The Scottish Government

« Previous | Contents | Next »

Listen

Review of Scotland's Cities - The Analysis

4.4 RESHAPING THE MARKET SECTOR

4.4.1 Market Renting

The market sector of our cities comprises not just home-ownership but also the much smaller private rental sector. And before turning to the majority sector it is important to examine the private rental sector because it has a particular and important role to play in modern cities with flexible economies. ³⁷

In many respects Edinburgh typifies both the prospects and problems of the sector. ³⁸ A survey of the city in 2000 by the Council and Scottish Homes showed the sector was of significant scale in the city: some 12% of homes in the city were provided in the private rental sector (double the Scottish average). They were mostly flats geographically concentrated within the city: providing some 28% of homes in the Central city, 21% in the Outer central city and 13% on the waterfront. There are smaller neighbourhoods where the sector is the majority provider for the young. Four-fifths of the tenants were under the age of 35 and 45% under 24 years. This reflected students comprising a third of the residents in the sector. More than half of tenants had been at their present address for less than a year and three quarters planned to move on within two years. Tenants were not poor overall but contained a sector of poorer, often younger households - 8% of residents in the sector were unemployed and a fifth received housing benefit. This profile, and indeed the profiles for our other cities, reflects core city roles. Cities are places where urgent housing needs arrive, partly because they are destination zones for those who arrive from elsewhere and the young starting their work, education and housing careers. In consequence private rental housing, which is both fast access housing and low transaction cost in nature, plays important roles in providing homes for those who want fast, flexible housing arrangements and re-arrangements. All quality cities have effective market rental provision systems, often concentrated in neighbourhoods close to city centres.

At the same time private rental housing and market landlords are often envisaged in darker terms by many of those involved in housing policy discussion in Scotland. In the past private landlordism, poor quality housing and impoverished populations were firmly associated in the national housing debate. There are still sub-markets or sectors in Scotland's cities where poor quality or dangerous housing is provided by private landlords, and this is most likely to occur where low income households cannot secure adequate options in the social sector and are rationed out of home-ownership by prices beyond their borrowing capacities. Such areas are apparent in Dundee and in Edinburgh, but are much less evident in Glasgow where housing associations largely bought out the sector in the 1970's and 1980's.

It is difficult to argue that such sectors still exist simply as a consequence of failure. It is equally difficult to justify the fact that some of our oldest and youngest and most vulnerable poor households have to find low-quality shelter through private landlords. More effective policing and possibly the replacement of these forms of provision, perhaps involving expansion of the not-for-profit role, might provide a means of reducing this social injustice.

This sector of segments, within any of our cities, ranges from squalid slums exploitatively run through to high quality homes professionally managed. However, there are signs that the better quality rental sector is seeking to grow in our cities. That being the case, better information and more coherent strategies for change may contribute to improving the sector.

The present proportional significance of these sectors has recovered in scale a little since the start of the 1980's. Job expansion in the cities and even more markedly the significant expansion of higher education over the last decade have all contributed to pressures. There has been some investment in new property to let by mainstream commercial enterprises within Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen but much of the sector expansion has been, in the last three years, an upsurge in 'Buy-To-Let' of existing properties by small scale landlords, often the parents of university students. This has fuelled property demands and prices in the moderate to good quality property markets close to our Universities, located in our city centres, and may well have exacerbated the problems of poorer households in finding city centre accommodation.

Sector change in Aberdeen rather typifies this evolution over the last decade. Market renting rose from 5 to 8% of provision in the city. Half of lets in the sector were furnished and catered for young adults without children, four-fifths of whom were under 40. The unfurnished sector tends to be let to workers, sometimes with families, temporarily working in the city and is more likely to be suburban in location. Rents of 600 to 1000 p.m. for moderate size properties are evident and there is a demonstrable increase in parents buying for student offspring. There is weak demand for smaller, older, poor quality flats. Similar patterns have been noted in Dundee.

In general provision rates for private rental housing are lower in the urban parts of surrounding city-regions. However in the more rural areas, and especially at the interface of rural areas and growing urban settlements, there has been a worrying tendency for commuters to make inroads into the significant share of private rental provision formerly the preserve of rural workers. There is some evidence that city-region growth and commuting are displacing those on low agricultural and rural wages from the rural rental stock available at the edge of commuting limits.

