The Tenants' Movement

Resident involvement, community action and the contentious politics of housing

Quintin Bradley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317962649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

The Tenants' Movement is both a history of tenant organization and mobilization, and a guide to understanding how the struggles of tenant organizers have come to shape housing policy today. Charting the history of tenant mobilization, and the rise of consumer movements in housing, it is one of the first cross-cultural, historical analyses of tenants' organizations' roles in housing policy.

The Tenants' Movement shows both the past and future of tenant mobilization. The book's approach applies social movement theory to housing studies, and bridges gaps between research in urban sociology, urban studies, and the built environment, and provides a challenging study of the ability of contemporary social movements, community campaigns and urban struggles to shape the debate around public services and engage with the unfinished project of welfare reform.

1
The Tenants’ Movement

Tenants are outsiders in a society fixated on home ownership, and yet a new ‘generation rent’ finds itself shoe-horned into a private rental sector that is largely unregulated, over-priced, and to a significant extent unfit. High-quality rented social housing – provided by public bodies, co-operatives and not-for-profit organisations – is severely rationed, and everywhere under attack by states enamoured of the illusory benefits of a free market. The question of how tenants can organise collectively, what their aims should be, and how they can achieve them are pressing matters for these times.

This book is about the tenants’ movement, the organised and sometimes spontaneous collective action of tenants fighting for a fairer housing system. Tenant protests and campaigns are the inevitable result of the monopoly ownership of property, and its application as fixed capital to levy rents, charge interest and sustain a global financial infrastructure that has extended its influence into every aspect of human relationships (Harvey 2010). The promotion of homeownership as the ‘natural’ way of life has rendered whole populations vulnerable to the fickle trends and reckless practices of finance capital and staked out a landscape of dramatically widening inequality (Glynn 2009). Residential property sits within an increasingly global market as institutional landlords, public assets and private mortgage portfolios are traded on international finance markets, and local house prices and rents are inflated by the investment strategies of distant speculators (Hodkinson 2012).

Housing policy does not develop in a benign progress of legislative justice but is forged through the social and economic struggles that are inevitable in unequal and divided societies (Johnstone 2000). The provision of decent housing has been fought for and won by thousands of people in grass-roots campaigns, in direct action and protest, over many decades. The tenants’ movement was born in a popular struggle to protect housing from the market system, to decommodify it, provide it affordably, and allocate it on principles of need, not greed. It emerged in countries around the world in a wave of mass support for the development of welfare-state systems of redistribution, collective insurance and socialised risk. As the remaining elements of collective protection from the heavy hand of the market are everywhere rolled back, the tenants’ movement continues to promote the standards and values of a socialised and fairer housing service and, as a consequence, finds itself opposed to the exploitation of ‘the people’s home’ as a capitalist commodity (Harloe 1995; Peck and Tickell 2002; Harvey 2003).

Recent years have seen a wave of housing protests against the displacement of working-class residents by state-backed regeneration schemes that have raised rents and property values through gentrification (Allen 2008). Homeless encampments have sprouted at the margins of major cities in response to a wave of repossessions and foreclosures following the 2008 subprime mortgage crash. This process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003) in the global North mirrors the continuing enclosure and privatisation of property in the South to create a newly impoverished industrial proletariat. Housing remains a key question of public policy, not just for the overcrowded megacities of South and South East Asia (Forrest and Lee 2003), or for the slums and favelas of the industrialising global south (Davis 2006a), but for Western countries whose problems of affordability, job insecurity and increased personal risk now force a significant retreat from homeownership among younger generations. In the stark division between those who have capital and those who have none, the growth of the private rental sector across the globe operates as a recognisable marker of injustice. Alongside the land struggles and mass trespasses of dispossessed peasants (Corr 1999) and the protests of the urban homeless (Wright 1997), the tenants’ movement is engaged in a Promethean struggle against a housing system that is fundamentally broken.

