Urban Decline: Empty Homes

Following my previous post Urban Abandonment: Not Just Detroit which looked at urban decline in terms of depopulation, I now want to think in terms of abandoned housing. There is a lot more data for this metric, which helps!

Just last month Barbara Follet, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, was asked how many empty dwellings there were in England:

Ownership	2006	2007	2008
Local authority	42,870	40,960	36,940
Registered social landlords	30,170	30,770	29,240
Privately owned	675,120	691,590	717,840

David Ireland of the Empty Homes Agency notes that this overall rise of 3% suggests that 970,000 homes are empty across the UK as of March 2008, suggesting the million mark has probably been crossed by now if this trend has continued. Given total housing stock of about 24 million properties in the England and Wales, and 1 in 12 people this is a substantial problem.

In London an estimated 80,000 homes stand empty, with councils employing a wide range of grants and housing association take-overs to reduce this figure.

But so far these are only abandoned houses, not abandoned cities as we are seeing in the US. Without concentrations of vacancies in specific towns and districts, we cannot call this the same problem at all. The Empty Homes Agency, however, report that 937,000 homes or a city twice the size of Birmingham is located in areas of low demand for housing. They report that:

The Sustainable Communities Plan, published on 5th February 2003, provides the Government framework for a major programme of action that will, over the next 15-20 years, tackle the pressing problems of communities across England. One of the key areas forming the basis for the action programme is the tackling of low housing demand and housing abandonment: sustained action to turn round areas where housing markets have failed. Over the next three years, £500 million is being made available for some of the worst affected areas, known as Pathfinder market renewal areas, with the intention of reversing low demand by 2010.

There are nine Housing Market Renewal (HMR) Pathfinder areas:

Birmingham and Sandwell
East Lancashire
Humberside
Manchester and Salford
Merseyside
Newcastle and Gateshead
North Staffordshire
Oldham and Rochdale
South Yorkshire

Other non-Pathfinder low demand areas include the Tees Valley and West Yorkshire, both of which should be getting additional support from the ODPM.

Questions to follow up include:

- What does Pathfinder involvement mean?
- Is it working?
- Many councils have Empty Homes Strategies that look good on paper. What have they actually done and achieved?
- Demolitions: where? To what extent? Local reactions.
- Socio-economic impact of current vacancies (perhaps a gap in the current discourse, which is fixated by solutions).
- National pattern of low housing demand, especially North vs. South: are some areas unlikely to be able to gain more residents, leading to a need for managed decline?
- Lessons from (or for?) the US

Links to follow up:
- Ipsos MORI surveys (c.2006) on scale and reasons for unoccupied homes
- Self-Help-Housing.Org for community-driven solutions and uses for empty dwellings
- Empty homes statistics by region since 1999
- Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on housing estates' improvements making them more popular with residents
- LSE CASE research on 'Low demand and abandoned housing in the north', some published in conjunction with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Shared space

I liked this - not beautifully written, but as I sit on my own in my studio flat, it said something to me. Semiotically this place is so under control, so perfect: the rectilinear lines, the street and found art on the walls, the fading tulips exactly matching the yolk yellow hue of the champagne bottle next to them. I have wood floors and orchids and my clothes are precisely rolled in their drawers - I know no other way to live now, and yet is this right? (He is in New York; no, it's not.)

I put so much energy into signs, into performance, such that these things become the meaning of the space and the codes by which I read it. But that language of reading: it presumes an audience and thus a fourth wall, an inside/outside relation. What happens when you share space, what is created, what is this topology of intimacy? Instead of the single dweller writing this controlled autobiography through possessions and pristine order, Garnett's ideas implicitly suggest a reversal of this relation - new spatial circumstances re-writing the self. In turn, this raises an idea that fascinates me: equivalency between the home and the body as both spaces in & through which we live. Through pristine accessorising, Garnett was forming herself - then the accessories change, and so does that self. Thus we find ourselves assemblages not individuals, and something about human-object relations becomes a little more focused.

"That's the thing about moving in with a lover: you can't prepare yourself for it, or lay down rules or decide how it's going to be. You just muddle through. But I was, at best, just muddling through living on my own, only with a better kitchen and more acccessories. And no-one to witness the boring bits. And though I've never been prissy I was, on my own, in my own nice flat, in danger of becoming tight-arsed. [...]

"Most of the time, you just have to be your normal, boring, human, honest self. If I've loved getting to know my boyfriend more intimately than I ever imagined I'd know anyone, then I've enjoyed watching my real self unfurl itself infront of somebody else. I've never had to do it before. But everyone who lives with someone does! Sometimes I'm amazed by this feat. It's so trusting and honest of us. Amazingly, my partner doesn't appear to mind when I am boring or ratty or over-tired or sad or blue. He just puts his arms around me and comforts me. He likes it less when I am unreasonable or determined to punish him for some perceived wrong, but then one of us makes a jump and we manage to get out of whatever heavy weather we've sailed into.

[...] "A more interesting lesson has been learning to live with myself. I don't mean that in a cheesy, self-help, 'You have to learn to love yourself before anyone else loves you' kind of way. I mean that when you live on your own you can wave away the bits you don't like about yourself to an extent, but when you live with your lover you can't. It's all thrown out in front of him and you can't take it back. It's like the tree in the forest: if no-one sees or hears it fall, does it actually topple? I did lots of toppling in that flat by myself and, of course, word seeped out. I went to therapy regularly, I had a good many close friends and they, as well as my family (most of my family), got to see me at my most boring and irritable. But you don't have to win your family over in terms fo love. And I didn't live with my friends. No. In this flat there is, day to day, me, my boyfriend and not that much else. But you don't need props, I've discovered, to live together, because what you're doing isn't a performance."

Daisy Garnett, 'Moving On', in Vogue September 2008