Surprised with the quality of some council houses

[LydieL]

Hi all, so I recently moved to a town in the north west, very low income area, the town is as you’d expect a sea of terrace houses that open to the street with concrete yards, some of the nicer parts have gardens but for the most part that’s not the case. There are also some newer estates.

Anyway I work for a charity, we support families where a parent or sibling has passed away. As part of my job I’ve seen a lot of council houses, in this area it’s mostly the terraces which are small or post war builds which are bigger but these tend to be “rougher” areas to live.

Lately I’ve been working with a family, mums been offered a council house and today I went with her to just go over a list of what she needs to do to get out of temporary accommodation asap and into it. I’ll be honest I’m a little stunned at the quality, it’s a 3 bed terrace, small front garden, mid size back garden (more than most around here), large kitchen, bay window. Council have fitted a new kitchen and bathroom and re-plastered the whole house.

It’s also in a “nicer” area. For the amount this place would sell for, you could probably buy 2 cheaper 3 bed terraces and considering the shortage of council housing stock I’m surprised that hasn’t happened! She will be paying about a little Over half what it would go for on the rental market.

Now I know this is the exception rather than the norm but AIBU to be surprised councils are holding onto higher value properties like this rather than selling them and either getting 2 houses (so 2 families can be housed) or putting the profit into the local area?

I am aware this is far from the norm but after talking to colleagues the council seems to have several properties in this little area, this mum has also got very lucky with her housing situation as she’s only been in temporary accommodation for a couple of months.

I live in Wales, where we have legislated to have high standards when it comes to building new councils houses. Unfortunately this also means that councils build fewer than needed.

People should be housed in high quality housing stock.

I know OP was sneering. No need for wiser minds to humour the “life choices” trope though.

You need to get a new job, OP.

All housing should be good quality. And a bay window? The sheer audacity!
Have you missed the stuff in the press about people in shockingly awful social housing too? Broken windows and mould so bad it is affecting their health. Or do you think that should be the standard for SH tenants.

I hope the lady you are supporting enjoys her new home, and that it is serves as a springboard to a decent life here. Sounds like she lost her partner and has come back home (you said she is British) as her family is here.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Thanks. All the far right posting is probably making me irritable.

It’s a particularly irritating trope that our right wing seem to have to have pinched from America. “Work harder and you too can have a £500k mortgage.” It’s just not true.

The low paid actually prop up the rest of us with their too-cheap labour. Ragged trouser philanthropists. Or they would be ragged if the right had their way.

You are in the wrong job.Working for a charity usually mean you can show empathy for others.

You seem to believe that council housing should be cheap-looking, lower standard dwellings because that is all that those pesky poor people deserve...

You need to see some of the council houses Westminster Council own…

I grew up in social housing. In the late 70s, my family moved from a three storey terrace CH with inadequate heating in a bad area to a new build HA housing estate in a semi-rural area (which is now a full suburb because of all the development that's gone up around it.)

Our new house had all its bedrooms on the first floor, (no attics) underfloor heating, a separate living room and dining room, a big kitchen, a nice upstairs bathroom and, get this folks, a downstairs loo! Two loos were far from being a common fixture at the time and we thought we were proper posh 😁

Best of all, the location was beautiful, peaceful and mostly law-abiding and my family and a number of others settled down and stayed for decades, bringing up children who identified as part of the area and were proud of it. Because it was nice, there wasn't the churn of tenants you get in more troubled areas, where properties can be left vacant for weeks and even months, adding to disorder, mess and a general sense of malaise. We don't need less good quality housing in decent areas. We need more, to give children the opportunity to grow up in places where stability and a lovely environment are the norm, not just something you have if you're wealthy.

Your tone is even worse in this post. Please find another job. Someone this judgemental and envious shouldn't be supporting bereaved families. Did you vote Reform today?

OP you should see the quality of social housing in Austria and Denmark. You would have a fucking fit.

They even have swimming pools never mind bay windows! For people who haven't "worked hard". Go on, get really really upset.

When my grandparents moved into their council house many many years ago it was a much better standard than the private rented ones. It had an inside bathroom, electric lighting, and my grandparents were very grateful. It was still their aim to own their own house, and they eventually were able to do that.

Part of the role of councils should be to drive up standards in housing. Too many people in this country live in poorly built houses, with mould and rubbish insulation. It’s bad for health and I understand our housing stock condition is much worse than other European countries.

