Social housing on new build estates

[pangeapanda]

I’m absolutely not looking for a bun fight on council housing tenants, we’re classed as living in affordable housing (shared ownership).

We live on a new build estate, it’s a mix of outright owned/mortgaged, shared ownership & social housing. From what I understand, a certain percentage of new homes have to be allocated for affordable housing or council housing. I imagine they’re moving away from building entirely socially housed ‘council estates’ now?

Half of the estate is houses, a line of part owned properties then quite a few blocks of social housing apartments. I guess my question is, why do they segregate the council tenants from the home owners? I thought they’d be more likely to pepper them throughout the estate now to avoid pockets of antisocial behaviour.

There’s a clear divide between the estate and one side is noticeably less nice. At the same time, some of the houses sell for nearly 500k so people might be apprehensive, rightly or wrongly, about buying where there may be a lot of turnover or perceived antisocial behaviour.

Is there a reason they lump all the affordable housing together then? And should it be considered a good thing?

Turnover is much faster in private rentals than in social housing & round here it's faster among the owner occupiers than among the social tenants. People wait years for a SH tenancy, transfers & exchanges are now stupidly complex & time consuming so when someone finally gets a SH tenancy they tend to stay put.

I've seen just as much antisoial behaviour & outright criminality among the property-owning class as among my fellow chavs.

This is an interesting infographic: https://www.ntu.ac.uk/media/documents/nce/Pages-from-Resolution-83-with-NTU-QSCwork.pdf

In our new-build estate, social housing is mixed in, and that seems to work well.

However, we are a small estate.

I have seen areas where its obvious where social housing is, trolleys outside houses, rubbish on floor etc.

In no way did I mean for it to go this way and I genuinely wasn’t trying to be divisive.

My arse.

Thank you! As someone with family who lived in council housing, estates that were once infamous, and with parents who rent/ed, many poorer people are great. No wanting to sound cheesy, but I was always told of how my greatgrandparents lived in very deprived areas, with no indoor toilets, yet everyone helped everyone, and the stoop had to be immaculate.
It was the wealthy who could get away with misbehaving. The kids in our family would have got called out for it!
Maybe there should be more done about anti-social behaviour, rather than just thinking about where to put social housing, because I can't see why anyone should mind living next to someone just because they're what would have been called a council tenant - all the complaints are about behaviour.

Yes I think everyone should give it a quick read. It doesn’t look very good quality but does state people who live in social housing are 40% more likely to be victims of crime than owner occupiers.

on then other hand, your grand parents (and mine) lived in slums owned by slum landlords

social housing came in and offered such people a high quality safe home. We should all be thankful for our social housing system. Without it, most of us would still be languishing in the slums

The estate round here where all the cars get nicked is owner occupied.

I live on a new build estate that is now about 20 years old. When I was looking for a house I was very nervous about buying on a brand new estate (which has the social housing on it) and that directed me to one of the 'older' estates as they were built before social housing had to be included.

That's not to say all private owners are perfect. They make noise sometimes, they have too many cars sometimes, their little spoilt children can be noisy and inconsiderate with their playing outside.

However whenever I walk round the new estates I can always tell which houses are social. Some of them may well be kept nicely (and I feel sorry for those folks) but plenty have a real air of neglect/rubbish after just a short time. They are always on the worst part of the estate ie beside the main road or hidden away from the rest of the estate. There is more children near them who look a bit 'poor' and neglected. The gardens are usually full of broken pots, abandoned toys, chipped paintwork. I definately feel less safe near them.

It must be horrible for the law abiding, decent people who live in them and go to work and try and keep their house looking nice. Only to be surrounded by the benefit scroungers, smoking and swearing and their feral children.

I know that's not a very politically correct view but that's how I feel.

I agree.
I don't care how wealthy or not someone is.
But I really do care about behaviour

We have quite a nice house on a nice leafy street but one of our neighbours keeps far too many cars so they clog up the road and they have noisy parties. Selfish people can live anywhere sadly

I have to say I agree with you. We avoided the whole new build situation for this reason and some others. We checked mode of ownership for the areas we were considering and anywhere that had social housing in the vicinity we quickly removed from our search list. The interesting thing was, when contrasting the crime rates with social housing, crime stats were just too high. We ended up paying a lot more to live in an area where there wasn’t that issue.

I’ve lived in a housing association block (flat was bought through right to buy and rented to me) in east London and also in a house with streets of social housing to the side and back. Everyone was very quiet, only drama was from another private tenant.

Where the affordable properties are on a site is often agreed in advance of starting to build by both developer and housing association - most prefer clusters of maybe 3 - 5 properties together. You will often get the only block of flats on a site as affordable units though. Sometimes the housing association specifications are better than the private for sale.

Realistically there’s terrible people everywhere, rich and poor

What's not to love is that even spending hundreds of thousands of your hard-earned money isn't enough to buy yourself away from antisocial behaviour.

Why should you be able to?! Even with the benefit of hundreds of thousands of hard borrowed cash?!

it’s the uk. We don’t have segregate the poor into ghettos. Maybe you should live in a country with gated communities so you can lock them out.

