HSA Special Issue: Housing in “Hard Times”: Marginality, Inequality and Class

Abstract

This paper reasserts the relationship between class and housing through a sociological exploration of working-class place attachment, against the backdrop of a recession and government “disinvestment” in social housing. These are hard times for housing and harder still if you are working class. Interest in working-class lives within sociological research has declined; meanwhile, place attachment is deemed a middle-class proclivity of “elective belonging”: a source of place-based identity in response to ontological insecurity. I draw from an ethnographic exploration of Partick, Glasgow to demonstrate how working-class residents express strong “elective belonging” in financially and ontologically insecure times yet, paradoxically, their ability to stay physically “fixed” to place is weakened. I argue that working-class place attachment is broadly characterized by strong “elective belonging” and poor “elective fixity”: choice and control over one’s ability to stay fixed within their neighbourhood.

Key Words:

• Class
• Displacement
• Gentrification
• Elective belonging
• Neighbourhoods

Notes

aNew house building: houses completed by or for housing associations, local authorities or private developers for below market rent or low cost home ownership; houses completed for market sale by private developers. Refurbishment: houses acquired by housing associations and refurbished either for rent or low cost home ownership. Refurbishment of private dwellings funded wholly or partly through the Affordable Housing Investment Programme. Conversion: new dwellings created by conversion from non-housing to housing use.

1. The NS-SEC is the primary social classification in the UK since 2001, for use in all official statistics and surveys including the census. The NS-SEC was developed from a sociological classification, known as the Goldthorpe Schema. It is constructed to measure the employment relations and conditions of occupations based on the family/household as the unit of analysis. The eight category version was used, as follows: (1) higher managerial and professional occupations; (2) lower managerial and professional occupations; (3) intermediate occupations; (4) small employers and own account workers; (5) lower supervisory and technical occupations; (6) semi-routine occupations; (7) routine occupations and (8) never worked and long-term unemployed. Those in categories 8–3 are conceived to be working-class. In my sample category 4 refers to a middle-class respondent, while categories 1 and 2 represent middle-class groups. Those who were retired or unemployed were classified by their previous employment.

2. “Messages” is a Scots word for shopping/groceries.

3. I received a hand-written letter from a former local resident. She wrote seven pages on her life in Partick and why she loved the neighbourhood. She signed off “I belong to Perdic, a Perdic girl I will always be” – “Perdic” the old Gaelic form of Partick.

4. The process is as follows: first, a “notice of proceedings” is sent, followed by legal proceedings and tenants will be sent a summons telling them when their case will be heard at court. When the case goes to courts the Sheriff can grant a decree for eviction. Sheriff Officers will be sent to remove tenants from the property. They are entitled to use reasonable force to enter the home and remove tenants and their possessions.