Our council are building their own new houses and they should be better quality, and I’m very happy (as a local homeowner) for my council tax to be used for this.

Ah, another thread to add to the "poor people should be punished" collection that I'm curating at the moment. Heartening to see a majority view that decent stable housing is something that people need in order to build communities and raise children with a sense of security and self-esteem.

Hopefully the OP is reflecting on her ill thought out post, and re-evaluating her choices, which seem to be martyrdom based, frankly.

It’s also policy in many places not to put all the social / council housing in the same place but to “pepper pot” it throughout developments, and presumably throughout communities.

I kind of agree in that councils need to spend their money wisely - if they can buy two homes for the price of one then that's one more family out of temp accommodation, or possibly even homelessness so surely that's a no-brainer - there isn't a magic money tree for council housing - do councils even build new council houses these days? I don't think they do where I live.

YANBU
I worked as a housing ASB officer in a fashionable part of inner London.
A huge proportion of our housing stock was in the most expensive area.
The tensions we'd have with people who'd paid £2million for a property next to lovely parks and schools unable to deal with various neighbours relatives constantly nicking parcels off off porch (our tenants managed to swerve all blame!) and other neighbours aching out paranoid hallucinations (again nothing we can do as no magistrate will allow a council to evict a severely mentally ill adult)... it was madness... would have been better for everyone not to mix quite so closely (as for the professional masseuses with tenancies that allowed them to work from home!)

Just why as a HA ASB housing 'officer' would you find it better if it was only neighboring HA tenants suffering from other tenants relatives constantly nicking parcels off their doorsteps, or being plagued by other neighbors acting out paranoid hallucinations, or as professional masseuses prostitutes working from home?

Did you think we deserved to live with it it for being your tenants?
Did you have an issue with us being able to access lovely parks and schools, or is it you think we haven't paid as much as our neighbors (who don't suffer our crummy building quality, landlords and poor quality staff) so don't deserve to access lovely parks and schools?

Just why's it ok to have good HA tenants suffer these social ills, but not better off neighbors who aren't your tenants? "Mixing"s not the issue, inaction is.

Is it because it would have made the job you where clearly failing to do properly, easier for you?
I do appreciate it's often a very difficult multi agency job, but you took it and the money paid by tenants rents for you to do it.
So why would it be ok if ASB was only inflicted on your normal tenants paying for you, instead of everyone in the local population?
Would us "not mixing so closely" have hidden the inaction better?

Isolating tenants in crappier neighborhoods doesn't make HA staff inaction better for others, but it does make it easier for them to hide not doing their jobs properly.

Our HA 'officers' find it easier to threaten those of us who complain and try and uphold basic living standards, than deal with the perpetrators, too. It's fraud.
We don't want enforced mediation or eviction, or to be told to put up with it, we want the perpetrators dealt with, same as all normal folk, rich or poorer.

Some HA staff are as big a part of the problem as problem tenants are.
It has been our richer neighbors who often have the resources and can't be threatened, who force them to do their jobs better, and we're grateful to them.

Money shouldn't be all that protects decent people of all walks of life from ASB.

Edited to try unsuccessfully to attach to @sunights YANBU to want social segregation, post.

Nah. Just in groups further out of town 🧐 (the price could get 2/3 other places, you see)

This time 3 years ago we were a happy family of 4 then my 22 year old son was killed in an accident in May of 2022 leaving me and my 12 year old daughter and my partner a shattered family then in 2023 my daughter went through something else completely traumatic then in February 2024 my partner pretty much dropped dead unexpectedly and my housing association were the biggest support we had in that they moved us asap as where we were all living before all that happened just became an unbearable place to be and they even furnished our new place for us and paid for the move and have gone above and beyond for us.
Im sat here now in a lovely place with all the support I could get and my daughter is in bed as she has school tomorrow but when it comes down to it we are now a family of two and every day we sit in the living room with two urns sat on the sideboard and we are not sat rubbing our hands together because we have a nice place and think of ourselves as lucky.

@Elleherd I worked for a large council that was the main social housing provider dealing with their housing stock and also held oversight of HA ASB casework where legal interventions or local politcians were involved.

While in post I did a blinding job advocating for social housing tenants, including battling local and high profile labour politicians for their rights when it came to individual casework.

