Housing Policies in Glasgow since 1880

S INCE World War I, housing has expanded more rapidly in Western cities than any other type of land use. Increased urban population and a desire to abolish substandard housing have been the principal motivations for that expansion. British attempts to alleviate the problems of substandard housing may be grouped into three periods. Prior to 1930 the government relied on the filtering process in which upper-class and middle-class migration to new housing freed dwellings for the lower class. Between 1930 and 1965 slum clearance and new housing for displaced families were the major policies. Since 1965 emphasis has been increasingly on rehabilitation of existing structures.' These broad trends in national policy may be identified in Glasgow, where during the last one hundred years there has been a continuous struggle to ensure a decent standard of housing for its citizens. The housing problem has posed a difficult and enduring challenge to successive city administrations because Glasgow is one of the most residentially congested cities in Europe. Clydeside with only 4.3 percent of all enumeration districts in Great Britain contains 37.3 percent of the country's most overcrowded housing. Despite a century of efforts to improve the situation, the general quality of housing in Glasgow remains below British standards. Now that the pressure of the immediate post-World War II years to build large numbers of dwellings is relaxed, attention may be given to other aspects of the housing problem. Questions are formulated on issues such as the social composition of housing areas, the relative distributions of community services and housing, the preservation of communities, the quality of the residential environment, the definition of tolerable standards, the tenurial composition of the city's housing, the expressed preferences of residents, and the effectiveness of the housing management machine. The decennial census by the British government has several direct indicators of urban deprivation.2 An analysis of recent data on eleven of these indicators for eight conurbations in Great Britain reveals the dismal conditions that exist in Glasgow, the major city of the Clydeside conurbation (Table I).3 This conurbation ranked highest for six of the indicators, for four indicators it was second, and for the final indicator it ranked third. A comparison of Clydeside data with the rest of Scotland shows a comparable pattern of extreme concentration of deprivation in the Glasgow region. Statistics for the city of Glasgow indicate that approximately one person in five is affected by some aspect of deprivation (Table II and Fig. 1). In this paper I shall analyze the main policies advanced as solutions to Glasgow's housing problem since 1880.