The new Govan/Partick Bridge
We all think we know what gentrification is. We sense it – it might be the new artisan bakery or an organic coffee shop on the corner – but the reality is the degutting of working-class neighbourhoods. The term was first coined by the urban sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964. She grasped that the movement of bohemian middle-class types was transforming the character of the likes of London’s Notting Hill[i]. The key motor was the displacement of working-class residents by rising housing costs.
But gentrification has also always been deeply political. It was Margaret Thatcher who grasped that mass council housing created working-class communities as potential centres of solidarity and resistance. The result was the right to buy and massive disinvestment in council housing.
The process continues. Today, gentrification poses many threats to people’s housing. Some dramatic, some more subtle. Following the right to buy, came privatisation through stock transfer, and now - most recently - large-scale commercial redevelopment masked as regeneration. There has, of course, been major local resistance to turning council estates into ‘commodities’ for developers across Britain.
Under the mantle of “tenure balance”, these “regeneration” projects seek to shift dramatically the character of such areas in favour of market-led housing with just a scattering of ‘social housing’ for the few long-term residents who remain. Is there ever a more patronising term than ‘social housing’? It implies that public sector housing fulfils a purely residual welfare role. For everyone else who would once have aspired to a Council home, they are now expected to create demand and profit for the private sector. It is also an insidious term - delineating the discourse on housing policy even for the left.
The process is driven by neo-liberalism, the neo-liberalism which underpins the grip of finance capital on Britain’s economy. It is the super-heated hunger for profit that drives an ever-expanding property market.
As the central state becomes simply the facilitator of finance capital, so any real agency is stripped from the local state – whether it’s the devolved administrations or local councils.
Under neo-liberalism, all regions and cities can do is compete for the attention of capital. They do this chiefly by trying to provide favourable conditions for property developers – cheap land, infrastructure provision and, of course, subsidies. The hope is that this will ensure physical renewal and economic spin-offs - crucially attracting footloose employers, chiefly though in retail and services. Gentrification has ceased to be the sporadic and spontaneous process that Ruth Glass described to become a goal of municipal government itself[i].
For all the claims of the current SNP administration, Glasgow is no longer a world city. Hence these processes play out less dramatically than say in London or New York[ii]. But you can still see their impact as you sip your cortado in that would-be hip café, gazing at the nearby empty creative industry spaces. Facilitated chiefly by the City Council, these businesses help create a superficial vibrancy with which to attract developers, but once they have fulfilled this role they are be replaced by higher rental activity. Cynically, city managers hope the same process can be repeated in other districts.
What does this mean for working-class neighbourhoods? What you see is a process of displacement as affordable housing opportunities diminish. These days in Glasgow, at least, this rarely happens through wholesale clearance – although it can still occur as in Dalmarnock to make way for the Commonwealth Games village. In The Housing Question of 1872, Friedrich Engels described Baron Hausmann’s restructuring of central Paris under Louis Napoleon. He wrote “The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished: they are merely shifted elsewhere!”[iii]. More recent commentators have described this process as the “suburbanisation of poverty” – certainly an accurate description of Glasgow’s post-war restructuring[iv].
Today, in practice the process is somewhat more benign - at least as presented. Take today’s Govan. We may welcome physical improvements – new housing, nice public spaces, revitalised shop fronts and even a new bridge! The existing population though is not so much displaced as diluted within an enlarged and more economically diverse one. More perniciously, we see what has been termed exclusionary displacement. This happens when the tenure and housing cost profiles shift so that the groups who have traditionally aspired to move to the area can no longer do so. You might ask does such a shift matter? The existing population might not have more money in their pockets, but their environment is better and they have a wider range of services, if maybe not always to their taste. But it does really matter if gentrification prevents you moving to a more suitable house or when you see services that once catered for you squeezed out. The politicians may preen themselves that the neighbourhood statistics demonstrate the success of their policies. But under the gloss, there may well be a deprioritising of health and social services, despite the absolute need not changing.
You can also see the neo-liberal underpinning of Glasgow City’s policies in the so-called Transformational Regeneration Areas. Here affordable housing programmes and land disposal are skewed to tempt private investors. Anyone leaving Govan’s subway station will be impressed with the new flats down to the river. The 92 new houses though in the striking Water Row development are pitched as “affordable” market rented – 50% more expensive than the existing flats of the ultimate developer – the local community housing association. The hope no doubt for the city council is that this will inspire more private development and investment, as property values and rents rise on the back of Glasgow University’s expansion into the area. Likewise in Lauriston, the priority is for owner-occupier and private rented housing. It’s not intended for those where previously displaced through recent clearances.