The work was exhausting and draining. It was an unsustainable system and in my view deeply unfair on vulnerable tenants treated like social pariahs with street wide social media campaigns to get some of the seriously unwell ones out of the neighbourhood- which they refused to leave/ take a house swap from as the neighbours attitudes fed into victim/ persecution complexes for them.

I had a number of vulnerable tenants taken advantage of by the local wealthy coke sniffing crowd die, as they were useful for sourcing drugs from, and left to overdose.

I don't have a solution but think our current system sucks.

This is everything a housing association is for and the values they’re built on. I’m so pleased you had a positive experience and know that helping you when you were so terribly unlucky is why those people went into those jobs 😀

I think people are missing the point in their urge to join in a pile-on. As many have said, everyone should have a secure nice home. But they don’t. Private rentals have been encouraged and deliberately enabled to proliferate, with no standards. Many people who are working hard have no choice but to live in these godawful private rentals - many damp, with insects or mice, barely habitable, as long as the landlord can slap a coat of paint anything goes - I’ve been told something like that is ‘good quality’ and ‘be grateful’ and all the usual shit from the rich to the poor. Social housing confers many advantages, not the least right to buy. If people don’t want to see jealousy and resentments erupt on all sides than perhaps they should strive for an end to systematic unfairness. But often the same people parrot ‘life isnt fair’ and basically tell the poor to put up and shut up. It’s hard to work hard for years and get nothing, and it should not be happening. But it is.

@sunights I am not quibbling your I did a blinding job claim.

But, very few people want to be forcibly rehomed into poorer areas with less decent work, schools, parks, opportunities, for all the far more obvious reasons, and you having experienced some problem tenants "refusing to leave/ take a house swap from as the neighbors attitudes fed into victim/ persecution complexes for them" isn't a good reason why generally HA/council tenants should be herded into lowest cost housing and "not mix quiet so closely."

And as you will patently know, deaths of vulnerable people encouraged to source drugs, happens regardless of if their neighbors are a "wealthy coke sniffing crowd" in expensive housing, or 'reliant on benefits crack cocaine or spice users' in cheaper housing.
'Lines of credit' for drugs are open to almost all.

But if you want to talk about how unwanted vulnerable ASB tenants who are just as unwanted as neighbors by ordinary tenants, automatically benefit from areas when people are mixed:
Cuckooing doesn't go unnoticed, or get ignored, loan sharks struggle to get a hold so easily when people aren't all lower income, stolen vehicles are removed to police pounds and returned, instead of crushed by councils when enough tickets aquired, child abuse is taken more seriously, dangerous dogs not so easily allowed to rampage, nasty graffiti is dealt with fast, fly tipping and stinking rubbish is forced to be dealt with, properties are not allowed to publicly look as run down at least, and broken front windows and doors get fixed, sewage leaks running outside aren't tolerated, and tenants are rarely allowed to be left lying dead ignored for years while neighbors complain about the stench and flies...

Basically the crap many SH tenants in lower cost areas are forced to live with, isn't tolerated by owner neighbors in normal ones. And they get listened to and heard by SH landlords when normal tenants can't even though we fund the ASB housing officers.

But the answer to this is reforming the private rental sector, not changing the social housing sector

i would have no issue if every private landlord was forced to sell their property to a housing association and only social rent being available.
You could argue richer people who want to rent more expensive nicer properties won’t like that but I don’t think it’s a big deal.

but the answer does not lie in taking away from social housing tenants

Exactly, these threads are always the same.

People want to make things worse for social housing tenants, rather than make things better for private renters.

I’d love (spelling autocorrection getting worse too!) to see that @AquaPeer but that is not the direction this country has chosen to take for the last 20-30 years. Arguably the last 50. The trend is very clear and long-term and will not be overturned in the near future. There are no political solutions in the pipeline. No one cares, we just get more gaslighting and manipulation about what should be happening instead of anything actually happening.

Older council houses are often way better than a lot of non council new builds. A dd bought a 3 bed, 2 good doubles, one v good sized single, plenty of storage space. Built in the 50s IIRC.

Former owners had bought it from the council in 1971 - well before Thatcher and Right to Buy.
They paid almost exactly 1% of what dd paid!
Not far from us, 50s/early 60s council/ex council flats are also rather more spacious than the average new build.