Tenants’ movements remain a potent force across the globe in campaigns for affordable and socially provided housing. The International Union of Tenants (IUT) has 61 member associations in 45 countries, consultation status with the United Nations and the European Union, and is pressing nation states for the imple mentation of the right to adequate housing, and the adoption of a tenants’ charter on standards of affordability, security of tenure and participation in decision-making. While the IUT has its base in Europe, its membership extends to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Russia, Japan, India, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and many other African countries. In the USA, where the rented sector has been expanding rapidly since 2000 and now makes up over 30 per cent of all homes, tenants’ campaigns have successfully pressed for rent controls, opposed state-funded programmes of dispossession and entrenched the principles of residents’ action in the political life of many urban centres (Dreier 1984; Somerville 2012), while the National Alliance of HUD Tenants (2013) stretches across thirty states in its campaign to preserve affordable housing and protect the rights of residents housed in private multi-family housing under the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s voucher programme (Hackworth 2009). In Australia, where the size of the rented sector has also increased to nearly 30 per cent, there are tenants’ unions in nearly all states providing legal support through tenants’ advice and advocacy services, and representing the interests of private renters and social housing tenants, boarders and lodgers. Social housing is at a premium in Australia where it provides scanty protection for the most vulnerable. The Japanese Tenants Union, with 500 local branches, has campaigned against the suppression of social house building and the privatisation of the state housing agency, and advocates on behalf of private renters, who make up 27 per cent of all households. These movements describe themselves as non-governmental organisations (NGOs); they are pressure groups rather than political campaigns and, in an intensely urbanised world where the provision of housing is left to the sleight of hand of the market and distributed regressively, they fight a rearguard action for the recognition of a human right to affordable, secure and decent housing.

FIGURE 1.1 International Union of Tenants (IUT): Cora Carter, Secretary of the Tenants and Residents Organisations of England (TAROE), signs an agreement with the Spanish tenants’ organisation, the Federació d’Ássociaciones de Veïns d’Habitage Social de Catalunya

Photo provided by Kirklees Federation of Tenants and Residents Associations

Housing is a commodity that can be provided at a profit under capitalism and there are vested interests to oppose any moves to make it affordable. Mass privatisation of state or municipal housing has been enacted across the Russian Federation and the former Eastern bloc, and has spread into Japan and Hong Kong with its large public housing sector, while the provision of social housing in the heartlands of European social democracy is now under threat. In Sweden, where the Swedish Tenants Union still provides the premier model for tenants’ movements in other countries, the erosion of the social democratic consensus that combined rent controls with generous subsidies to multi-family housing, municipal housing companies and tenant co-ops has been stark. A public housing sector supposedly open to all has been shrunk to 18 per cent of stock, as homes have been demolished, sold to affluent tenant co-operatives or purchased by sitting tenants. Swedish governments have funded the growth of the private market through regressive taxation and have shattered their policy of tenure neutrality in the promotion of home ownership (Clark and Johnson 2009). Founded in 1923, the Swedish Union of Tenants has over 528,000 individual members, 3,000 local organisations and a national secretariat employing 900 staff. As well as providing housing support and numerous benefits to its members, it is a campaigning organisation that lobbies for the development of affordable homes and tenure neutrality in state policy. It was a central agent in the development of social democratic housing strategy and in securing fairness in the rented sector. The Swedish Union of Tenants won the legal right to negotiate rents in the municipal housing stock, and has agreed the same annual collective bargaining process with landlords across 90 per cent of the private rental sector. Up until 2011, rents in the private sector were set with reference to the rents charged in nearby municipal housing. Property companies mounted the first of several legal challenges to the rent negotiation process and the role of municipal housing in setting limits on private rents in 2005. These challenges resulted in a European Commission anti-competition ruling that forced municipal housing companies to become profit-making and barred them from receiving subsidies, triggering the introduction of market rents in public housing. The effect of this attack by the property finance lobby is also being felt in the Netherlands, where social housing makes up 36 per cent of stock, and the transition from a universal service to a welfare safety net has been speeded by a maximum income limit imposed to restrict access to the poorest and more vulnerable (Turner 2007; Hammar 2013). The global retreat from the provision of social housing as a universal service is a major set-back to the international tenants’ movement, which developed in the political ferment and revolutionary spirit of the 1920s to demand ‘the introduction of social rent, and housing legislation and for a prompt promotion of municipal and jointly owned housing’ (IUT Assembly 1926, quoted in IUT 2013). At a time when the private housing market has demonstrably failed to provide for people’s needs, and property speculation has been fingered as the agent of global financial collapse, the raw forces of capitalism are being rolled out remorselessly to maximise profit from the right to shelter. What can the tenants’ movement do to resist the state-enforced power of a rapacious property market? What can it do to keep alive a belief in collective and affordable models of housing provision?

