

Safe as houses

When it was introduced almost 30 years ago, Right to Buy was hailed as 'one of the most important social revolutions of the century'. But far from seeing council estates transformed by their home-owning former tenants, it has led to fractured communities, the rise of exploitative landlordism and a lack of housing so severe that some councils are now trying to buy their old homes back. John Harris reports

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These days, you can make out the enduring signs of another historic watershed: the one that began in December 1979, when the freshly elected Conservative government published the housing bill that enshrined council tenants' right to buy their homes, and commenced what was, arguably, Thatcherism's most popular scheme: what Michael Heseltine - then the secretary of state for the environment - called "one of the most important social revolutions of the century". Nearly 30 years on, its legacy is instantly revealed by the estate's front doors. Council-supplied models come in five designs, which are all soberly traditional; if you are a home-owner, you are more than likely to have joined in a quiet riot of stained glass, pastel colours and ornate door-knockers.

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"Once houses started to be sold," he says, "people felt better about living here. People looked after where they lived more. And they were more interested in what was done to the rest of the place. Basically, it made it a more pleasant place to be."

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"You wouldn't recognise this place compared to how it used to look 20 or 30 years ago. It was an absolute tip."

Such is what remains of Right to Buy evangelism: the idea that ownership breeds responsibility in a way that tenancy never can, and the collectivist delusions of the past were best swept away by the property-owning democracy.

This is a key element of how the council house story is told in the UK. That the disrepair of many houses and estates was solely the result of people not caring about houses they didn't own. Nothing to be said about their income levels, or the spending squeeze the local councils had been through in previous years.

To give you an idea of the massive scale of the change:

In 1979, 42% of the British population lived in council housing. These days, the figure is a mere 12%, with another 6% renting their home from housing associations and cooperatives. Between 1980 and 1996 alone, 2.2m homes were bought by tenants who became what the jargon termed "owner-occupiers" - and, give or take the property slump of the early 1990s, thousands of them became the beneficiaries of rising house prices.

Harris wryly quotes a novel of the period: "They had doubled their savings without any work being done. It was extraordinary, money for nothing. It went against some inherited, deep-rooted idea of how the universe worked, but there it was all the same."

To me this suggests an alternative explanation of why the maintenance of houses improved and an "air of prosperity" came to  various, previously publicly owned, estates. Simply, over a period of years, the transfer of assets combined with a rising housing market made these people very much richer than before.

Now some might say this is in some twisted way socialism in action. (Give people a decent base and they can build a better life.) So why am I complaining?

Firstly, of course, because it's never sold as "giving people money" although it turned out that way, but as the virtues of ownership, responsibility, capitalism and crucially, removing things from public to private ownerhip.

Secondly, there are some downsides to the tale, which Harris does a great job of reporting on:

Houses were sold to tenants at a discounted price, up to 50% off. The councils were forbidden from using this money to build replacement housing. This represents the first strand: Looting the wealth accumulated in the past:

Transferring assets from public to private ownership was passed off as "giving the people back their money" but the reality was that it formed much more of a lottery. If you happened to be living in the right place at the right time the government would give you an asset (with good prospects - see pt 2) at half price. But if you weren't living in the right place, then all that happened was that your share of the collective wealth of the country was diminished - and the capacity of the government to improve the country also diminished. That the sales were at half-price just added to the degradation of local government's ability to spend on the public realm.

The next strand comes in a couple of parts, but I see them both under the rubric, stealing from the future.

In a country like Britain, with (relatively) little building land free around major cities, the sale of housing land was never going to be a neutral act in the long term. Should there ever be a need for new public housing then local government were always likely to have to pay really high premiums to get back something they could have held onto for nothing. Indeed, the reality at this time is that often the councils cannot afford to buy building land and are thus forced to rent back space in original public housing at exorbitant fees:

On top of all that, he says, there is the insanity of a practice known as Private Sector Leasing: councils putting families deemed to be emergency cases in ex-council properties, owned by private landlords who charge them as much as £300 a week for places they once rented out for less than a third of that. So much money can be made out of this wheeze that in many London boroughs, property firms have been known to leaflet and cold-call council tenants, offering cash enticements for them to use their Right to Buy on the companies' behalf.

But beyond this is a dreadful irony, where estates that "bloomed" in a wave of "proud ownership" start to regress as those owners seek to convert their asset gains into money:

Within all this intrigue, there is one particularly sharp irony: that contrary to the idea that Right to Buy would lead to some idyllic future of gleaming houses and perfectly tended gardens, the pushing of so much property on to the lower end of the private rented market means that too much if it has been left looking remarkably shabby and unkempt.

"That's happened over the past 10 years," says Smith. "After Right to Buy, I can remember properties that straight away had lovely Georgian-style windows, crazy paving on the drives, nice brickwork - these little villas popping up everywhere. They looked fantastic; I can remember walking past, thinking, 'I wish I lived in a house like that.' I look at them now: they've changed hands two or three times, and they look dishevelled. People don't take pride in them, because you've got this six-month transit-camp situation. There's no community cohesion, the neighbours don't know each other ... Overall, if you took a sample of 100 properties and 50 were council and 50 were privately owned, I would guarantee you that the council properties would be in much better condition."

One resident explains why:

"The people who bought the properties don't live in them any more," she says. "This is the biggest problem. They buy them, they do them up, then they sell them, and they get rented out. A lot of them go and live abroad." One of her neighbours, she tells me, bought his flat, paid off his mortgage, and eventually retired to Cyprus.

In the end of course, only the "lottery winners" got an instant leg up the housing ladder. They wanted to move up and out, so who would move in? People who could not afford to buy. So instead, a whole new generation of private landlords came in, turning the houses back into a rental sector.

Now, beyond the irony of a "ownership society program" that leaves you with an estate full of tenants and just a new set of landlords, you may say... so what?

Alas, the complexity of human systems has resulted in a situation even worse:

Some of those private landlords were fine people, who treated their tenants better perhaps than the council ever did. Others maybe not so well. But still the utilitarian calculus isn't clear.

The killer blow comes from a lack of regulation, which allowed various mini-slum lords to turn houses into dormitories, packed with migrant workers. The rental profits went up, but the transience of the community increased. And the pressure on infrastructure from overcrowding has also added to the decay.

So the state of the "estate" has decayed back to 1979 levels, but across 30 years we've managed to hamstring the resources of local government to address the problem and destroy the cohesion of the community, reducing the potential for grassroots solutions.

It seems to me that the neo-liberal prosperity of these areas wasn't very real, just partly looted from the work of the past and partly stolen from the future.