Paul Lusk
Writing on democracy, politics and Christianity
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The view from Hales Place
What's happened to Hales Place? That's asking questions about our politics
In the 1960s, on St Stephen's Hill to the north of its small city, Canterbury council started to build 1,400 homes to meet the needs of its population.
At the same time, just across the main road, the first students arrived at the new University of Kent.
Now many homes on the Hale Place estate stand empty, and the council struggles to achieve its housing targets.
What has gone wrong?
Hales Place was once Church territory, a resort known for its fine view over the ancient city. At least two Archbishops spent their final days in a palace standing where now there is a shopping parade. Its land and buildings were seized by the state in the days of Thomas Cromwell, passing to trusted aristocrats who served the Kings and Queens. After the Restoration of King Charles II, its owners became the furtively Catholic Hales family. Late in the nineteenth century they sold it for the use of a Jesuit college providing a refuge for French aristocrats. A few decades later it came into the hands of Canterbury Council's housing department.
As designed and built, the low-rise, high density, landscaped council estate provided cheap housing for families, elderly people and people with physical disabilities. But waves of state-sponsored innovations have swept through to wreck these plans. In 1980 came the right to buy. Council tenants bought their homes at a hefty discount. After a few years they were free to sell them, and meanwhile in 1987 the rental market was deregulated. Ex-tenants sold, and their homes were snapped up for the rapidly growing market for students at the University over the road.
Within a few years, a quarter of all homes on the estate were privately-let student accommodation . A standard family house on the estate has 80 square metres of living space: just about enough, under the old Parker Morris standards, for a 5 person home with 3 or 4 bedrooms – in practice good for a family with one or two children and maybe a third on the way. Currently a house like this is on the market as a 6-bedroomed student let. Under the impact of Covid and a large supply of newer student housing, many homes are empty – over a hundred properties are currently (midway through the academic year) on Rightmove as student lets on the Hales Place estate, typically at £100 a week per bedroom. This includes furniture and bills, but let’s say the ‘6 bedroom’ student house might yield its investor £2000 in a good month – way out of the reach of an average-income working family. A working household, incidentally, would pay £150 a month council tax on top of the rent – the student house is ‘exempt’, meaning the government kindly compensates the council for tax it cannot collect from students.
Facing low demand, landlords are offering incentives like zero deposits and rent-free holidays as well as ‘bills’ included in the rent. No one really knows where the student market will go after Covid, and the much needed review of higher education in the new era of online learning and diverse pressures on public spending.
In time landlords may look to redirect the homes back to the family housing use for which they were originally intended. Homes are fifty years old and visibly distressed from decades of miserly investment in repair, so this reversion, to happen, will keep builders and decorators busy for years.
This is not about blaming students or landlords. Some of my best friends are students; they and their landlords have just been following the signals of the market. The point of this piece is to reflect on
the role of the state
in all this.
Since the 1960s great convulsions have swept over Hales Place, arising from successive tsunamis of planned state initiatives. A huge council estate, state-funded, results from policies pursued by both parties in mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile a great university is planned and delivered. As council ownership and management of housing falls into disrepute a popular right to buy is intended to endow the more stable households with pride in ownership – as, briefly, it does. But the
right to buy
turns into a
right to sell , and the market attracts small investors to allocate homes to a use for which the estate was never designed – as, in another state initiative, from the same (Thatcher) government, it is ordained that half of all young adults will be educated in (mainly) residential universities. They are to live near the great productive site known as the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC).
Fulfilling Manuel Castells’ analysis of ‘the urban’, the city becomes the site not of production but of ‘collective consumption’ – in an unplanned consequence of well-made plans, Hales Place estate was repurposed to become the dwelling place of the university’s customers. Their purchasing power is largely driven by state-sponsored ‘loans’ which are repayable only if the students earn enough money to ‘repay’ their loan through taxes (which many won't).
Meanwhile the state’s own once-cherished plans for families to bring up children in secure homes in a reasonably pleasant environment are left accidentally abandoned. Instead, for a generation or two, politics answers the deceptively alluring calls of mass supplies of graduate labour, enriched ex-council tenants and small investors putting their savings into property.
What is to blame – capitalism or socialism? Maybe both, a bit. More interesting is to understand the weird new hybrid: the high spending ‘social market’ state, its immense powers of intervention placed at the service of successive and competing waves of political fantasy.
A new book puts a Marxist frame around its picture of the Merseyside Housing Co-ops. How useful is that?
We are told that the 'housing crisis' (the shortage of choice for younger home-seekers) results from limited housing stock. In fact the amount of homes has greatly increased relative to population in the last fifty years, while the real price of housing relative to income has more than doubled. So what is going on? We explain why building more homes will not solve the problem
Older blogs on the Ashers bakery 'gay cake' case, why Tim Farron's own colleagues hung him out to dry, how Care lost May an election, and more.