Reluctant Gangsters - London Borough of Hillingdon

Two quite distinct communities are emerging within the sector
with quite profound differences in lifestyles and culture. At
one end there are the established elderly residents, who have
lived in social housing all their lives and who remember a time
when having a council home was a desirable goal. At the
other end are the new, younger residents, frequently suffering
from multiple problems: unemployment, poverty, poor work
skills and perhaps mental illness and drug abuse as well.
As a result, whereas at the beginning of the 1980s the average
household income of council house residents was 73% of the
national average, at the beginning of the 1990s this had fallen to
48%. By 1995, over 50% of what had been council households had
no breadwinner (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1995). By 1997,
25% of the children and young people under 16 in the UK were
living in these neighbourhoods.
Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived London boroughs.
Sixty-one of the borough’s ‘super output’ areas are amongst the
most deprived 20% in England and Wales and 23 are in the top 5%.
Unsurprisingly, most of these areas, located in Cathall, High Street,
Leyton, Wood Street, Hoe Street, Leytonstone, Lea Bridge and
Valley wards, have particularly high rates of crime in general and
street crime and drug dealing in particular, and are home to the
Waltham Forest gangs.
Neighbourhood Destabilisation
This income polarisation was mirrored in the housing market. The
the Right to Buy and Tenant Incentive Schemes precipitated a
‘secession of the successful’ as, increasingly, the economically
active vacated what became known as ‘social housing’ to be
replaced by the socially disadvantaged (Page 1993, Hope 1994). As
Malcolm Dean (1997) observes:
This happened despite the warnings of housing professionals
about the problems which public housing projects generated
when they were confined to the poor, the unemployed and the
elderly.
This meant that many local authorities, including Waltham Forest,
were left with the worst housing stock and the most needy tenants
(KI.25, 32,33,34).
In response, at the turn of the century, the housing authorities in
Waltham Forest embarked upon an ambitious programme of
neighbourhood regeneration on some of the poorest housing estates
in the borough. However, this ostensibly positive initiative had the
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