I bet you are always wishing you could live inn such an amazing society like South Africa or Dubai.

Parents bought 700k dream retirement home beautiful new build estate beautiful part of Devon. On that estate is a block of flats with tenants from hell in it, drunk gobby, stupid pit bill / xl bully kind of dogs. god knows what else.

they are selling it - would have been better off spending less money on an old house where everything is privately owned.

why isn’t social housing points based? You get points if you keep your place nice/ aren’t on drink/drugs. There’s plenty of families in need for these homes who aren’t antisocial nightmares. Why do we house the drunks and druggies!

I live on a new build. It's shared ownership for us. The guy on the right used to work, did up vans or something. Jacked it in. His girlfriend, who doesn't live here but visits every day, has never worked (he's told us this, my partner gets on well with him), and her kids are absolutely feral. I dread seeing her car pull up here every day. Her kids have smashed my garden door by constantly throwing frisbees at it, they have damaged at least three neighbours' gardens, smashed another's outdoor lamp, destroyed another's sunflowers (that was heartbreaking) and kick balls against cars the whole time they are here. We have 2 parking spaces and these kids just sit in them and won't move, even when we're returning home and trying to park. They also swear at anyone who has the misfortune to return home from work if they're here and playing outside.

The woman on the other side of me also doesn't work, and blasts loud music all day long. Constantly undergoing a complaint process through the council.

You can also tell which are the social housing homes on this new build estate as the cars tend to be there all day, but the cars of working households are gone by 730-8am every day. I know because I take my dog out every day between 730 and 830am.

I get on with everyone here though. But I do wish I'd had enough money to get a full mortgage. It really shows that we didn't.

A lot of other neighbours have told me privately that they feel very sorry for me living next to both sets of my neighbours, especially the one with the out of control kids.

Is that a joke?! You give someone a home and then they have to earn points to stay there. And if they don’t earn enough points you throw them out to go- where?!?

sounds more like China by the minute. Wait until someone makes you behave in certain ways for points

Absolutely

My Grandparents and Parents were such people in the late 60s.
However , they had been luckier than most in that their Landlord was a friend of my Grandads.
They demolished the streets of houses (though they left some, including one my Great Grandmother lived in).

They were brand new maisonettes they were moved too with indoor toilet and bathroom and they were all thrilled with it , and the space they had around them.
They kept pride in their homes, as did those on our estate when we eventually were re housed .
I do agree, though, with PPs who have said let's not pretend all SH tenants are decent , because they are not .. It is the same with Owners of Homes imo

Why aren’t mortgages points based where you lose points for being on drink/drugs and not keeping your place nice? Why do banks enable the drunks and druggies to be housed? Money! And if you don’t have enough money you will have to live alongside people you would prefer not to and accept that some of your neighbours will be wishing they didn’t live next to you for whatever reason

Yeah how about a points based system for all. Someone like me could run it. I don’t like:

people who hate on social housing
racists
boomers
people with shit jobs
people who don’t volunteer

imagine them all living on the streets!? Delicious.

I can't help that you don't like the description of my reality. I wish it was otherwise, but it's not. 300 houses on the estate, 30 social houses in 3 groups of ten, and every single problem I mentioned above (and I forgot parking on a wildflower area leaving ruts) has come/ is coming from some of those 30 houses.

I'll think of you when the illegal straight-through exhaust car with no front numberplate passes by waking me up tomorrow morning.

Hold on though what about people like by Bf? She drinks and uses drugs regularly but has never had a mortgage because she’s rich. In fact she doesn’t even have a job. I would still like to control her behaviour and the way she keeps her house though. How?!?

This is a very well-written post, and perfectly sums up the experience of countless people on this island. Yet it is amazing how many of those on the left would either dismiss what you write as exaggeration and lies, or attack you for being a 'snob' and 'bigot'. They can't deal with facts. They live in a fantasy land, and as soon as the facts don't fit their dreamy ideals, they explode with anger.

The brutal truth (and this IS the truth) is that at least 10-20% of the population are incapable of living in a civilized way. They just can't do it. I don't know why. No one has any answers. The left say more state spending, the right say more personal responsibility. Neither works. Nothing works. Both the left and the right have failed to do anything about such people. The harsh reality is that some people are not fit to raise children. They raise them to be just as violent, ignorant and anti-social as them, and so the cycle continues. Until we are prepared to discourage the worst members of society from having kids, we will all have to endure the kind of things you describe. It has nothing to do with 'poverty' btw. Some of the finest human beings I know were raised in poverty.

Personally, I will do anything, and go anywhere, to avoid living near such people. Am I a snob? You bet I am.

I live on an older post war estate that still has plenty of social housing tenants. My neighbours are fucking awesome, and I know from experience that if I have an emergency they’ll give me the coat off their own back to help out.

I have lived on much “posher” estates and my neighbours would not have pissed on me if I was on fire. People behave badly, doesn’t matter how much money they have!

And who do you think is carrying out the crimes? Do you think it's owner occupiers or renters from other areas coming to the SH areas to commit crimes. I don't think so! It'll be their fellow SH tenants.