Mixed Communities - Placebo or Panacea

Residential segregation has sold many newspapers. Social Mix has become the current buzz phrase. Government policy now aims to create and maintain 'mixed communities'. Considerable efforts and resources are put into this. But there are crucial questions that need to be answered if this policy concept is to be implemented, and to justify the scarce resources it consumes.

The paper reviews the evidence on these questions and challenges the belief that mixed communities can effectively reduce deprivation and social exclusion. Whether mixed community policies can work in the way their advocates claim hinges on the direction of causation; do poor people live in poor neighbourhoods because living in affluent ones costs too much? Or does living in a poor neighbourhood make poor people significantly poorer?

The paper puts the question ‘Are mixed communities an effective way to reduce deprivation and social exclusion?’

Cheshire argues that creating mixed neighbourhoods treats a symptom of inequality, not its cause. The problem, he says, is poverty – what makes people poor and what keeps them poor – not the type of neighbourhood in which people live.

He makes the points:-

• If it were true that creating mixed neighbourhoods could reduce poverty or improve individuals' life chances, then it would logically have to be true that living in a deprived neighbourhood must make you – or your children – worse off than you would otherwise have been. But the more carefully one looks the more difficult it is to find any convincing evidence that this is so. While the evidence does not show that the character of a neighbourhood causes poverty, there is important and obvious causation running from poverty to the sort of neighbourhood in which you live.
• Substantial money was spent in the US to see how enabling people to move from disadvantaged to more affluent neighbourhoods affected their lives but the experiment found no positive net outcomes. Those who moved did not become better off. There were some improvements in girls' educational performance and aspirations but this was offset by worse school performance and increased crime among boys.
• Research from the UK and Canada tracking people over time shows that the neighbourhoods they initially lived in had no influence on their prosperity later in life, while evidence from the US shows that moving people from deprived neighbourhoods to more affluent ones does not improve their economic prospects.
• Neighbourhoods with concentrations of particular types of people – rich, poor, ethnic, occupational – have been a feature of cities for 2,000 years or more. We should respect this fact. There is probably a good reason.
• 'Specialised neighbourhoods', with concentrations of similar people, have benefits. They help people find compatible neighbours and local amenities they value, provide support networks and help people – particularly less skilled people – find suitable jobs.
• These specialised neighbourhoods may seem divisive but in large cities they are shown to lead to improved productivity, welfare and overall living standards.
• All the attributes that make neighbourhoods attractive to more affluent people cost money and suit people with higher incomes, therefore pricing people on low incomes out of 'nicer' neighbourhoods. Although approaches to mixed income communities provide affordable housing, the fact that the community caters overall for those with relatively high incomes means that genuine 'access' to this community requires more than just an affordable home.
• Affluent neighbourhoods lack many of the amenities poorer households need. Some of these are tangible, such as shops selling goods one can afford to buy on a low income. Others are less tangible, such as social networks that give access to information about job opportunities for which poorer people are qualified.

The question arises of why the various governments in Australia persist in continuing their historic practice of adopting other countries discarded concepts. History, and my great aunt Fanny, tells us it is cheaper, and a lot less painful, to learn from other people’s experiences. The adage that there is no value to be gained from flogging a dead horse has stood the test of time. The flogger gets sore arms and the value of the horse’s hide is reduced.

Placebo induced outcomes are dependent on maintaining a mental illusion whilst panaceas produce physical results. Why should the public housing sector of the Australian community be denied the physical results of a panacea?

Ross Smith
Waterloo

References:

Full Report: www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/2066-segregation-mixed-communities.pdf

Summaries: www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/2114.pdf and www.jrf.org.uk/publications/are-mixed-communities-answer-segregation-and-poverty

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