The concentrated nature of provision in selected neighbourhoods means that they have distinctive, dynamic features that could potentially make them attractive neighbourhoods for the young and singles in our cities. Cities, Universities, not-for-profits and private investors perhaps need to make new local neighbourhood partnerships to raise the quality of these places.

4.5 ACCOMMODATING OWNERSHIP

4.5.1 The New Market

The extensive growth in owner occupation within the cities, and indeed much of Scotland, has been a defining feature of housing, social and economic change over the last two decades. ³⁹ Whilst in the two decades to 2000 home ownership in Scotland expanded by just over a quarter, Dundee increased by just above the national rate and Aberdeen and Glasgow saw the sector's share increase by a fifth and Edinburgh by a sixth. This reflected changing preferences, rising incomes and new demographics as positive drivers, as well as the difficulties of declining quality and rising rents in the council sector.

A number of the fiscal and subsidy advantages of ownership, which were both inequitable and inefficient, have now been removed by government and public sector rent rises have been moderated as well as the generosity of the Right To Buy reduced. However there are still strong indications that as income and employment rates in Scotland continue to improve, home ownership will continue to rise. Housing demand forecasts, based in economics and demographics and predicting tenure splits, exist only for Glasgow. ⁴⁰ These forecasts and other less rigorous forward looks for the other cities all indicate that the ownership sector will continue to expand in our cities, with social renting contracting. In the recent past, governments have been more concerned to expand home-ownership in the cities without giving too much attention to the issues that expansion raised for the cities in the long term. Whilst it is self evident that consumer driven ownership markets (operating within the planning and policy framework) have made cities more attractive living locations for many Scots, it is an appropriate time to review policy issues that arise.

The growth of the market sector has greatly reduced the salience of municipal boundaries as relevant limits in the housing system. Housing markets operate as a city-region system. There is ample empirical evidence for all of our cities that many suburban 20 year olds move to the core city for their early housing and many, but not all suburbanise as their incomes and household sizes grow. At any point in time there are significant proportions ( see Chapter 3) who work at the core of the city-region but live in the suburbs, and indeed there are not insignificant numbers who reverse commute on a daily basis as well. Housing search and choice research also indicates that different consumer groups are likely to look at both suburban and core locations in many choice decisions. Municipal boundaries are a discontinuity, a distraction in the residential choice processes of most households. At the same time, within the broad Housing Market Areas of any city-region, there are likely to be well-defined submarkets for which there may be strong local preferences.

These issues are well understood by planners and housing professionals in Scotland. Arguably, Communities Scotland, in promoting local system analysis for more than a decade, has pushed Scottish practice in this area of planning to the international forefront. A great deal is known about housing markets in Scottish cities but that has not ensured effective cross-area collaboration or greater supply responsiveness.

4.5.2 The Urban Renaissance?

In the previous section attention was drawn to the very different strategies that had been pursued for older housing neighbourhoods in Scotland vis-à-vis England over several decades. Starting from that basis it is relevant to provide a Scottish perspective on the urban housing issues which have driven policy in England, but practitioner debate throughout the UK, over the last few years. The Rogers report, ⁴¹ (the Urban Task Force), noted in 2000 that there needed to be a new drive to provide housing at higher densities on brownfield land in city cores, to reverse urban decline and reduce the environmental costs of added commuting.

The Report made much sense in the English context and also stimulated a debate on urban design that has involved Scottish practitioners, many of whom work across the UK. However, although the Urban Task Force report was subsequently used to argue for changes in reserved tax powers, it contained no reference to British urban experience outside of England. However, it may be argued that not only is there a UK-wide urban system but that the experience of different countries in dealing with city issues provides an important range of innovations that are not present in all countries.

The experiences of housing change in our cities, particularly Glasgow and Edinburgh, is of UK, and international, relevance. It is clear from the arguments and figures presented above that much of what the Urban Task Force was advocating was already the policy objective in the Scottish cities. Between 1989 and 2000 some 33,400 homes for owners were built on brownfield land in Glasgow, the vast bulk of them as part of neighbourhood regeneration schemes. In Edinburgh 24,200 units were similarly built. By the time the Rogers report was published almost an eighth of the total housing stock in both Glasgow and Edinburgh was a home, usually a flat, built on brownfield land in the previous decade.

