This is the ninth episode of the Disobedient Buildings podcast, an AHRC funded project at University of Oxford and focuses on the everyday lives
of people living in ageing blocks of flat in three European countries the UK,
Romania and Norway. My name is Inge Daniels,
and in this episode I will be joined by Anna Andersen and Gabriela Nicolescu to further explore some of the key issues discussed in season one.
In episode three, Ștefan Ghenciulescu questions the usefulness of the notion of social housing in Romania.
And in this episode, we all three will zoom in on the characteristics of housing in London, Bucharest and Oslo.
The first thing that somebody has to do to get when you speak about housing in socialist countries is that it's not social housing.
I think that is that should be stated in a very powerful way because social housing is social housing
for housing that is subsidised by the government for certain social categories and communities,
which has problems having their own hope.
Of course, that was also the case in the socialist housing with some of these blocks, but the main idea is that it was housing for everybody.
One of the things that come up in in fieldwork and that I think almost everyone mentions is the fact that in Norway,
a large portion of people own their homes and it's just generally encouraged, I think, to own rather than rent.
And you know, there different ownership models where you could see an individual on a flat in
the in the block or in the building or their ways when you don't own the flats,
but you own the right less than your share in the Co-op.
So the right to live in the flats and these like different ownership models, you know,
they affect how much freedom you have as an individual, if you can sublet it or if you can have certain colours on your balcony or not.
It also affects the responsibilities people have over the common areas.
We also have social housing in Norway and it is run by the municipality.
But this is a temporary solution and it is for those who need it the most.
So the idea is that it is not permanent.
It is something that should, let's say, get you on your feet and then ideally get you out into the housing market to get people to to own their flats.
I mean, one of the things that that's changed and again,
it's been brought up by so many participants is the fact that the Norwegian housing market used to be regulated,
especially place where you had housing shortage, a shortage of materials.
So it wasn't very regulated. What you could do. There was even a ban on bathtubs or so you couldn't make new bathtubs for a while after the war.
But then these things that did change and the event, I mean,
there's definitely a lot of different political decisions that that's led to where we are today.
But the one event most people refer to is in 1994,
the right government led by the prime minister quite a lot made changes that deregulated the market and in consequence,
the housing prices and has been rising ever since.
And what happens then, is that for the people who already are in the housing market, they own their flats.
It's it's great because then when they sell their flat,
they get to lock their money back and they can trade up to larger flats or move to larger houses.
But it's very difficult for people to get into the market.
You need to have in order to get the mortgage, you need to have a steady job, but you also need 50 percent of what you want to lend.
You need cash upfront. So that means that if you don't have those savings, then you can't.
You can't get a mortgage. When you can't buy a flat, then I mean,
one of the communities I've been in touch with during the field work has been Muslim communities living in this, this borough.
And one of the issues there is that according to religion, you shouldn't take up mortgages with with interest.
And then that makes people not take up mortgages, even if they have a great job, steady job.
They do have the savings, but they they don't want to take up the interest.
And to solve that problem could be, you know, these like rent to buy schemes and other funding models than what we have in Norway today.
But what happens? It's just that people, they fall outside of of the housing market and they rent and they have to move frequently and Else
Abrahamsen from makers hub, she talks about the fact that in the borough that I'm looking at,
child poverty is rising and it's very troubling.
You do see that the rich get richer and and the less privileged they stay less privileged.
And it goes on for generations and I think should be done something about that.
And one of the possibilities also that's come up in fieldwork that people are talking about.
Participants are talking about this, that if you have higher taxation that say on your second home,
that would prevent individuals to buy a second home as a mere investment and with less demand,
you would then have maybe lower housing prices in Romania.
I think the key concept is like in the other side, of course, property.
But in Romania, it has a different meaning because immediately after the Second World War in the 1950s,
when the socialist regime came to power, private property was nationalised.
So what happened is that many houses in the city were taken by the state,
and previous owners would pay rent to live in only one room maximum two of their previous property.
The state managed to build blocks in the 60s,
and these new blocks were really seen by everybody with good eyes because they had good conditions, running water.
Everybody wanted to move, move there, and the renting prices were quite small.
So starting with the 70s, the new blocks of flats that were built in the city could be in the property of individual owners.
When the socialist regime collapsed in the 1990s, it was a mix of privately owned flats and rented flats.
But in the 1990s, all the rented flats or most of the rented flags have been privatised.
I mean, people could buy them for very small prices, which which for nothing, as they said.
And this almost full privatisation of the housing stock created something very, very interesting in the present.
It's a lot of tension both to put on the housing stock, especially in the context in which in 2008,
a law called the restitution retro sedation law made in a way wanted to repair what the socialist regime did in the 1950s.
