Against a century-long trend of decline, the private rented sector grew significantly during the 1990s. This book explores why and looks at the consequences for tenants and landlords, as well as the wider implications for housing policy. Written by legal and policy experts, the book brings together, for the first time in over a decade, leading-edge research on the newly deregulated private rented sector. It provides background information about the recent history and development of the private rented sector and explores the changing nature of the sector. The book will be invaluable reading for law, public policy, housing and social policy students. Housing practitioners and policy makers will also find it a stimulating read.
The 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, along with similar campaigns across the UK, catalysed rent restrictions and eventually public housing as a right, with a legacy of progressive improvement in UK housing through the central decades of the 20th century. With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago. Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, this book asks what housing campaigners can learn today from a proven organisational victory for the working class. A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.
A Booklist Best Book of the Year: “The definitive history of the life and death of America’s most iconic housing project,” Chicago’s Cabrini-Green (David Simon, creator of The Wire). Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to twenty-three towers and a population of 20,000—all of it packed onto just seventy acres a few blocks from Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast. Eventually, Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource—it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed. In this novelistic and eye-opening narrative, Ben Austen tells the story of America’s public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly though the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation’s effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes. “Compelling.” —Chicago Tribune “[A] fascinating narrative.” —Booklist (starred review) “A weighty and robust history of a people disappeared from their own community.” —Kirkus Reviews “Austen has masterfully woven together these deeply intimate stories of the residents at Cabrini against the backdrop of critical public policy decisions. Ultimately this book is about how as a country we acknowledge and deal with the very poor.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here Named a Best Book of the Year by Mother Jones Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction; the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize; and the Chicago Review of Books Award
Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, patterns of change to the former communist nations of Europe are now discernible in a way that was impossible to see in the initial years. This insightful book focuses on the case of changes in housing based on evidence collected from across the Central and Eastern European region. The volume adopts a conceptual framework and provides cross-regional analysis, amongst which is situated a series of more focused case studies. Issues examined include the consequences of the rapid privatization of state rental housing including the emergence of 'super-owner-occupied' countries, dramatic changes in urban structure and evidence that housing, having been the shock absorber against which wider economic restructuring has occurred, now faces a whole series of deferred problems. The enthusiasm with which the market economy was initially embraced must now be tempered by a more sober assessment of what in reality has happened.