A number of academic and policy evaluations of housing developments on brownfield land in the Scottish cities have concluded that programmes, particularly the distinctive GRO grant programme, were effective in stimulating developer interest in brownfield land. Prior preparation of brownfield sites was important in smoothing the development process ( see Chapter 3). The volume of new supply reduced premia on existing better quality homes in the city and facilitated the integration of the housing market across areas of the city that had previously been regarded as marginal or low demand. New private housing was provided on peripheral, and other, council areas undergoing renewal and it stimulated a great deal of local interest. In Glasgow around 90% of the purchasers of these moderate value houses either lived or had previously lived in the neighbourhood undergoing renewal; without the new provision they would have left the area and possibly the city.

The more recent evidence is that there are a growing number of city centre, riverside and waterfront schemes in all of our cities that can be developed without significant or indeed any subsidy and that there is strong demand for higher value and quality homes in these now re-established cores (although the core was never anything less than well established).

If the Scottish experience had potential lessons for the Urban Task Force the converse was also true. Elsewhere in this report we draw attention to the importance of intermediate levels of action oriented plans, lying at a level somewhere between traditional structure plans and development plans. Such levels of plans require an amalgam of technical/design capability, financial acumen and ability to understand where projects fit into the economic, social and spatial systems of the city. Some might label this set of technical/professional skills urbanism or even socio-economic sensitive town and neighbourhood planning. Throughout this Review a great deal was said that suggested that Town Planning lost its confidence as a profession in the 1980's and has not adequately recovered in Scotland to create a new understanding of urbanism and how best to analyse and design change in places. Lord Rogers has stimulated a different trajectory and debate in England and the RDAs in England are now all establishing, on behalf of the ODPM, Regional Centres to promote new ideas and designs for cities that are rooted in their social and economic aspirations.

4.5.3 Improving Designs

There is ample evidence from the past remaking of places that, amongst others, there are two important prerequisites for places to thrive in the long term. These are that 'quality' is important and the other is that 'low income only' schemes don't work. The market often fails in identifying demands for quality and has little incentive to promote mix. The earlier sections of this chapter recognises the mistakes in the past record of politicians, planners, architects and academics in reshaping our cities. We need to find new ways to give voice and shape to the designs for places that we would like for the long term.

Much of what has been produced in Scottish city regeneration in the last decade, whether social housing or home-ownership, whether in the centre or on the edge, is decent housing. Some streets have been well thought through, but there are too few examples of where the new neighbourhood has a coherence in terms of urban design. Crown Street, Homes for the Future and the like are the exceptions that make the point. And similar remarks could be made about the indifferent, often repetitive design of much new suburban housing.

There is a criticism that in rethinking the roles of places in the process of regeneration there is a repetitiveness in Scottish experience. Critics argue that creativity is minimised in the design process and that the end products do not facilitate creative, interactive behaviour within city neighbourhoods. For instance, few community regeneration projects have developed interactive uses of new ICT within their neighbourhoods or linked their homes to wider non-place communities. Sophisticated 'green solutions' emerge in some projects but fail to become part of the norm. In city centre regeneration there has been minimal attention to the creation of 24 hour living-working districts for younger workers in the knowledge, media and other sectors. Critics claim we build for conservatism rather than creativity. Why have we not seen 'creative' districts emerge around the major schools of art, drama and music within Glasgow and Edinburgh? Arguably a 'smart-successful' city requires the neighbourhood provision that meets workers demands and facilitates social cohesion and interaction.

4.5.4 Improving Homes

The Housing Improvement Task Force is giving a new impetus to how housing systems in Scotland need to be refashioned to facilitate the repair and improvement of privately owned housing. This is particularly likely to have great significance for more effective ways to maintain the quality of flats and be of great benefit to our cities. We have noted earlier that there is an emerging issue, most acute in the cities, of difficulties in co-ordinating major repairs and improvements where Right To Buy had led to mixed ownership in high rise and other flats. And there is the growing issue of elderly owners who have the assets and, sometimes the incomes, to afford required repairs to their homes but often fail to do so. Research shows that this unwillingness is partly due to lack of information about problems and solutions, it may be due to the organisational difficulties that older people experience in making major repairs, but it also often stems from a desire to protect cash inheritances for children.

