Book Review: Municipal Dreams - John Boughton

A comprehensive history of social housing, and of the causes of today's housing crisis

John Boughton expertly walks the line between macro political commentary and detailed analysis of specific estates. Municipal Dreams pretends to be a descriptive book about council estates and how they have changed, but is an unavoidably political case against Thatcherite (and Blairite) free market ideology as it relates to housing.

Without getting too theoretical, housing is a policy area that is central to any critique of capitalism. The often expressed sentiment of the poor that all they want is a ‘safe, warm home and enough money to eat’ shows the inescapable fact that housing must be central to the policy of any progressive government.

Yet the depressing narrative of Municipal Dreams is one where housing is ignored again and again. And if it isn’t ignored, policy is either short-sighted or outright malicious.

This maliciousness comes from, in my opinion, the idealised understanding of who social housing is for. On the right, social housing is for the very poorest. Once they get a steady job and get their lives back on track, they will move to the private sector. As Lynsey Hanley puts it in her piece for the Guardian: “Tories have always tended to see it as compensatory and temporary: you use it when you can’t buy your own, and only until you can buy your own”.

On the left, we have a notion of ‘general needs’ where social housing should be for large sections of society - the working class, the middle class, young people, people facing homelessness, retirees. My worry is that when we look at social housing as just for the poor, providers stop caring:

If it’s just for the poor, it doesn’t need to be high quality. Repairs don’t need to be immediate. Communication doesn’t need to be taken seriously. Because the very poor don’t really deserve that high level of service. They should feel lucky that they even have a home…

Luckily, Labour’s Housing Secretary Lisa Nandy has said that social housing will become the second largest tenure type under a Labour Government. This is indisputably ‘general needs’.

There are, of course, pitfalls that Labour must be careful of. In housing circles, ‘densification’ is the current goal. What this usually means is that council estates are to be redeveloped, but with more homes. Provided that basic standards are maintained, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but as Boughton points out the implication is that ‘council estates are brownfield sites ripe for redevelopment as demand for housing in London spirals’.

As Nye Bevan said when he was Minister for Health and Housing "while we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build [...] we shall be judged in ten years' time by the type of houses we build". Naturally, we cannot build without high standards (Grenfell, Lakanal, and countless other disasters), but we should not build homes that are not decent. Social housing should be of a standard that anyone on any income would be happy to live in it. To that last sentence many have the reaction that this is going too far, or that it is idealistic and naive - but is it truly radical to suggest that everyone in our country should have a decent home?