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As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.

Published in 2002, Housing Policy and Economic Power is a valuable contribution to the field of Human Geography.

The existing literature on neighbourhood effects suggests that a number of factors within local areas can have an impact on health, including environmental hazards, social networks and the socio-economic status of the area. However, there is minimal evidence regarding the role of housing organisations in shaping these effects. This article sets out the findings from a three-year longitudinal, mixed methods study of tenants of three housing organisations operating in the social and private rented sectors, examining different aspects of neighbourhood experience and their relationship to health and wellbeing outcomes. The findings demonstrate impacts of the immediate environment in terms of close neighbours, the wider neighbourhood environment, and social support networks, which are heavily influenced by tenant characteristics, previous experience and expectations. The services provided by housing organisations, themselves shaped by regulation and market factors, are also important. The findings will have relevance for tenants, housing providers, public health professionals and policy makers.

01 02 Despite plentiful evidence on poverty and reduced health chances and on the benefits of co-operative social networks and social capital, the nature of the relationship between them remains uncertain. Yet an enhanced understanding is needed if we are to gain, not only a more effective purchase on social processes involved in well-being, or on links between poverty and place, but also of the stratagems people adopt to challenge or cope with social and economic difficulties and resist their deleterious effects. Drawing on key concepts and on community studies conducted in East London housing estates, this book brings together diverse strands of influence on participatory community life and individual well-being. Residents' rich narratives are used to emphasize the significance of different social network patterns for mediating disadvantage and happiness. The book makes a timely contribution to post 2010 policy agendas and to current political debates on the 'big society' and the 'good society'. 02 02 If we are becoming increasingly disconnected from our local communities, are there implications for health, well being and happiness, particularly for people on low incomes? This book looks at the interplay between poor people, poor communities and poor health, with a particular focus on social networks as key linkages. 13 02 VICKY CATTELL Honorary Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Middlesex University, UK. She has lectured in Sociology, Social Policy and Politics. Her research and publications cover poverty, community and social networks in poor neighbourhoods, health and well being, and public spaces. 31 02 This book explores the role of co-operative social networks in mediating the effects of disadvantage on well being 19 02 Examines how disconnection from communities impacts on health, wellbeing and happiness Focuses on impact of those with low incomes Addresses the post-2010 policy climate and current political ideas on 'the big society' and the nature of 'the good society'    04 02 Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Social Murder Utopian Dreams? Researching Poverty, Community and Health Community Resilience Community Demoralisation and Resistance Social Capital in Urban Neighbourhoods: the Potential for Unity and Division Well-being and Happiness: Balancing Community with Independence Social Network Characteristics and Health and Well-Being Conclusions: Poverty, Community and Health in the 'Good Society' Bibliography Index

Businesses, consumers, industry groups, and governments understand the importance of innovation and the innovation process for continued economic success and improvements in quality of life. However, innovation remains an opaque topic. A paradox exists in housing at-large; using innovation is vital yet accounting for the value to individual organizations remains a challenge. This paradox is supported by a landscape that includes a sizeable graveyard of failed attempts at innovation on grand and small scales. This book seeks to decrease the opacity of innovation processes in residential construction and housing. Along with the next book in the collection, this book addresses key questions pertinent to the potential for widespread diffusion of green buildings and for improvements in community sustainability. The first several chapters will orient the reader to the concept of innovation in housing and residential construction. The later chapters will examine both the role of the Federal government in supporting innovation in housing and the commercialization pathway for residential building technology innovations. The overarching purpose of this book is to provide context and foundation for later books in the collection and to assist readers in peeling back the complex layers of innovation in housing and residential construction.

This book provides an overview of the effects of home ownership, a housing sector that has grown rapidly in recent years in many countries, not least because this is normally encouraged by governments. The first part of the subtitle, 'Getting in', refers to processes in the development of the homeownership stock including problems of access, which in turn implies issues of affordability, the viability of financial institutions and subsidies. 'Getting from' indicates that this form of housing tenure may provide households with advantages such as wealth accumulation and independence that may not be available to tenants. Finally, the last section 'getting out' refers to the risks associated with home ownership such as the fact that their tenure positions may be founded on their ability to meet loan repayments. This publication is a follow-up to Home ownership: Getting in, getting form and getting out, parts I and II, and is a result of the conference 'Building on home ownership; housing policies and social strategies' in Delft, organized by the ENHR working group Home ownership & Globalisation and hosted by OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, Delft University of Technology. Part III provides an overview of the most recent research results in this field.

Longitudinal social surveys are widely used to understand which factors enable or constrain access to higher education. One such data resource is the Next Steps survey comprising an initial sample of 16,122 pupils aged 13-14 attending English state and private schools in 2004, with follow up annually to age 19-20 and a further survey at age 25. The Next Steps data is a potentially rich resource for studying inequalities of access to higher education. It contains a wealth of information about pupils' social background characteristics - including household income, parental education, parental social class, housing tenure and family composition - as well as longitudinal data on aspirations, choices and outcomes in relation to education. However, as with many longitudinal social surveys, Next Steps suffers from a substantial amount of missing data due to item non-response and sample attrition which may seriously compromise the reliability of research findings. Helpfully, Next Steps data has been linked with more robust administrative data from the National Pupil Database (NPD), which contains a more limited range of social background variables, but has comparatively little in the way of missing data due to item non-response or attrition. We analyse these linked datasets to assess the implications of missing data for the reliability of Next Steps. We show that item non-response in Next Steps biases the apparent socioeconomic composition of the Next Steps sample upwards, and that this bias is exacerbated by sample attrition since Next Steps participants from less advantaged social backgrounds are more likely to drop out of the study. Moreover, by the time it is possible to measure access to higher education, the socioeconomic background variables in Next Steps are shown to have very little explanatory power after controlling for the social background and educational attainment variables contained in the NPD. Given these findings, we argue that longitudinal social surveys with much missing data are only reliable sources of data on access to higher education if they can be linked effectively with more robust administrative data sources. This then raises the question - why not just use the more robust datasets?

In this book academics and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines provide a survey of research into buildings, epidemiology and medical issues, followed by an assessment of the tools available to the practitioner. The book goes on to provide clear guidance on putting theory into practice. This will be a powerful reference source and a compelling read for a wide range of built environment and health professionals from surveyors to environmental health officers.

Although directed to the British system of town and country planning this paper has relevance for many OECD countries, including some with systems of land use regulation which evolved entirely independently of the British. The paper starts by characterising the basic features of the British land use planning system, viewed from the resource allocation point of view of an economist. A conclusion is that the system explicitly excludes any use of price signals from its decisions. The paper then summarises the problems to which the exclusion of price information has given rise. Because the UK planning system has deliberately constrained the supply of space, and space is an attribute of housing which is income elastic in demand, rising incomes not only drive rising real house prices but also mean that land prices have risen considerably faster than house prices. Several housing attributes other than garden space are to a degree substitutes for land but the underlying cause of the inelastic supply of housing in the UK is the constraint on land supply. The final section proposes a mechanism which would make use of the information embodied in the price premiums of neighbouring parcels of land zoned for different uses. Such premiums signal the relative scarcity of land for different uses at each location and should become a 'material consideration' in planning decision-making. If they were above some threshold, this should provide a presumption of development unless maintaining the land in its current use could be shown to be in the public interest. If combined with impact fees, such a change would not only make housing supply more elastic and the system more transparent, but would help to distance land availability decisions from the political process.