Where I lay my head is home

[davywavy]

A year or so ago I read an article (I can't find it now) about how Detroit City Council, finally realising that their city just was never going to be what it once was, had started demolishing residential suburbs and returning them to nature. I thought it was an interesting idea as it seemed to make two assumptions; firstly that the housing stock was not only now redundant but also that the people who had lived there were now not only gone, but they weren't coming back. At the back of my mind I vaguely contrasted this pragmatic solution with the plan put into practise about five years ago by our own Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), when they started demolishing entire housing estates in places like Liverpool and Newcastle.
At the time I was shocked by this plan; the rows of hundreds of rather nice, solid red-brick Victorian terraces being merrily bulldozed out of the way. Surely some better solution could be found for such nice properties, I thought.

I sometimes mention that I grew up in 'It's Grim Up North' territory; I do it to establish my working class hero credentials when arguing with the sort of Labour supporter who had a nice middle-class upbringing in Hampshire and feels a bit guilty about it. My dad worked as a pig herder and then went down the pit, and I left school with only one 'O' level. This might be mendacious of me, but I don't half find it entertaining.
Anyway, whilst I was up there visiting family a few weeks ago I was driving through one of the innumerable housing estates in the area. The sort of place where one house in three is boarded up and there's 40% unemployment and whilst I was doing so I got to thinking about Detroit and the DCLG and wondering who was right.
It's the nature of communities to grow and shrink; no municipality has any moral right to exist solely on the merit of it already doing so. The industrial communities - be they Detroit or Sheffield or wherever - grew as people moved to them because there was work there and, when the work ends (in the case of Detroit because people started making better cars cheaper elsewhere), something else is needed. Both the UK and the US have spent large sums of money on regenerating or supporting communities in this situation, but I can't help but think that this money may well have been better spent on retraining people with skills and also helping them relocate to where those skills are in demand, rather than supporting and regenerating communities - which seems to be just a euphamism for spending lots of moolah to get people to stay where they are for no real reason.
One thing which really struck me is that when the DCLG set about knocking down terraces in Liverpool, the local residents objected strenuously and it appears that their objections were not based upon idea of losing homes they'd lived in all their lives, but instead were based on their experiences of what happened during the last time this process happened in the 1960's and 1970's, when houses were cleared simply to make way for new housing developments and people were just moved about in the same small area with no greater opportunities to make themselves a better life than were there before.

I can't help but feel that the money being spent on this entire process of regeneration and supporting communities might be better spent on the very thing which created those communities in the first place - encouraging people to move where there is work for them, where they can create new neighbourhoods.

But what do I know. What do you think?

Comments

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

I'm from Michigan, albeit further north than the areas under the bulldozers. My sister still lives near Detroit. Not in Detroit. Relatively few people live in Detroit these days, hence the bulldozers.

I understand the deliberate destruction idea first started in Flint, a town a bit north-west of Detroit which lived entirely for the US auto industry, and started losing jobs and population back in the '80s. The issue isn't so much that the housing stock is redundant, as that there's frequently one occupied house in four blocks. That occupied house may be dutifully paying for city water, garbage pick-up, and all the other support you need to be a modern suburbanite, but without people around them to pay their share it's just not economically feasible to support them. A garbage truck that has to drive 10 miles to pick up (and get paid for) two households' trash can't even keep itself in fuel, much less pay the driver. The same goes for the rest of the infrastructure--pipes for water, street clearing (a huge expense in the snow belt), etc.

My parents moved with the jobs back in the '80s, and it worked out really well for me. I got a better education and far better job opportunities than I would have if we had stayed. However, the idea of moving for jobs runs counter to an idea in the US that family and community should take care of one another when problems arise, rather than having a strong social safety net. If you move to follow jobs every few years, you don't get to know your neighbors that well. And you usually can't bring your extended family with you. So this method handling a roving economic boom, coupled with a fairly weak social safety net, is causing a few problems.

Still, done right, I think deliberately contracting the physical size of cities with shrinking populations is a good idea. They can be made a lot more efficient, and the area around them could be repurposed into farms (food), farms (wind), or wildlife areas.

[(Anonymous)]

"encouraging people to move where there is work for them, where they can create new neighbourhoods."

Through the miracle of lower taxes, which would make otherwise marginal investment opportunities attractive? It would mean less government (because government is expensive & remote, so it only really a way to get things done if there is no other way, and should therefore be deliberately dismantled whenever possible) Or some sort of stupid state scheme which forced the productive part of society to subsidise the unproductive?

[hiromasaki.livejournal.com]

As far as I've heard, the bulldozing has only been in Flint, at least as far as in MI. That may be why David isn't finding the article again. ;)

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

Could be. I think it's an idea that could work in Detroit, though, with their acres of uninhabited buildings.

http://www.kevinbauman.com/100abandonedhouses/

[vampyrefate.livejournal.com]

I've got what sounds to be a similiar background to you - parents didn't have any qualifications, Dad working in a factory as guillotine operator for all of his life, and Mum was a hairdresser. Most of the labour types I know are all from very comfortable middle class backgrounds, which as you say can make for a lot of fun.

I'm from Brum, and I moved to sheffield to study, and then stayed here after graduating. Found work with a local software company before starting my own six or so years ago.