As Scotland embraces higher ownership rates (and they will show up significantly in cohorts ten years ahead from now) and the population ages, there are likely to be growing difficulties in this regard. If they are ignored the quality of the national housing stock will depreciate or policy spending will have to rise. It is not the optimal policy choice to leave pensioners to age in their own homes whilst that stock deteriorates at an increasing rate. Consideration might be given to how organisations such as Care and Repair could help co-ordinate (unsubsidised) repairs for the elderly and consider with the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) and others, ways in which to release repair resources against the equity value of homes in the most effective ways.

For cities to be better quality places Scotland must consider mechanisms which will encourage quality in the design of homes and neighbourhoods and also ensure that incentives and funding routes exist to maintain property quality in the national interest.

4.5.5 Mixing Communities, Including the Poor

There have been substantial efforts in GRO-grant and other programmes to encourage 'mixed communities' in the regeneration process involving home-owners. It is apparent that tenures are more mixed within many localities than was the case two decades ago. But it is not at all clear that this has meant really new social mixes, or simply the tenure switch of residents already in the neighbourhood. The 2001 Census may provide some important evidence in this regard. There may be a case for more detailed review of whether we have been creating more socially mixed communities and whether there have been social and regeneration benefits from any of the initiatives involved.

This is important, not just in ensuring that renewal schemes being led by the social sector include some provision of home-ownership units. But there is a new agenda emerging. More and more city schemes on brownfield land are capable of being developed without subsidy. Indeed there are rising and positive receipts on land in at least some parts of our cities, and this can only increase given the economic and demographic futures that we have identified. The question then, for some sites, is to what extent the seller (say a council) can extract some of the gains from the developer. In straight market transactions these gains would be fully reflected in the land price. However public authorities and councils are involved in this process in two ways. First, they own a substantial proportion of the brownfield land within three of our cities. Second, even when they are not the seller they are the planning authority.

Councils, aware of the rising values of city land, recognise that changing the planning status of a parcel of land creates a potential surplus. They seek to extract some of that surplus, usually in the form of additions to city infrastructure, by making consents conditional on developer actions. This action constitutes, in effect, a tax on either the seller or the developer. Some authorities have come to the view that they should have a standard tariff (tax rate) in particular classes of neighbourhood. Others take a case by case bargaining perspective.

Increasingly councils are looking to the possibility of having some of the development gains returned to the community in the form of affordable housing within higher income housing projects. Clearly this facilitates 'income mixing' and it would also reduce some of the pressures on Executive budgets if more housing could be provided in this way. There is however great variety, and lack of clarity, about what is now happening in these issues in the Scottish cities. In Glasgow there has been great pressure to include subsidised ownership within social regeneration schemes and effective community pressures to ensure that New Neighbourhoods for owners also include around a third of social housing, but at the same time the Glasgow Harbour proposal is to produce 600 high value homes without a single affordable home developed. Edinburgh has adopted a quite different approach, trying to secure consistent rates of affordable housing in similar projects.

The outcomes of such processes may influence Executive expenditure requirements ( see Chapter 8) as well as the pace of city development.

4.5.6 Including Families

Much of the housing that has been built within Scottish city limits in the last decade has been flats. The market effort has largely reinforced rather than diversified dwelling types in the cities. This broad balance is unsurprising as not only has the key demand driver been new household formation, but also the widespread developer perception is that high density in development is the way to cover high land costs. That may be a reasonable pattern in Edinburgh where the land economics arguments all imply dense development. But do they hold equal validity in Glasgow and Dundee where there are substantial stocks of vacant and derelict land?

The research evidence for the Glasgow housing market area is clear, ⁴² and it has been clear for more than a decade. There is a proportion of households, usually with young families, most with above average incomes and with a prior 'career' in one or two flats in the city, whom leave the city each year, who would have preferred to have chosen to remain in the city. There is now similar evidence for Dundee (and perhaps rather different evidence for Edinburgh implying that the high cost of home-ownership in the city is pushing them out to the city-region edge and imposing commuting costs on them).

The evidence for Glasgow, and Dundee, is that some households are leaving the core city because on the transition from childless couple to family with children they find that there are relatively few family houses within the city that meet their requirements - it is primarily an issue of quality and availability rather than price. Survey evidence for the housing market area around Glasgow suggests that households would consider moving back to the city, to new neighbourhoods, if:

• developments were on a sufficiently large scale that the social mix could be similar to suburban developments;
• local schools, and especially primary schools, were of adequate quality; and
• developments were secure, that is crime free.

