Housing stigma

[Antiquedoll]

Has anyone else noticed an increase in bad attitude towards social housing from property owners? I hought the UK was progressive and believed innequality but it seems to me the division is growing?

I would have no idea which of the people I know are in social housing. There will be some. How do people know these things in order to judge! Was just reading a thread about someone being reported for benefit fraud - how would someone be so confident in their knowledge of someone’s personal situation to report them in the first place??

Property owners do not want social housing within close proximity of their property as it devalues it.

Because it's 2025 and we don't hide away social housing in the worst areas to punish people for daring to need it any more?

Which is the real reason they want HA tenants to be moved around like chess pieces. Its not because they give a fuck about those in temp accomodation

Home owners can act likes knobs and also devalue the housing around them too.
A well behaved SH tenant will cause not trouble at all. Most just want to live their lives.

And most people, SH tenants or home owners, do not give a shiny shit about the value of the house next door.

If you are worried about your house price, then you are too privileged to be concerned about having an actual roof over your head. That is all most people want.

Yep.

The worst neighbours I've had were home owners when I had a private rental. Now I have no issues with any of the neighbours which is a mix of SH and home owners. All just simply living our lives.

Yes I am saying that. I remember as a child being told by my mother not to play with the council house children( I'm in my 60s) so it's nothing new. None of my friends or family have ever lived in social housing. As I already mentioned upthread, my retired policeman neighbour says that all mixing social and owned housing in the same estates does is to increase crime and antisocial behaviour across the whole area. In the past council houses were built on estates where all the housing was council housing, I don't know why that changed.
The change in the nature of the type of people that have moved to my area, and the increase in crime, is detrimental to me and my neighbours as it will affect property values as well as open us up to the likelihood of experiencing crime which very rarely happened previously.

That explains the classism in the force

It might not be new but it's still awful to automatically judge children without even giving them a chance purely based on what house they live in.

Thankfully no one as far as I can tell in the owned houses tells their kids to not play with my son simply because he lives in social housing. Weirdly enough, he hasn't had a personality transplant between moving from a private rented property to social housing.

I wonder if they were the same person (under a name change) on another thread who said that unemployed people should be removed from their homes and forced to live in a hostel so grim that they would take the shittiest of jobs to get out.

Exactly and it would just be one more incentive in this country for people to keep their salaries low to avoid being financially penalised.

Work needs to pay or people will understandbly not aim for anymore than the minimum hours/wage and claim various financial breaks which will lead to them having more disposable income and more housing security than someone who does work /earn more. And tbh I don’t blame those people if that’s the way the system works. But we need to have good systems in place so people don’t feel they can’t work more than 30 hours or take that promotion.

Where is the incentive for them to earn more if earning 25K gets them the lower rent and earning 40K gets them evicted and then having to battle for private rent flats?

Better leave the higher earning ones in HA, it makes sure you have a mix of people in HA and also in many cases they may be able to save for a deposit to eventually buy a house rather than if you kick them
out and they may be forever private renting

Only on here 🙄

@xenobitch Possibly, though I think there's quite a few of this sort on MN.
Come for the poor, the disabled, the benefit recipients. Anyone getting anything they aren't.

Blind to the fact that if you don't need any of these things your life is automatically better than those in receipt of them.

As its rarely the Mum scraping by but the MC Mum jealous of a PIP award, not able to comprehend it comes with a free disability along with your monthly payments. Social housing doesn't allow for freedom to move, decorate, or apparently now even exist!
Will there be gruel....if so is one allowed more?

Actually, when Labour came to power last year, one of the first things it did was to drastically reduce the amount of discount tenants got when buying their council property. It varies from area to area, but round here the maximum you can get is £38K. Not much in this day and age.

That's quite interesting because in my road there's privately owned Victorian houses that sell for almost a £million (or the ones that have been converted into flats the flats sell for around £350 thousand for a one bedroom).
These are literally next door (physically connected as they are detached houses) to council owned properties as at some point the council bought some of the Victorian housing stock.
I lived in this road for years before I discovered some of the Victorian properties are council owned. I hadn't a clue as they don't have a flashing sign or anything 😂

Everything you say is spot on..

However, earlier generation council houses were awarded to police, fireman etc. It was something to emulate.. These hard working families were house proud and you would see the wife polishing the step to out do the neighbours.

In later years, the dynamic changed and said government housed individuals inspired by their hard work often move away and up jn the world by purchasing a house.

The housing clientele were replaced by non working individuals facing societal issues. The 'stigma' of council housing started. This exacerbated over the years as any shame associated with unemployment disappeared, huge increases in family breakdown, and displaced people. Loss of work ethic and increased numbers becoming state reliant.

These factors and the 'mixing' of housing has fuelled the divide rather than cured it.