In the United Kingdom the assault on social housing is far advanced. The municipal and not-for-profit social housing sector, comprising homes provided by councils, housing associations and co-operatives, has been reduced from 31 per cent of all homes in 1980 to a residual role of just 18 per cent (Wilcox and Pawson 2012). Mass privatisation through the provision of large discounts to sitting tenants under the Right to Buy has removed 2.5 million council houses from public supply, while demolition and under-investment, the withdrawal of security of tenure and the introduction of commercial rents have reduced the role of social housing in the UK to that of an ‘ambulance service’ or a temporary and increasingly conditional refuge for the most vulnerable (Fitzpatrick and Stephens 2008). Safeguards against homelessness and protection against eviction in the private sector have also been withdrawn and housing allowances capped and slashed (Hodkinson and Robbins 2012). Meanwhile, the provision of new affordable housing has been reduced to a trickle, falling from a 1975 height of 145,000 public, municipal and housing association homes built every year, to 23,000 homes in 2011, with almost all those provided by housing associations operating as semi-commercial companies heavily mortgaged to banks, financial institutions and international bond markets. Although new protest and direct action occasionally shatters its quiescence, the tenants’ movement in the UK appears to have been stunned by the scale of this assault. Its small advances have been overshadowed by the regressive direction of national housing policy and the penetration of market exchange into public services based on need. Perhaps the tenants’ movement has been co-opted or institutionalised by the torrent of reforms that has transformed the housing system according to the prescriptions of market theory (Mayer 2000; Somerville 2004). This book is an inquiry into a tenants’ movement that has become all but invisible as a contentious force.

The idea of a tenants’ movement

As in other European countries, the UK tenants’ movement emerged in the struggle for social housing and in a series of bitter conflicts with property owners and their organisations, and since those early years it has been associated with the struggle for social citizenship and the demand for a more democratic and participatory welfare state (Grayson 1997, 2010). This is a movement mobilised around a passionate concern for the associational relations of community (Somerville 2012), the resources and facilities of social reproduction and a regard for future generations (Baldock 1982). The idea of a tenants’ movement is driven by the organic and seemingly irrepressible dynamic of the neighbourhood tenants’ association, or locality-based group (Ward 1974). Tenants associations have been a feature of the English social housing sector since the first estates were built in the 1920s and they continue to emerge in campaigns for improved local facilities, nurtured in partnerships with municipal government and social landlords, elected, accountable and formally constituted. The tendency for these local groups to organise themselves into federations at city or borough level has been the building block from which the notion of a tenants’ movement has evolved (Hampton 1970; Somerville 2005b). While national tenant organisations have exercised limited effectiveness, local and federal organisations have proved much more resilient, and many of them are justifiably proud of their longevity; Newcastle Tenants and Residents Federation, for example, has been active since 1977, while others, like Kirklees Federation of Tenants and Residents Associations, were launched in the campaigns of the late 1980s, although the withdrawal of sponsorship by municipal authorities and social landlords in recent years has put an end to a number of other long-lived federations (Morgan 2006).

Neighbourhood tenants’ and residents’ associations have been cited frequently in community studies since the 1930s, engaged in a range of activities that include negotiating with housing organisations, municipal authorities and other statutory agencies, agitating, campaigning on local issues and promoting ‘community spirit’ through social activities (Cairncross et al. 1992). Some accounts have portrayed tenants’ associations as short-lived and fractious (Andrews 1979; Ravetz 2001; Uguris 2004), while others have attributed their tenacity disapprovingly to the pursuit of social welfare aims rather than campaigns and direct action (Sklair 1975; Lowe 1986). The establishment of meeting places, tenants’ halls or community centres, and subsequent concerns about their upkeep, facilities and improvement has occupied much of the history of local associations (Ravetz 2001), and these have been the base for social activities aimed at generating ‘solidarity around an estate conscious ness’ (Olechnowicz 1997: 200). A culture of estate newsletters, sports clubs, youth groups, galas, fêtes and social events, food co-ops, parents’ and toddlers’ groups and lunch clubs has been built up around local tenants’ associations and their generation of a sense of place (Durant 1939; Mitchell and Lupton 1954; Jupp 2008). Only about 3 per cent of all social housing tenants are involved in tenant groups but the movement should be conceived as a network that links activists and non-activists within the same geographical community in a cross-cutting pattern of interaction. Around 38 per cent of social housing tenants are aware of their local tenants’ and residents’ association (TSA 2009); they routinely meet members of the association in public places, at the bus stop or the local shops (Gibson 1979), and are linked by bonds of personal commitment and interdependency, the ‘intersecting social networks in which the collective of movement members are embedded’ (Stoecker 1995: 12). Lesley Andrews’s (1979) fascinating study of a neighbourhood tenants’ association revealed the web of family relationships and friendships that extend the activities of the association outside of its formal meetings and committee structure into the wider social networks of the neighbourhood. This diversity in movement participation was expanded beyond the ranks of social housing tenants by the success of policies aimed at promoting homeownership through the privatisation of municipal housing and the development of mixed tenure estates. Social housing now encompasses a range of tenures, including intermediate market rent and shared ownership, and tenants’ and residents’ associations may include council tenants, housing association tenants, leaseholders, former council tenants who have bought their own home, private tenants and homeowners.