Substantial scale of change is possible, because of land availability, in Glasgow and Dundee, but aside from ensuring the interests of communities still residing where such developments might take place, school performance in both cities will have to improve. Neighbourhood crime issues are touched upon later. But overall, there is a recognition that the renaissance of housing markets in Glasgow and Dundee has to move beyond simply providing flats to create longer quality chains within city boundaries. However the demographics facing our cities suggests that demand for family housing may fall and that demand combined with significant expansion in the city cores may mean difficulties for the more marginal owner-occupied suburbs. More detailed discussion of the role of new house-building in Glasgow and Edinburgh can be found in Bramley and Morgan (2002). ⁴³

4.6 HOUSING PRICES

4.6.1 City Price Patterns

We have concentrated so far on the volume, quality, mix and choice aspects of the growth of owner occupied housing in our cities and stressed that there are design and policy issues to be addressed. But there are equally important issues regarding city house prices, price changes and their economic impacts.

House prices in Scotland, and for the Scottish cities have typically been more stable than the English average and English cities. However, long term evidence for Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh shows that since the 1960's average house prices in these cities have, over the longer term, at least kept pace with UK averages. Our cities and our central cities have endured neither relative nor absolute decline in their housing prices.

The 1990's were, however, a little different. Southern UK housing markets, at the start of the 1990's, were either still suffering price declines or slow recovery from house price falls, which Scottish cities had avoided (largely because the larger social sector meant that recession and unemployment had little impact on Scottish owners and because Scots have typically been much less likely to engage in housing equity withdrawal). That recovery, combined with subsequently faster rises in productivity and household formation, especially in southern England, meant that English house prices rose by a half in money terms in the 1990's. As the 1990's boom accelerated so did southern house prices and Scottish prices, with the exception of Edinburgh and the Lothians, have begun to lag behind English averages.

Through the 1990's average Scottish prices also increased by close to a half but there have been marked differences across the city-regions. Between 1989 and 2000, second-hand house prices in Edinburgh and the Lothians rose by 58% and in the Northeast of Scotland, on the region focused around Aberdeen, by 57%. On Tayside and Clydeside the increase was just under 40%. However the core cities performed more strongly than their surrounding regions, with increases above 70% in Edinburgh, 80% in Aberdeen and 50% in Glasgow, with Dundee and Inverness lagging at just over 40%.

Within the cities, central city localities were amongst those that appreciated most rapidly. Whilst media coverage of housing prices has emphasised the Edinburgh boom, Sasines figures at more local scales make clear that there are segments of the Glasgow market (its higher value end) which have appreciated at rates not dissimilar to high value Edinburgh. More recent evidence suggest these well established patterns are continuing within the cities and that Edinburgh price trends are now more similar to south-east Britain than the rest of Scotland. It is the more marginal quality parts of cities, the outer parts of the city-regions, and much of western and central Scotland which have low appreciation rates which are holding overall Scottish price inflation well below the UK average.

The price dynamics of these housing markets reflect the demographic and economic changes outlined earlier in the report. This is apparent within the cities as well as between them. For example, neighbourhoods with higher rates of appreciation in recent years in all of our cities have been those that attract not just higher income local movers but disproportionately high shares of movers into the city-regions from outside of Scotland. Research by Communities Scotland has indicated that in the second half of the 1990's well over a third of purchasers in the City of Edinburgh were arriving from outside of Scotland. By 1998 almost half of purchasers in Central Edinburgh and almost two-fifths in Outer Central and Waterfront Edinburgh were from outside of Scotland. Academic research in Glasgow has shown that more than a third of buyers in the Merchant City and the higher value West End markets originate from outside of Scotland. The main inward flows are from higher priced English regions (with earlier and higher housing equity rises). The nature of our house purchasing system may facilitate importing inflation in the cyclical upswing when Scotland lags southern Britain.

4.6.2 Policy Issues

We have indicated that the demand drivers of the last decade are likely to be replicated in the next, if with less pressure on family housing and more on high value two person homes. It is therefore pertinent to ask whether such rapidly and differentially rising house prices, which attract so much press and dinner table interest, should be so uncritically tolerated in our cities.

Some studies of city success indicators, including the European Urban Audit, include rising house prices as a success indicator. This may be valid, as an indicator of rising demand. But by the same token, it is a limited meaning of success to suggest that we all have to pay more for the same bricks and mortar that were built in the past. Rather house price rises are a potential sign of supply side failure, that is prices rise because rising demand is unmatched by increasing supply.

