Housing, Planning and Modern Life (1955)

From the October 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I was struck with the magnificence of the building . . . ‘One should think,' said I, ‘that the proprietor of all this must be happy.'  ‘Nay, Sir,' said Johnson, ‘all this excludes but one evil — poverty.' "

Boswell's Life of Johnson

People marrying in 1955 have no better prospect of somewhere to live than they had in 1945. That is not an uninformed guess by this writer: it is a statement made on the third of July this year in the Sunday Pictorial. How much attention it gained, among the nymphs and the strip cartoons, is uncertain. It should have had a great deal—most of all from those who believe that capitalism can solve its problems.

Between the wars, four million houses were built in Great Britain, and by 1939 there were twelve millions altogether. With the slum clearance programmes two-thirds completed, about a quarter of a million remained condemned as unfit for habitation, and nearly half a million were “overcrowded." Another half-million were destroyed or severely damaged during the war—most in docklands and crowded industrial areas, and so anticipating further “slum clearance." In 1945, authorities agreed that four million new houses were needed in the next ten years; in fact, at the end of that period two millions have been built

Even allowing that it is only half the estimate, two millions is an impressive number. Indeed, nobody wants figures to know that a great deal of building has been done. Small, semi-rural towns have dilated to populous urban areas; on the outskirts of cities, the council estates (and latterly “private" ones, too) have mushroomed; in the cities themselves, clumps of prefabs and great chest-of-drawers blocks of flats have risen on bomb-sites, waste patches, football fields— every place, in, fact, where there was land to spare for the housing of working people.

The solution of the housing problem has been the great promise of the postwar years; getting a council house, once slightly shameful (“corned beef islands," the estates were called), has become heart's desire to millions. Local authorities, faced with endless lists of applicants, made dire need almost their sole criterion. Most have used the “points" system to ensure that the houses went to the largest families with the worst accommodation: a temporary relief which ensures more overcrowding in a few years on the council estates. Outside of what is provided by the councils, the letting of houses has entirely disappeared. Virtually all that is available to childless or one-child couples is furnished accommodation at extortionate prices, or house-purchase.

For most people, buying a house is out of the question. Usually a tenth of the price must be paid as deposit; add on legal charges and other expenses, and an initial outlay of £300 is needed for a very modest house. Recently, it has become possible to obtain 95 per cent. and even 100 per cent, mortgages: that sends up the weekly repayments to something like £4—again, out of the question for most people. More are buying houses, because it is the only solution to their housing problem; over 90 per cent. of them—according to figures recently published by the Association of Building Societies—houses costing £2,000 or less. In short, some working people can buy houses, but only cheap ones.

What is obvious is that all to-day’s housing schemes rest entirely on the assumption of full employment. Buying a house takes 15 or 20 years, and if you do it for less than £3 a week you’re lucky. Council tenancies cost approximately double those of the older houses with controlled rents. In the last few years there has been a great deal of talk about “improved standards of living” that has been based largely on working people buying their own houses and being fixed up in smart little boxes with all-electric kitchens. The truth is that most people, with jobs and plenty of overtime, struggle for financial survival after having their housing problem solved. The Daily Herald, on the 16th of last month, gave some sobering facts about die lucky ones who are supposed to exemplify the better standard of living:

"In a London court last week an eviction order was granted against a £15-a-week factory worker for non-payment of rent. He has been living in a 32s.-a-week council house, with three young children, a host of debts, and a TV set.

The man who sought and won the eviction order against him on behalf of the local council had no sense of elation about the success, of his mission.

He, too, is living above his means. . .  He can't afford to smoke or drink. He hasn't a suit to his name—and wears sports clothes for economy reasons. He has already borrowed £245 against his life insurance—and he now faces a summons for non-payment of £5 rates."

The housing problem, in fact, is not post-war at all: it is the continuation of one of capitalism’s oldest problems. The working class never has been adequately housed. Before the war it was the slum problem—rehousing people who lived in such squalor that their children were malformed and tuberculous. Plenty still live in those conditions, by the way, and are not rehoused because they can’t afford to be. However, the dominant factor in the housing problem since the war has been that most people are in work and so are asking for houses to themselves. In this writer’s town there is a row of houses, built just before the war, which still bears a signboard announcing in faded letters that £20 down will buy one. Passers-by lament the change without realizing what it was. Now, they haven’t houses; then, they hadn’t the money. As soon as there is legislation which allows rents to be raised (and that seems a near-future inevitability) the post-war housing problem will fall back into its century-old perspective of people needing houses but unable to seek them.