At the centre of this collective culture, the tenants’ association has encountered a mixture of patronage and disciplinary intervention from municipal and charitable social landlords, and many supposedly autonomous associations have been initiated and effectively regulated by the landlord as part of their management strategies. The majority of associations, however, are set up by tenants themselves, with or without help from housing or community-work practitioners, and rely on the

FIGURE 1.2 A passionate concern: fancy-dress parade at the tenants’ association gala on the Harley estate in Rotherham in the north of England

Photo provided by RotherFed

organisational ability of their members for their effectiveness. They spring up to negotiate with the landlord over issues of local housing management, or to improve local facilities, or to mobilise against potential threats. Even in the turmoil of the rent strikes of the 1960s and 1970s, the primary spark for new tenants’ associations was the issue of local housing management and the sense of belonging to a defined neighbourhood (Hampton 1970; Moorhouse et al. 1972; Kaye et al. 1977). This local focus has led to successful and sustained mobilisation aimed at ensuring participation or greater democratic involvement in housing management. The bitter protests over rents, rebates and security of tenure that have characterised the history of a tenants’ movement, the fierce struggles over housing conditions, estate facilities, inadequate heating, damp, system building and alienating estate design, were at their root an enduring campaign for more say in decisions that affect the neighbourhood (Craddock 1975; Rao 1984). The role of the tenants’ association in agitating on these issues – some of which became national campaigns, and involved the construction of broad networks and the formulation of joint strategy – has been as the representative of local interests. Tenants’ associations are formed in a desire for collective representation and in the need for collective advocacy. They are expressions of neighbourhood democracy; as Ruth Durant (1939: 38) noted so long ago, they virtually form ‘a nucleus of local government’. They promote a model of participatory democracy grounded in the routine interactions of place and the formal processes that ensure accountability, and enable redress and renewal. Any failures of tenants’ associations to adequately represent varying interests, their propensity to decline into cliques, and to initiate feuds between factions (Andrews 1979; Ravetz 2001) are inevitable outcomes of the democratic process and its recognition of conflicting interests. This focus on collective representation rather than leadership, and on democratic engagement rather than confrontation, is fundamental to the definition of local tenants’ organisations, and is one transmitted by their delegates to the federal organisations, ensuring the idea of a tenants’ movement is oriented towards social inclusion rather than political antagonism. A denial of political goals is written into the constitutions of tenants’ organisations and is seen as an essential mark of their legitimacy. This disavowal of politics dates back to the rent strikes of the 1960s (Kaye et al. 1977; Lowe 1986; Grayson 2007) and is a reminder of the marginalisation of social housing tenants from the mainstream concerns of political parties, and the displacement of community and neighbourhood struggles from the workplace agitation of the labour movement. Although widely interpreted as meaning non-party political, this constitutional disengagement from political strategy undermines opposition to state initiatives that are associated with party ideologies. It explains the limited political achievements of national tenants’ organisations, and accounts too for the immersion and domestication of tenant collective action in the government-sanctioned policy of public participation.

After forty years of public participation and collaborative governance in social housing policy, it is unclear to what extent there remains a tenants’ movement in the UK and what, if anything, it aims to achieve (Ravetz 2001). Tenant activists have been co-opted as surrogate managers (Sullivan 2001) enmeshed in the compromises of governance, while tenants’ organisations are increasingly excluded from policy making as the unrepresentative congregation of the ‘usual suspects’ (Barnes et al. 2003, Millward 2005). The strategy of public participation has been a stepping stone for the transference of free market principles to the provision of social housing and public services in the U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 The tenants’ movement
• 2 The hidden history of tenants
• 3 Power and participation
• 4 Constructing a tenant voice
• 5 Tenant localism and democracy
• 6 Mobilising tenants
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Transcription key
• Appendix 2 Participation in focus groups and interviews
• References
• Index