I would argue with you a bit. People originally came to the caring sharing north when there was work here, for sure. However nowadays, in this country, I don't think the location of the employer really matters all that much. In fact, it makes a lot of sense for employers in high tech industries to have production based up here, and perhaps maintain a sales office in London.

I mean, it's the globalisation argument, but on a smaller scale.

Should we be investing in re-training and educating our populace? Yes.

Would the money spent on knocking down houses etc be better spent on education?
Yes.

I do think that some of the regeneration money spent in Sheffield was well spent, some of it not so. We don't need quite as many blocks of flats as we have, and I think we're also king of the city center serviced office block now too. But on the flip side, we really didn't need the vacant industrial units all over the shop either. Preserve one as a museum. I think the sweet spot would have been to have spent a bit less on regeneration, more on training, and a lump sum on promoting the area. (Which is sort of what they did... but kinda badly...)

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

I think we should give these communities a button which, when pressed, kills someone unknown to the operator and simultaneously generates a million quid's worth of local resources.

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I think about this sort of thing a lot now. We moved for jobs when I was little. My Dad, in fact, was talking about going somewhere else if he can't find work in Portland, at 54 (he'll never retire apparently!)

But Portland became a mecca for young "creative professionals"* because it was cheap and it had some cool points for being cold and rainy. Like Manchester, but without the scallies. It's also a relatively liberal city, not much in the way of gay bashing and the like. Sounds good right? College educated people coming to Portland can only be good?

Know what happened? We're at 12% unemployment. Which is pretty high for the US. And somewhere between 2-3% of those people are the transplants that came here for a lifestyle instead of economics. The Atlantic did a fascinating article on how home ownership is screwing up economies. Part of the reason the US managed to get itself out of the last large economic meltdown was because people could move. They didn't have to sell houses and uproot to get out. Houses make it harder for people to migrate.

And it isn't as bad in the US as say, Wigan. Where commenters on the WEN website are always lamenting how people born and raised in Wigan can't even find a job in Wigan and Pakis.





* See: no job skills and liberal arts degrees

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I live somewhere people want to be. My rent is a third higher than my sister's. I live in a 1 bed flat, she lives in a two bed house. On the down side, she lives in Derby, and I live somewhere nice (but with a worse crime problem).

But encouraging mobility is not the answer. Centralisation is too much of a self-perpetuating disease as it is. Paying people to move where the work is would only make it worse.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, right now, we're paying people to remain where work isn't, so I really struggle to understand how getting them to move to places where they can work is worse than that?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, massive depopulation would solve a lot of problems, it's true. The money would come in handy as well.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I wasn't joking when I called my potted history mendacious! When I say I left school with one 'O' level, that's because I was a precocious little beggar who did an exam three years early. By the time I did all the others 'O' levels had been replaced by GCSEs, of which I have a hatfull :)
And as for my dad going down the pit - he did, but only for about three weeks...

I recently went to Sheffield for the first time in yonks and I do rather like what they've done with the old place; the fountains in front of the Town Hall are rather like Milan, and bulldoxing the old town hall annex and putting the Winter gardens in instead has improved the place immeasurably.
The worst bit of a night out in Sheffield was always the drunkards weeing in doorways and against walls, so I was delighted to see they've put that huge metal urinal on the approach leading to the station as well.

[ukmonty.livejournal.com]

How the hell did you manage to get one O'Level? Standards are slipping I tell you!

Beer soon?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I had been going to text you to ask if you were about this weekend, actually?

[ukmonty.livejournal.com]

I'm in Bath this weekend

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Has your phone number changed?

[meme-machine.livejournal.com]

Hi Dave,

I'd take issue with your last sentence. The thing which created communities in the first place was not people moving there because there was work. That's a very recent phenomenon - something from the massive dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution, and which created ghettoes, social unrest, overcrowding, various "urban maladies", and a general grottiness of life which arguably we're still trying to cope with.

By far the vast majority of communities have agrarian origins. They were collections of farms, then concentrations of specialist crafters into towns supported by outlying villages. But you know this :-)

My family are staunch Northerners and originally farmers who came down from Cumbria into Lancashire with the railways during the late Industrial Revolution, and in doing so lost contact with "the land" and became urban or semi-urban proles and petty bourgeois. That was about 180 years ago, so we've managed to put down new roots, and now consider central and east Lancs "home".

I had to leave, because economic deprivation meant there was little there I could do other than manual work, which I didn't want to. I would have *loved* to stay, but was forced out by economic circumstances and a general lack of planning. I don't resent it, but it has made me relatively "rootless", which I consider a loss, and it would have been nice to have had the choice.

The Industrial Revolution is a blip in human history - a mere couple of centuries - and already our societies are beginning to find the concentration of labour in cities to be not all that productive. On the whole, the uncontrolled social movements produced by the Revolution have been socially disastrous, unless you're a rich landowner: we have people crammed in on top of one another in cities, urban decay and lawlessness, and vast tracts of countryside underdeveloped and largely empty, and far too expensive for its "ancestral inhabitants" to currently go back to. Quite absurd.

So, personally I'm hoping we get over this Industrial Revolution hiccough, and get sensible about communities, roots, and creating a decent living environment again. And, yes, that requires a bit of thought and planning, rather than simply a kind of Darwinist sauve qui peut ;-)

Sarah