Neighbourhoods do change of course – both physically and socially. The point is in whose interest is the change. Gentrification is opposed not out of a sentimental attachment to idealised working-class communities, but to challenge capital and the co-option of supposedly representative institutions, like city councils, by neo-liberalism.
We see examples of resistance on the ground. The work of Living rent upholding the rights of private sector tenants is bearing fruit in greater legal controls over the private rented sector including on rent levels. At the Wyndford estate, tenants may not have stopped the demolition of their homes but they have still obtained major concessions from their landlord, the Wheatley Group, on rehousing and on the tenure mix of the replacement housing. Their campaign has drawn attention to the wider issues as they built a broad constituency of support[v]. It hopefully sets a marker to other councils and their favoured landlords. Last year in Dennistoun, the community saw off an attempt by a London-headquartered property company to take over their community-based housing association[vi]. This was a major victory given the machinations of the Scottish Housing Regulator and the indifference of most SNP politicians.
As Engels wrote: “the solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself”[vii].
But there are things we can focus on now in Scotland:
[i] B. Doucet, R. van Kempen and J. van Weesep, ‘‘We’re a Rich City with Poor People’: Municipal Strategies of New-Build Gentrification in Rotterdam and Glasgow’, Environment and Planning A : Economy and Space, 43, (2011), 1438-1454.
[ii] D. Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, 53 (2008), 23-40.
[iii] F. Engels, The Housing Question (Progress Publishers, Moscow: 1970), 74.
[iv] M. Fransham ‘Neighbourhood gentrification, displacement, and poverty dynamics in post-recession England’, Population, Space and Place, 26 (2020), e2327.
[v] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/homes-people-not-profit
[vi] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-67963151
[vii] Op cit, pp74-75.
This article is based on a contribution Jim Whiston, a former housing worker, made at the Scottish Morning Star Conference on Sunday 23rd March at the STUC in Glasgow
The process continues. Today, gentrification poses many threats to people’s housing. Some dramatic, some more subtle. Following the right to buy, came privatisation through stock transfer, and now - most recently - large-scale commercial redevelopment masked as regeneration. There has, of course, been major local resistance to turning council estates into ‘commodities’ for developers across Britain.
Under the mantle of “tenure balance”, these “regeneration” projects seek to shift dramatically the character of such areas in favour of market-led housing with just a scattering of ‘social housing’ for the few long-term residents who remain. Is there ever a more patronising term than ‘social housing’? It implies that public sector housing fulfils a purely residual welfare role. For everyone else who would once have aspired to a Council home, they are now expected to create demand and profit for the private sector. It is also an insidious term - delineating the discourse on housing policy even for the left.
The process is driven by neo-liberalism, the neo-liberalism which underpins the grip of finance capital on Britain’s economy. It is the super-heated hunger for profit that drives an ever-expanding property market.
As the central state becomes simply the facilitator of finance capital, so any real agency is stripped from the local state – whether it’s the devolved administrations or local councils.
Under neo-liberalism, all regions and cities can do is compete for the attention of capital. They do this chiefly by trying to provide favourable conditions for property developers – cheap land, infrastructure provision and, of course, subsidies. The hope is that this will ensure physical renewal and economic spin-offs - crucially attracting footloose employers, chiefly though in retail and services. Gentrification has ceased to be the sporadic and spontaneous process that Ruth Glass described to become a goal of municipal government itself[i].
For all the claims of the current SNP administration, Glasgow is no longer a world city. Hence these processes play out less dramatically than say in London or New York[ii]. But you can still see their impact as you sip your cortado in that would-be hip café, gazing at the nearby empty creative industry spaces. Facilitated chiefly by the City Council, these businesses help create a superficial vibrancy with which to attract developers, but once they have fulfilled this role they are be replaced by higher rental activity. Cynically, city managers hope the same process can be repeated in other districts.
What does this mean for working-class neighbourhoods? What you see is a process of displacement as affordable housing opportunities diminish. These days in Glasgow, at least, this rarely happens through wholesale clearance – although it can still occur as in Dalmarnock to make way for the Commonwealth Games village. In The Housing Question of 1872, Friedrich Engels described Baron Hausmann’s restructuring of central Paris under Louis Napoleon. He wrote “The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished: they are merely shifted elsewhere!”[iii]. More recent commentators have described this process as the “suburbanisation of poverty” – certainly an accurate description of Glasgow’s post-war restructuring[iv].
