Urban Maps

[joevsimp]

_{*And lots of smaller categories (shared ownership, rent free, private renting not involving a landlord or letting agency, etc) as well.}

how does one privately rent without involving a landlord or agency?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I have no idea, but the highest concentrations nationally are on military bases, I think.

[joevsimp]

maybe it means renting from your employer then?

[EPG]

Are these percentages by property or by number of residents?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Households

[Smid]

_{*And lots of smaller categories (shared ownership, rent free, private renting not involving a landlord or letting agency, etc) as well.}

how does one privately rent without involving a landlord or agency?

Not sure about UK, but Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data breaks tenure into a wide range of options, including owned outright, owned with a mortgage, purchased under a rent/buy scheme, rented, occupied rent-free (I suspect/observe but haven't analytically proven a correlation with university students... most likely international students - I can elaborate if anyone's interested, but you probably understand the principle), occupied under a life tenure scheme, and "Other tenure type."

It also provides separate data on "landlord type" - which includes real estate agent, state or territory housing authority, person not in the same household - parent/relative, person not in the same household - other, residential park (includes caravan parks and marinas), employer - Government (including Defence Force Housing), employer - other, housing cooperative/community/church group.

I don't think I'll post any maps of these Australian maps because the ABS website maps them very nicely so I'd be a little superfluous. If anyone wants to have a look, I believe the ABS Tablebuilder link is in the "Important Links" stickied thread, and I can explain to anyone interested (just PM me). If people are interested, but don't want to register for the free access to the Census website, I might make some of these maps, if people say what they'd like to see.

[EPG]

Tenure by household in Dublin.

In general, owner-occupiers are rare in the city centre and pervasive in rural areas, and these two categories of tenure tend to be found in the same places. "Mortgaged owner-occupiers" are concentrated in the new semi-detached, private housing estates around Donabate, south of Swords, west of Blanchardstown/Castleknock villages, south of Lucan, Firhouse/Ballycullen/Ballyboden and Stepaside, as well as in the commuter towns like Ashbourne. "Outright owner-occupiers" are more common in traditional residential areas, such as the belt of well-off, older areas from Templeogue to Dalkey, the north Dublin suburbs (apart from council housing estates), Castleknock on both sides of the M50 and Malahide/Portmarnock, while being much rarer in the new private estates and commuter towns.

Local authority housing is distributed in a very skewed manner. Lots of areas have none, or just a couple, whereas there are substantial amounts in the predictable places that we've already discussed on this thread - which overall gives Dublin less local-authority housing than the typical European city. Private and voluntary-body rental is strongest in the city centre, especially the triangle between Trinity College, UCD and Rathmines, a suburb which has been associated with private rental for decades, but also in the new suburban housing estates in the west, the new urban apartment developments in the city centre, and around Maynooth, a university town in County Kildare, just visible to the extreme west of the map.

[EPG]

maybe it means renting from your employer then?

Good intuition!

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http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/a-century-of-home-ownership-and-renting-in-england-and-wales/short-story-on-housing.html

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Excellent maps. Enjoying this section.

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This developed bit is now called 'Belarmine', a name I never heard when I was child...

[EPG]

This is the last map I found interesting, posted simply because it's pretty funny. Spot the commuter rail, DART and Luas lines.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

That map is fantastic.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Housing in London. By ward. I am sane.

[YL]

Probably this is the point to mention Park Hill.

I meant to ask this ages ago, but what do you, as someone from outside the area and with an interest in that sort of thing, think of Park Hill?  It can be quite a controversial issue in Sheffield...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Do you mean the building as a building, the building as a social project, or what's been done with it recently?

[Franknburger]

Why not comment on all three aspects?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why not comment on all three aspects?

As a building I love it, must admit. As a social project I take the view that it ultimately failed but because the political, social and economic grounds on which it was built fell away rather than because it was seriously misconceived: Park Hill only became a sh!thole after the economy of Sheffield collapsed at the same time as the residualisation of council housing (i.e. the early 1980s). Many of the problems with 50s/60s high rise housing were consciously averted by those that planned Park Hill, which is why what eventually happened counts as a tragedy. I'm highly ambivalent about recent developments.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course the early 80s thing is a feature even of big council housing developments that were not so well planned. I think it was Richard Titmuss who said that a service for the poor will always be a poor service (if not it's the kind of thing he would have said), and that's the issue right there. The idea that council housing ought to be for 'the poor' was not policy until then. I take a slightly unorthodox view that this policy shift of the Thatcher government was more damaging that Right To Buy.

[YL]

As a building I love it, must admit. As a social project I take the view that it ultimately failed but because the political, social and economic grounds on which it was built fell away rather than because it was seriously misconceived: Park Hill only became a sh!thole after the economy of Sheffield collapsed at the same time as the residualisation of council housing (i.e. the early 1980s). Many of the problems with 50s/60s high rise housing were consciously averted by those that planned Park Hill, which is why what eventually happened counts as a tragedy. I'm highly ambivalent about recent developments.

