ABSTRACT
Waltham Forest Seminar, London Housing Research Group, 25 May, 1995
By the end of the twentieth century council housing was having to function in a society very unlike the one for which it had been devised. Had its utopian expectations been fulfilled, its estates would presumably have been selfregenerating by now; but instead they were increasingly identified with poverty and social breakdown. There was no longer any question of adopting the remedy of summarily removing their inhabitants to better environments, for the problem now was not just how to deal with the poor, but how to deal with the environments created to eliminate their poverty. Even in the parts of council housing that were apparently functioning quite well, the future was already compromised by a huge backlog of repairs and renovations.