Rises in house prices (unrelated to improvement action) are of course welcome to those who own housing assets, and that is now over half of our city residents and almost two thirds of people in Scotland. But the proportion benefiting falls if one considers that existing owners who intend to trade-up in the market (usually more than half of existing owners) face rising buying prices (on higher value homes) as well as enhanced sales values. It is only those who intend to trade-down or out of the market who unambiguously gain. When gains occur, real or perceived, it is now well established that there is a housing wealth effect on overall domestic spending, so that house price booms can increase local consumer spending (and of course the converse applies when boom turns to bust). In general, the volume of transactions in Scottish city housing markets are also positively correlated with house price increases so that rising prices are associated with good times for estate agents, solicitors, valuers, removal agents and the white goods and carpets sectors (households spend when they move).

There are, however, also down-sides to this process. First, those entering the market now have to increase their share of income devoted to mortgage payments and reduce other savings and consumption. Second, those rationed out of the market may find rental costs rising as private landlords have to compete for properties and social landlords face rising land prices. All of these effects are apparent in Edinburgh; rising house prices for the better-off half in the city are imposing costs on those who cannot afford to buy and on owners forced to the edge of the city-region. There must be a concern then that rising house prices, and land values, could begin to limit the attractiveness of Scottish cities to potential migrants. If we need to attract more people there is merit in being able to expand housing provision without major house price increases and avoiding instabilities.

House prices reflect not just local authority infrastructure, planning and housing policy decisions and related Executive actions but also UK monetary and tax policies. The Executive has relatively few instruments available to shape housing demand but it does have the capacity to shape housing supply side changes. This suggests a need for a stronger understanding of the causes and consequences of housing market development in Scotland, including price developments in the cities.

Further, price changes, given their micro and macro-economic significance, deserve more consideration in regional investment strategies of Communities Scotland and in local housing strategies and structure plans. At present these plans produce quantitative targets of housing outputs, or ranges thereof, but say nothing about the price effects of achieving these targets or indeed the effects of under-specifying targets relative to real demands.

The need to make progress in raising productivity and safety in the construction sector and to address potential construction sector shortages (which have been widely identified for the decade ahead) has to be allied to an understanding of the costs of land. Recent press reports have highlighted the higher rate of new household formation in Scotland and with city household growth significant there is likely to be renewed debate about the overall balance of brownfield and greenfield land around Glasgow and Dundee and concerns about the 'tightness' of planning around Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

This review has highlighted the major economic significance to Scotland's economy and population of dynamic centres being able to expand quickly and with minimal cost increases, for this will be a shaper of productivity, but this cannot be at the cost of sustainable development. The Executive is currently making significant progress in providing a better framework for spatial development in Scotland and in promoting the link between strategic plans and delivery action. But consideration might also be given to the issue of whether the present extent and form of green belts actually play the roles assumed of them. Just how does the provision of green belt impact housing provision and prices, and just how do they provide visual amenity and act as green lungs?

Scotland's cities and city-regions, would benefit from a more sophisticated forward look on the housing market and a more incisive view of the social and economic causes and consequences of rising house prices. Because whilst there is much current excitement about rising house prices there seems little recognition that these rises reinforce the gaps between those that have and those that do not, between those that have to live in the worst council housing and those that can escape into the market.

As households make choices of where to leave and where to move to, they give much thought to neighbourhood quality. Studies of the social rental sector show that neighbourhood quality is a key influence on where people will accept housing offers. Market sector studies of the determinants of house prices (hedonic index studies) typically reveal that neighbourhood attributes can explain between a quarter and a half of house price variation. Selecting a particular house also means an array of access to different private services and amenities (close to shops), environmental qualities (close to green space, under the flight path), public services (schools, nurseries, health centres) and of course neighbours (similar, different). We now have to ally the previous discussion of housing issues to neighbourhood qualities to assess the overall residential choice aspects of Scotland's cities.