On the face of things, the controversy is mostly concerned with recent developments; in particular cutting funding for the project is one of the Lib Dems' proposals to save some money which could then be used to maintain council funding for all the libraries.  (I haven't been able to find out what the Lib Dems want to do instead.  It's a Grade II* listed building, so demolishing it shouldn't really be on the agenda, and I'd hope they don't want to leave an enormous derelict hulk overlooking the city centre.)  I think there's also some room for debate about whether the refurbishment that's been done so far is sufficiently faithful to the original design.  (Personally I think it probably is, though it looks very different.  But I'm not an architect.)

However, I think a lot of the attitudes to the refurbishment are connected to attitudes to the building in the first place.  My own view has become more positive since making an effort to understand the design and the context which produced it, though I'd still struggle to say that I like it...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Some maps of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which has been in the news recently.

White ethnic groups*



Asian ethnic groups**



Black ethnic groups



<sub>*Also included the Jewish figure from the religion census. So not only is that map not exclusive of the others, but there's a comparative undercount.

**Actually Arabs are technically listed under 'other', but whateversky.</sub>

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Looking at that map:

A strong correlation between 'White other' and working in the city/gentrification? Certainly it seems to negatively correlate with Bangladeshi anyway.

Other Black?

[EPG]

Malheuresement, we don't have terraced/detached/etc. housing types from Irish census data. But we do have two other factors to work with: average number of rooms per dwelling and average share of houses among all dwellings (as opposed to flats or caravans). Houses are generally larger than apartments in Ireland. So we can use these data to great advantage!

We can overlay these two in a single map. Plot average number of rooms per house (to proxy house size) as blues, and share of houses as oranges, each becoming darker per quantile. Then white areas have small dwellings and few houses, i.e. your typical apartment. Conversely, dark areas have large dwelling houses. Orange areas have small dwellings, but these tend to include small houses more than the white areas. Blue areas mean big apartments, so I guess we shouldn't see too many of these.

To generate this map, I've taken the quantiles for Dublin county as a whole, and they are quintiles. White areas have fewer than 3.7 rooms per dwelling and 38% houses. The darkest areas, which are harder to distinguish, have more than 6.2 rooms per dwelling and 99% houses.

The CSO says rooms are "kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, conservatories you can sit in and studies, but excluding bathrooms, toilets, kitchenettes, utility rooms consulting rooms, offices, shops, halls, landings and rooms that can only be used for storage such as cupboards."



The dark areas (big houses) are wealthy: the southern suburbs, Castleknock, Drumcondra, Clontarf and Howth. The light areas (small apartments) are mostly urban cores: the inner city, the Liffey from Islandbridge to Connolly Station, Docklands, and the Dún Laoghaire waterfront, but also Pelletstown north of Ashtown, Santry Northwood and Grove Road flatland in Rathmines.

Recall that orange areas have relatively few rooms, and blue areas have relatively many rooms, given their number of houses. Observe the orange in certain deprived areas: Crumlin, Drimnagh, Ballyfermot, Cabra, Finglas, Donnycarney, and East Wall/North Wall, but not Ballymun and the north inner city, which are flatland, or Darndale, which has flats but also caravans/mobile homes. Concentrated blue areas are pretty rare because apartments don't vary in size as much as houses. Mostly, I think apartments outside the centre share their localities with houses to a greater extent than city-centre apartments, which drags up the average rooms per dwelling. I think this is what's happening in areas like the coastal fringe, which seems to have more blue areas than is typical.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Pretty. Are these the sort of patterns that you would expect? I mean, in terms of details (obviously they are in general terms).

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Pretty. Are these the sort of patterns that you would expect? I mean, in terms of details (obviously they are in general terms).

Correlates fairly strongly to class, age of housing, and distance from the centre, so yes but not totally.

[EPG]

Not many surprises here. Maybe the weakness of the link between class profile and housing size in the north suburbs. I also learned that modern areas developed for below-average-income housing, like Kilbarrack/Donaghmede (west of Sutton and Howth) and Walkinstown (west of Crumlin bordering South Dublin), had bigger houses than their pre-50s predecessors.

[EPG]

Historically, those areas and their smaller-dwelling neighbours were the Dublin heartland of Fianna Fáil and, to a lesser extent of popularity, Labour. The stereotype was of the tenement resident rehoused in the suburbs, perhaps even purchasing his house from the Corporation, thanks to Fianna Fáil benevolence. They responded to their social franchisement with gratitude. Maurice Manning quotes a late 1960s survey that put party support in Dublin at 35/30/20/15 (DK/Others) among the middle class, and 37/14/31/18 among the working class. My judgement is that you should move about 10% from Others to Fine Gael to get more realistic figures. But the point is that Fianna Fáil was the most popular party among workers at the time.