So this law gave the right of the prison socialist owners or those who inherited
these properties to evacuate those that were led by the state to rent.
These people evacuated from these houses have nowhere to go because the state has no flats to give an important percentage of the population.
Definitely more than five percent. People talk about 10 or even 15 are people who are pushed from the cities.
I mean, Bucharest has nothing to give them.
Ilinca Păun-Constantinescu in episode six talks about the fact that in Romania, there is not enough consideration given to the social housing.
And this is also in this context in which, you know, property was taken from individuals was given to the state and now back.
It is given to individuals in very complicated ways, and the communist history has huge impacts on whatever happens to people.
I do research also with two participants who live in social housing.
And one participant who is on this waiting list for eight years in the conditions in which she she has.
She is a disabled mother of one and her own child, who is three years old.
She's also disabled, and she didn't manage to obtain a flat because she she cannot prove that she was evacuated from
one of these flats that were given by the socialist state to to her grandmother or something.
So it's a complicated story. So in the UK, this neoliberal turn also had a huge impact on the provisioning of public or council housing.
It was one of the four cornerstones of the post-war welfare.
State, public or council housing refers to rented homes that are built, manage and maintained by local municipal authorities.
Public housing, as such, can be traced back to the late 1800s or the early nineteen hundreds.
But their heyday actually was after World War Two,
when most of the country was in ruins and the Labour government committed to this a large building, this large council estates across the country.
It's interesting to note as a statistic that by 1979, over 30 percent or one third of the UK housing stock was actually public housing for rent.
But since the 1980s, so just right after this with this kind of preference for neo liberalism or neo liberal thinking,
subsequent governments have been promoting homeownership, which seems to be a theme throughout our study.
And this most famously was, of course, introduced if you want by Margaret Thatcher, who promoted this right to buy scheme,
which means that tenants in council housing were given the opportunity to buy their own flats.
And even today, we have a huge housing crisis here in London.
Most commentators, really the link is dwindling public housing stock with her policy, the right to buy scheme.
But these kind of policies have continued over time and more recently,
we had to help to buy scheme for young people to help them onto the property ladder.
On the other side or the flip side, renting is discouraged and very few legal protections, and they are given hardly any support.
Of course, in episode five, Jackie Peacock, who herself is kind of in charge of an organisation who helps the people who rent in London,
she highlights the dire situation in much detail documents if you want her fight for fairer housing on the ground.
And I thought it would be interesting to kind of give some more detail of how this works out,
where I did my fieldwork in central London, where I looked at five blocks or estates that were built between the 1950s and the 1980s.
They were conceived.
All of these flats I looked at were conceived as Council of Public Housing, although one of the blocks was run by a housing association.
So of my participants, we lived in these five blocks.
One third is renting and two thirds owning, which again reflects the general population approximate, I think.
So some of those participants who were renting were private renters.
They were often renting or from the owners who sublet the flats.
But still, quite a large majority of people in the blocks are social tenants, so their rents are subsidised.
But they also might claim other benefits that are means tested.
Their landlord is the council, and landlord is a very interesting term.
It's used for people who rent out property that they own.
And in episode two, Danny Dorling again traces this use of the term to actually feudal times, which is, I think,
fascinating where he says that it was the Lord of the Manor was given land land by the king or the queen to build homes for workers on.
So it's interesting that this term has persisted until today, and it reveals quite a lot about the class structure in the UK, I think.
But then, as I said, two thirds of the participants were owning their own flats and these people are quote leaseholders.
The term refers to the fact that they owned flats for the period or the term of the lease agreement,
which in the best case scenario is between 99 and 125 years.
So the owner is the leaseholder, but the person who actually owns the land the block is built on is called the freeholder.
And in most cases, in my fieldwork, this was the council.
So the people who owned the flats pay an annual ground rent and they pay service charges, which can be very expensive.
But also there are many limitations to changes they can make.
For example, in the quite a few of the blocks the flooring has to be, carpets cannot be wooden flooring or concrete.
And of course, more recent tenants would like to have the latest fashion and flooring,
and it's a kind of secret thing they do for the landlord doesn't know this is going on.
And also things like pets like cats and dogs are not allowed in many of the properties.
And again, this is contentious because particularly during the lockdown,
quite many people were seeing that having these animals around illegally, if you want really help them during times of isolation and loneliness.
Thank you for listening to our Disobedient Buildings podcast edited by Anna Andersen and produced by Jack Soper.
If you want to hear more, go to our website at WW Dot Disobedient Buildings dot com or search for a podcast where you normally find your podcasts.
In the final episode of Disobedient Buildings, the Team will discuss the impact of the pandemic on housing and wellbeing in the UK, Romania and Norway.