Rural Housing: Competition and Choice by Michael Dunn Marilyn Rawson Alan Rogers

Author:Michael Dunn, Marilyn Rawson, Alan Rogers [Michael Dunn, Marilyn Rawson, Alan Rogers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Poverty & Homelessness, Sociology, Urban, Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Human Geography
ISBN: 9781000297232
Google: 2wAWEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-23T01:00:34+00:00

Housing Quality

The quality of housing is an area where deprivation can plainly be seen, although measures of quality are invariably phrased in terms of official standards. While crowding and amenity provisions provide fairly clear-cut evidence of poor housing conditions some aspects of housing quality, for instance, house type, are far less easy to interpret. For example, while there is a rough gradation in quality from the detached house through semidetached and terraced housing to the mobile home, the last type may well be favoured by some owner-occupiers, such as young people in the skilled manual trades who are earning relatively high incomes.

Detached houses made up about a third of the sample in both areas and, as expected, professional and non-manual employees were the dominant social group, with farmers making up an important subgroup. In South Oxfordshire in particular detached housing was essentially the preserve of the higher-income groups. The characteristic house type associated with tenants, both local authority and private, was the semi-detached house. Here the skilled manual occupations in the middle-income groups were predominant.

As far as the age of housing was concerned, owner-occupiers tended to be found in the oldest (pre-1800) properties, particularly if they were the outright owners, and in the newer postwar houses, especially if they were first-time buyers. In both areas professional households made up the main group (one-fifth in the Cotswolds; one-third in South Oxfordshire) living in pre-1800 housing. Local authority tenants were usually living in housing built in the period 1946−70, though some properties dated from the interwar years. Tied agricultural tenants lived generally in older housing – in the Cotswolds about a third of such properties pre-dated 1800 and a further third were built in the nineteenth century. Armed forces households invariably lived in postwar purpose-built housing.

While only a relatively small proportion of households in the two areas lacked the use of basic housing amenities (Cotswold: 3·8 per cent; South Oxfordshire: 6·9 per cent), these households were clearly differentiated in terms of tenure, social class and income (Table 7.8). In the Cotswolds the disadvantaged households were mainly private tenants in unfurnished property, though outright owners provided a second group, reflecting the distinction within the owner-occupier sector which has already been mentioned. These outright owners, in fact, were the most important group in the South Oxfordshire sample, though here of course the picture of disadvantage was dominated by the owners of mobile homes. In both areas it was pensioner households which particularly suffered from a lack of housing amenities. More than half (52·6 per cent) of such households were made up of pensioners in the Cotswold sample and the figure for South Oxfordshire was 44·5 per cent. Of all households lacking amenities in the Cotswolds, 73·7 per cent had heads of household aged 65 or more, while in South Oxfordshire the proportion was 46·7 per cent. These households tended to be long-standing rural dwellers – two-thirds of those in the Cotswolds had been resident in their home since at least 1950.

Table 7.8 Characteristics of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.