4.7 CHOOSING NEIGHBOURHOODS

4.7.1 Patterns of Neighbourhood Satisfaction

Neighbourhoods differ physically in layout and density, in terms of location, amenities and accessibility, and socio-economic composition. This produces a diverse mosaic of neighbourhoods within the Scottish cities, though there are some underlying factors in shaping neighbourhood types. For instance, housing tenure is important because of its close association with other variables such as dwelling type and quality (non-traditional dwelling types and lower quality). As tenure selection is also influenced by socio-economic variables a consequent relation between low incomes and dwelling type can emerge. For example, whereas it is not uncommon in the US for high income households to live in high rise apartments in or at the edge of the central city, in Scottish cities high-rise flats are primarily owned by councils and let to the poor.

There is ample evidence of the association between tenure and income in the Scottish cities, though the relatively small size of the social rented sector in Edinburgh means that the capital has a wider tenure spread of lower income households than the other cities. The Scottish cities, reflecting their post-war commitment to public housing, also have two other distinctive neighbourhood patterns. First, because councils built dwellings in very large schemes there is often a sharp spatial division between different neighbourhood types and marked socio-economic segregation at very local levels. Drumchapel (at the edge of Glasgow) and Bearsden are respectively amongst the poorest and richest parts of the Glasgow city-region, their gap illustrated best by an eleven year difference in male life expectancy, but they are physically no more than 200 yards apart. Secondly, peripheral scheme development created major concentrations of poor people on the edge of cities (just as post 1980's regeneration has brought more affluent households to the city core). Arguably housing policy and planning have given insufficient attention to whether this is a pattern that should be changed.

Neighbourhood classification schemes allow a synoptic view of how the mix of neighbourhoods differs from city to city. Between a third and a half of neighbourhoods in Inverness, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh would appear (not just to statisticians but residents and visitors) as relatively prosperous places for home owners (Chart 4.5). Glasgow stands out starkly both in the proportion of poor public housing estates (for that is the dominant neighbourhood type in the city) and the absence of affluent and prosperous areas of home-ownership (despite the recent and positive changes noted above). Chart 4.5 highlights the scale of the differential inheritance, in dwelling and neighbourhood types, that confronts the cities.

It is important to probe beyond areas and to assess residents' views about neighbourhood satisfaction as well as the factors which influenced their residential location choices. The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) asked respondents to rate their neighbourhood as a place to live and breaks down these responses by broad urban/rural categories, individually for Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow and by MOSAIC neighbourhood type (Table 4.8).

For the four cities taken together, 43% of households rated their neighbourhood as very good and 44% as fairly good. Only 7% said their neighbourhood was fairly poor and 5% very poor. This indicates that most neighbourhoods in the four largest cities are successful as residential environments. These data confirm the findings of the 1996 Scottish House Condition Survey which also asked respondents to rate their own neighbourhoods and included data for Inverness where neighbourhood ratings are particularly high (Chart 4.6).

These results, at one level, are encouraging, because they suggest that almost nine out of ten city Scots are reasonably satisfied with the neighbourhood they live in. However it is worthwhile noting that neighbourhood satisfaction levels in rural areas are higher with 64% stating very good and 31% fairly good and that research on neighbourhood satisfaction levels in English cities has revealed similar findings.

Neighbourhood satisfaction rates vary across the cities (see Chart 4.6 below). These indicate that satisfaction levels are generally high; only 9% of respondents said that their neighbourhood was fairly poor or very poor as a place to live in Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh. In Glasgow, however, this proportion was 17%. Glasgow also has the lowest proportion stating very good at 35%, with Edinburgh highest at 54%. In all four cities, however, a significant number of neighbourhoods in the social rented sector are rated as fairly or very poor places to live. The proportion of respondents in the social rented sector who rated their neighbourhoods as poor was 18%, 17%, 25% and 26% respectively for Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. These neighbourhoods contain a concentration of linked problems - high unemployment, poor health, poor services, poor quality of environment, inadequate housing and high crime.

These broad findings are reinforced by analysing satisfaction scores for the MOSAIC neighbourhood types in the Scottish national sample (Chart 4.7). A clear pattern emerges of high satisfaction ratings in the owner occupied neighbourhoods and significantly lower ratings in the neighbourhoods of council dwellings. The neighbourhood type with the lowest rating is "Families in council flats", with 13% stating fairly poor and 13% stating poor. Because past policies favoured so much public housing in Scotland and then promoted large scale rehabilitation of older tenement neighbourhoods, with an intensity unmatched in the rest of the UK, it is these neighbourhoods in the deteriorated public housing system that now represent the worst choices within the Scottish system.

« Previous | Contents | Next »