This great session offers discussion around three papers considering regeneration, geographical mobility, and development. The full abstracts are below.
Presentations from these authors and a live Q&A session are available to all HSA members. Book here
1. Meng Le Zhang, George Galster, David Manley & Gwilym Pryce Social housing regeneration and its effects on local employment: An evaluation of a major Scottish housing policy
Distressed neighbourhood with large social housing developments are the focus of numerous academic and policy discussions. The prevailing strategy for addressing the problems associated with distressed neighbourhood is through selective demolitions or housing rehabilitation. These interventions usually involve large-scale capital spending which may have a positive impact on those living in regenerated areas. This presentation evaluates the causal effect of social housing regeneration on employment rates using a quasi-experimental design. The intervention of interest is the Glasgow stock transfer where over £4 billion of private and public funding was secured in part to regenerate (or demolish) existing social housing stock within the city. The intervention was restricted to areas within the administrative boundaries of Glasgow City Council whilst the built-up urban area of Glasgow extends beyond the administrative city limits. We exploit the under-bounding of Glasgow City, as well as historic shifts in its boundaries, to create difference-in-difference estimates of the intervention effect. We use linked census extracts from the Scottish Longitudinal Study to measure changes in employment rates over time for different subgroups of Glasgow residents. Our findings show that the employment effects of the intervention only benefitted a select group of Glasgow residents. This effect occurred mainly through the employment multiplier effect of large capital spending.
2. Dan Olner, Gwilym Pryce, Maarten van Ham & Heleen Janssen Social Frontiers, Inequality and Geographical Mobility in the Netherlands
Social frontiers are places of stark inequality: borders between geographies with a large step change in social makeup on each side. For example, a high proportion of wealthy people on one side with a low proportion on the other. Work on social frontiers has demonstrated their role in higher levels of crime (Dean et al. 2018). But do they play any role in moving behaviour? Specifically, do social frontiers generated through differences in ethnicity have an impact on household mobility? For example, neighbourhood allegiance might be stronger at the frontier, as residents feel a stronger sense of territoriality. On the other hand, social frontiers may represent places of tension and even conflict, causing residents to be more likely to relocate. We explore these research questions using Dutch microdata on every individual and household in Rotterdam for each year from 1999 to 2018. This provides a location to one hundred metre resolution grid squares. We first generate an estimation of where social frontiers are located using the Dean et al (2018) Bayesian spatial model, allowing us to identify those frontiers that remain stable during the five year period we measure mobility. We use logistic regression to investigate the odds of households' moving between 2012 and 2017. As well as the impact of frontiers on moving behaviour, we also look at key household factors including average adult age, tenure type, family structure and wealth. Our results represent the first robust investigation of the impacts of social frontiers on residential mobility.
3. Rose Smith Missing social housing data: The case for a new definition of social housing in social statistics
This paper explores how to define and measure social housing by comparing two different systems of social housing provision in the UK and the Netherlands. Both countries are thought to have large proportions of social housing provision. The UK has a more centralised system that is recognised in official definitions and measures, while the Netherlands’ more community led social housing associations or cooperatives are excluded from official records. European data sources, such as Eurostat and European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC) define social housing in a way which excludes the Dutch model from their figures, with Eurostat recording the Netherlands as having just 0.8% social housing. This is in contrast to other sources which place the figure at more than a third of the housing stock in the Netherlands (Pittini and Laino, 2011; Priemus, 2010). This paper argues that missing data on social housing limits our understanding of locally delivered and administered housing and creates barriers to comparative research. This paper proposes that definitions of social housing should be expanded to more realistically measure and acknowledge the extent of social housing provision in Europe.