For—and this is the great fact about the housing problem—houses are not produced to satisfy needs. Nor is anything else in this world. Food is not produced to be eaten, clothes to be worn, or anything else for its utilitarian purpose. All things, under capitalism, are produced with one motive only: sale and profit. Thus, at times when millions have needed it, food has been destroyed; thus, at any time (including today) anybody can have what he can pay for and nothing else. Note, please, that rich people have no housing problem. The Observer and the Sunday Times advertize houses to satisfy anyone; at £4,000 and upward.

How is it, though, that two million new houses in ten years leave the demand still unappeased? There are all sorts of contributory immediate answers—people keep on marrying, millions have shared houses for years, and so on. They all boil down to the fact that working-class families are in unsuitable accommodation and want to get out of it: the more important fact is that it always was unsuitable. Houses built for working people are small, cheap houses—soon overcrowded and soon dilapidated. The labourers’ dwellings and tenements and. industrial estates of the last century are the slums of this. Many thousands of people, incidentally, will still live in houses which were flung up over a 100 years ago to cram workers into the industrial towns. Go through the Lancashire mill-towns, and you see rows of grimy little dwellings with dates—1833, 1834, and so on—on their fronts and earth-closets at their backs. Go through London’s suburbs, and you see the unlovely prefabs of 1945; many of them now are having their lives formally extended for several years because their inhabitants cannot be rehoused elsewhere. So there is a perpetual process like that of the Augean stables, where the troublesome matter flows in at exactly the same rate as it it cleared out.

The biggest post-war housing project of all has been the building of “new towns.” Really vast estates attached to smallish country towns, they are the planners’' pride. It is worth examining them to see how much they really contribute to better living standards and human happiness. Essentially, they represent the way of life provided for the modern industrial worker; the north-country towns do the same for older, heavier industries, and the outer suburbs of southern cities the different amenities of the petrol-engine and electric-motor era. In them is incorporated, actually and potentially, the culture of the mid-twentieth century.

A new town has no music-halls, no street traders or little gold-mines. It is laid out in careful uniformity, and all the inhabitants keep their front gardens tidy because they are told they must. The buildings are grouped neatly according to function or income; shops together, civic buildings together, rows of houses with garages for the higher-income groups. Much has been made of this last point; in new towns, they say, the officials and professional people and managers live close to the rest. The fact may be true, but its implication is nonsense. There is as much snobbery in the new towns as anywhere else, and placing people close together makes no difference to it. In every big city in the world, wealth and poverty are contiguous with a world between them. The writer knows plenty of places where one side or one end of a street regards the other as “a different class."

The workers in the new towns are dependent on local industries, which are mostly of the newer sorts—plastics, electronics and so on. With largish families (the chief condition for getting the houses) and high rents, they can hardly lead lavish lives. Consequently, there are not many pubs or cinemas, and the new towns—like the estates— form “community associations” which really are means of recreation for people who have not much money and must look after young children in the evenings. Local transport generally is poor and the distances to former neighbourhoods considerable: the new towns impose fixed ways of living as firmly as the old.

Are those better, more satisfying ways? Consider the man living in Harlow or Stevenage or one of the others. He is fairly young and fairly skilled and has a family. He works in a radio or plastics factory; he works as many hours as he can to make ends meet, and if the factory closes half the town will be unemployed. He has a television set and complains of the programmes. His house has a refrigerator in which his wife keeps a pint of milk overnight during three weeks of the year. His wife uses Omo and Daz so that her family’s clothes are white, and they all use green toothpaste to keep their breath sweet. They haven’t a book in the house, but they take in Reveille, Tit-bits, Woman and the Daily Mirror. They are scared of having more children, getting diseases, and Henry’s firm becoming slack, and they do the football pools in the hope of buying themselves out of it all.

The condition of the working class, in new towns and old towns remains a deplorable one of insecurity and want. If material improvements can be discerned (which is debatable) they are outweighed by frustrations and fears of which our grandfathers knew nothing. Indeed, the degree scarcely matters: if things became much better they would still be bad. Housing is one of the innumerable problems which capitalism has created and cannot solve, simply because capitalism has no care for human needs. Many people refuse to believe that such problems cannot be solved within the capitalist system: the astonishing thing is that they are refusing to believe their own eyes.

Can Socialism house people, as people should be housed? The short and simple answer is that there will be no money barrier to the satisfaction of any need when all the means of production are owned by every person. The cheap and shoddy in houses, as in everything else, will vanish when there is no profit motive. As for the question of space—well, think of all the buildings which nobody will want. Shops, banks, exchanges, offices of every description ... and, in addition, a lot (an awful lot) of buildings which only a perverse society could think suitable for human beings.

Robert Barltrop

NOTE: The figures about rents and house prices apply to southern England. In the north and in Scotland they are rather lower. So are wages.