Council Estates

[shadowrider]

This may be a hard to answer question but could someone tell me how council estates work? I was under the impression they were a bit like apartments but have since read a Wikipedia article on the subject and am still a bit confused

Comments

Wow, this got long. And vague.

[ooktavia]

(1) Possibly, posssibly not. Actually, there's a huge political thing - or there was in the 1980s- over that. Briefly, what happened was that the Tory Gov at the time was chaing voters, and brought in a right-to-buy scheme whereby if you had been living in a council property for x amount of years, you could buy it. This was good, in that a lot of people who would not otherwise have been able to could own a house, it was bad in that it's meant an increasing shortage of decent low rent housing. I think Jackie might own her own flat- she's been there a long time, since Pete died. Mickey probably doesn't- he's too young, and although we know he's got a job as a mechanic, I'd be surpised if it paid enough to afford a flat in London

[rosinarowantree]

Local councils built homes for those who could not find homes on the open market. These might be houses, maisonettes or a flat in a block of flats (flats, not apartments), and would be allocated according to the need of the person. You had to qualify for a council house because you were homeless (but not because of your own fault) or because your housing was substandard or too small for your family). Some estates were good, some poor, and some deteriorated into 'sink estates' where the council housed all those problem families that were too disruptive to put in 'nice' estates

[jhall1]

That seems like a very good summary. Just one query:

"Would Jackie and Mickey likely own the places they live in?" It's possible that Jackie would have bought her flat, under right to buy.

I'm not sure whether the right to buy extended to flats. Because buying a house normally involves also buying the ground on which it stands, private (as opposed to council) flats are I believe hardly ever sold, but are either rented or leased. Of course, a long lease effectively isn't much different from an outright purchase.

[rosinarowantree]

If the lease is over a certain length then purchasing it counts as buying - we 'bought' our first home which was a ground floor maisonette with a ninety-nine year lease - everything from the mortgage to the deeds to the later sale proceeded like a normal house-purchase, except that there were covenants over repairs to the roof etc - but then the last two houses we've bought have shared driveways also covered by covenants. (bought one, sold it and then bought another - I'm not a property tycoon!)

This is a leaflet warning of the risks involved in buying a council flat:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/pub/284/thinkingofbuyingacouncilflatPDF252kb_id1151284.pdf

So Jackie may have bought hers.

[captainlucy]

Council housing is basic housing (apartments and houses) owned and maintained by the local government (the city or district council or semi-independent agencies thereof) and rented to tenants usually on a semi-permanent basis, at a rate substantially below the market rate for a similar property. It was the primary source of housing for the working classes in the immediate post-war years to quite recent (the 1950s until the 1990s

[ethelfleda]

Everything above is true, just a couple of things to add