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Changing Demand for Housing: Restructuring Markets and the Public Policy Framework

This paper provides an opportunity to review the New Labour policy framework for dealing with low and changing demand for housing, review emerging policy agendas for regeneration and suggest alternative strategies for neighbourhood renewal. The paper argues that targeted housing and regeneration policy has limited effectiveness in dealing with the scale of the problems of low demand in Britain’s northern cities and that a more strategic and planned policy agenda is required. The residential structure of cities in the north of England and the Midlands remain, disproportionately a product of the Victorian infrastructure which was built to fulfil the socio-economic circumstances of the time and the monolithic social housing neighbourhoods conceived during the 1940s and the 1950s. Since the mid-1970s housing and urban policy has concentrated on preserving and managing this infrastructure and initiated limited restructuring of small neighbourhoods. The scale of market change now being experienced in some urban areas is rapidly making this public policy framework redundant and as a consequence many existing New Labour regeneration initiatives will be undermined. Using administrative data at sub-regional, local and neighbourhood level (see Appendix), this paper illustrates processes and outcomes affecting housing abandonment in Liverpool. The paper also discusses policy responses within Liverpool and how these relate to the emerging pattern of abandonment and neighbourhood decline. The paper concludes by assessing the limitations of the current approach to regeneration in cities experiencing changing demand for low-income neighbourhoods, assessing the appropriate spatial scale of interventions and discusses the implications for housing strategies and regenerative partnerships.