The Difficulty of Mixed Housing

I thought I would come back to the importance of mixed housing that I discussed in an earlier post.  The Nye Bevan quote still puts the ideal position pretty well:

"It is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sections of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street … the living tapestry of a mixed community."

It doesn't however, go through the full range of types we might want to expect.  We might want a variety in terms of:

• Income distribution: That is the core of the Bevan quote, and what most people think of when they think of mixed housing.
• Age groups:  It is desirable to include family accommodation whereas the market at the moment pushes very much to single bed flats.
• Use classes: So that the public realm is used at different times for different purposes.  If an area becomes dominated simply by housing for example, the effect can be a dormitory town.
• Different kinds of tenure (which may ovelap with different income types)

If you think of the practicalities of negotiating with a developer for all those different objectives, coupled with the fact that areas tend to develop piecemeal over a period of years, you can imagine why meeting them all in any given neighbourhood is no easy task.