That's not an argument against social housing, it's an argument against the Right to Buy scheme. Before Margaret Thatcher's government brought in Right to Buy and deliberately didn't use the proceeds to build more social housing, council houses were pretty much available for anyone who wanted one.

More than four in 10 council homes sold under the Right to Buy scheme are now owned by private landlords.

Do not presume to know my motivation. I do care, deeply, about families in temporary accommodation. Do you have any idea how hard it is, to try and feed your family on a very limited budget, with zero cooking facilities? To keep them clean with zero washing facilities ( have you seen the cost of laundrettes?) To get them to school on time when you’ve been placed miles out of area? The mental, physical and emotional toll on these families is massive. So yes, when someone says, “I’m sitting pretty in my x bed home that I don’t need” I could show you 100 families that DO need it and who are absolutely suffering as a result of not having it. There are 165k children in temporary accommodation in England. That is not ok.
And no, I am in no way suggesting SH tenants get moved around like “chess pieces”. I am saying we need a large scale programme of social house building, to offer options to downsize and house those most in need. All of them.

I can't speak for everyone in SH, but as a tenant or on the list I certainly wasn't asked where I thought they should build a load of new houses and said right next to the posh estate because I am entitled to live somewhere nice and so they did.

I mean come on, do you really think that SH tenants and those on the lists are the ones deciding where new houses are built and how they're allocated because they expect to 'live somewhere nice'?

I thought they were all unemployed lay abouts committing crime and ruining your area, how are they also involved in the planning, building and allocation of new houses?

The difficulty is that when people want to downsize, most of the new properties have much higher rents as they are at an ‘affordable’ tariff rather than a social one. Realistically people are not going to move to a much smaller property and pay a big increase in rent. I pay full rent for my house with no housing cost support amenities has always been the case
My house is a 3 bed and my adult children live with me and are likely to indefinitely. We live in a very expensive area. When (if) they move out I will be more than happy to down size but not to my financial detriment.
My house was in an awful condition when we moved in and it’s cost a lot over the years to get it to a decent standard.

Nice try?
Some if the posts on this thread exemplify exactly my point.

Exactly, and the decision to move towards mixed tenure housing estates was from the govt.

The idea being that it encouraged upwards mobility, those unemployed seeing their neighbours go to work and buy nice cars etc was meant to be an incentive. Plus, trying to prevent the creation of a "ghetto" (I hate that word) by grouping like minded people together.

Now, whether that works or not I dont know. Or whether non working SH tenants think their working neighbours are chumps (before someone mentions it) I dont know.

Govt statistics show that in 2023/24 38% of lead tenants in general needs housing (so not supported living, over 55s etc) were employed, a reduction from the previous years total of 40%. So statiscally it doesn't work

HOWEVER

SH typically has a higher percentage of people who CAN'T work, so retired, disabled, mental health issues or illness. 44% of new lettings in 2023/24 had at least one person claiming a physical or mental health condition expected to last 12 months or more. This is an increase on 2% the previous year.

SH has increased, an extra 25,000 in 2023/24 compared to the prior year , but as an overall picture is 35% down on the 2013/14 peak.

So, what my rambling post is getting at is that the housing crisis and by extension the SH crisis in this country is not simple or straight forwards. We have higher need, larger populations, increased disabilities, mental health needs, a worsening NHS, an ever growing cost of living crisis.

Kicking people out of stable homes, into a private market that already can't cope with the numbers of homes needed, or ready to accept benefit claimants/low income households really isn't the answer.

Build more SH, absolutely. My HA is letting over 800 new properties in the London area between now and April but its a drop in the ocean compared to the wider societal issues.

@JenniferBooth and I dont always see eye to eye on SH but I was shocked to see her report about so many SH properties being demolished and replaced with a small fraction. That's never gonna help. As a HA employee I and my colleagues genuinely want to provide good and decent homes to all who are in need. But we dont hold the purse strings..

My Mother said anyone that needed a council house was a failure. Plus it meant that the local authority had some say over your life. She was very much a believer in small Government probably a classical liberalist.

I am not like her as she was anti state assistance but I suppose I'm just indifferent.

Exactly, and the decision to move towards mixed tenure housing estates was from the govt.
The idea being that it encouraged upwards mobility, those unemployed seeing their neighbours go to work and buy nice cars etc was meant to be an incentive. Plus, trying to prevent the creation of a "ghetto" (I hate that word) by grouping like minded people together.
Now, whether that works or not I dont know. Or whether non working SH tenants think their working neighbours are chumps (before someone mentions it) I dont know.

@MooseAndSquirrelLoveFlannel According to my retired police officer neighbour it hasn't worked at all. According to him, in areas with mixtures of SH and privately owned houses, there is no increase in the numbers of people in employment but there's an increase in crimes like burglary and car theft carried out by criminals living in the SH on their privately owned neighbours. It just means that the criminal element has easy pickings on their doorstep instead of having to travel further afield.