Today, in practice the process is somewhat more benign - at least as presented. Take today’s Govan. We may welcome physical improvements – new housing, nice public spaces, revitalised shop fronts and even a new bridge! The existing population though is not so much displaced as diluted within an enlarged and more economically diverse one. More perniciously, we see what has been termed exclusionary displacement. This happens when the tenure and housing cost profiles shift so that the groups who have traditionally aspired to move to the area can no longer do so. You might ask does such a shift matter? The existing population might not have more money in their pockets, but their environment is better and they have a wider range of services, if maybe not always to their taste. But it does really matter if gentrification prevents you moving to a more suitable house or when you see services that once catered for you squeezed out. The politicians may preen themselves that the neighbourhood statistics demonstrate the success of their policies. But under the gloss, there may well be a deprioritising of health and social services, despite the absolute need not changing.
You can also see the neo-liberal underpinning of Glasgow City’s policies in the so-called Transformational Regeneration Areas. Here affordable housing programmes and land disposal are skewed to tempt private investors. Anyone leaving Govan’s subway station will be impressed with the new flats down to the river. The 92 new houses though in the striking Water Row development are pitched as “affordable” market rented – 50% more expensive than the existing flats of the ultimate developer – the local community housing association. The hope no doubt for the city council is that this will inspire more private development and investment, as property values and rents rise on the back of Glasgow University’s expansion into the area. Likewise in Lauriston, the priority is for owner-occupier and private rented housing. It’s not intended for those where previously displaced through recent clearances.
Neighbourhoods do change of course – both physically and socially. The point is in whose interest is the change. Gentrification is opposed not out of a sentimental attachment to idealised working-class communities, but to challenge capital and the co-option of supposedly representative institutions, like city councils, by neo-liberalism.
We see examples of resistance on the ground. The work of Living rent upholding the rights of private sector tenants is bearing fruit in greater legal controls over the private rented sector including on rent levels. At the Wyndford estate, tenants may not have stopped the demolition of their homes but they have still obtained major concessions from their landlord, the Wheatley Group, on rehousing and on the tenure mix of the replacement housing. Their campaign has drawn attention to the wider issues as they built a broad constituency of support[v]. It hopefully sets a marker to other councils and their favoured landlords. Last year in Dennistoun, the community saw off an attempt by a London-headquartered property company to take over their community-based housing association[vi]. This was a major victory given the machinations of the Scottish Housing Regulator and the indifference of most SNP politicians.
As Engels wrote: “the solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself”[vii].
But there are things we can focus on now in Scotland:
- Build working-class representation in the communities through the tenants’ movement, community councils and anti-cuts campaigns.
- Campaign to rebuild the capacity of local government to intervene against market forces through effective compulsory purchase and taxation of under-utilised property.
- Bring back ex-council voluntary transfer stock back under direct democratic control either by the councils or, in partnership, genuinely community-controlled housing associations.
- Making sure that the impending legislation on the private rented sector really delivers on effective regulation and full rent control. Alongside this, campaign for the social ownership of private rented housing.
- Affordable housing investment needs to increase. This should be used to rebuild the capacity of the public sector to build new housing itself – ending the profit gorging of an increasingly monopolised construction industry exemplified by the SNP’s regional procurement hubs which public bodies are often expected to use.
[i] B. Doucet, R. van Kempen and J. van Weesep, ‘‘We’re a Rich City with Poor People’: Municipal Strategies of New-Build Gentrification in Rotterdam and Glasgow’, Environment and Planning A : Economy and Space, 43, (2011), 1438-1454.
[ii] D. Harvey, ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, 53 (2008), 23-40.
[iii] F. Engels, The Housing Question (Progress Publishers, Moscow: 1970), 74.
[iv] M. Fransham ‘Neighbourhood gentrification, displacement, and poverty dynamics in post-recession England’, Population, Space and Place, 26 (2020), e2327.
[v] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/homes-people-not-profit
[vi] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-67963151
[vii] Op cit, pp74-75.
This article is based on a contribution Jim Whiston, a former housing worker, made at the Scottish Morning Star Conference on Sunday 23rd March at the STUC in Glasgow
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