What makes a 'functional' community?

Mixed estates

Back in post-war England, the Labour government set up much of the post-war reconstruction with a vision of everyone in the community being cared for – in particular across health and housing. Housing Minister Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan held a positive vision for communities where “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street.” Council housing was to be made available to everyone, with eligibility restrictions lifted but allowing people who wanted to remain in private dwellings to do so. This inclusive approach welcomed more people into social housing, creating communities in what could have remained financially and sustainable housing systems.

A side note for our current supply-focussed approaches. Nye Bevan caused a lot of building – 850,000 dwellings in 4 years – but he also was conscious of the longer term legacy, ensuring they were good quality housing. He noted that “We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build”. The homes he built were so good, private renters nearby were able to challenge rent increases because their own homes were both far more expensive and clearly lower quality – this is the power of good quality government housing that leads rather than follows the market.
 

What Minister Jackson is describing is a fairly widely held theory of estate renewal and social housing provision generally that you can draw a line back to the kind of thinking Nye Bevan hoped to achieve. However in application, and particularly through manufactured rather than organic social mix, this theory has increasingly been shown to miss the desired outcomes of mixed communities. The mixed tenure model is an attempt to try and avoid concentrations of disadvantage. The theory is that by having private owner-occupiers, private renters, and social housing tenancies in the same neighborhood, the interaction between neighbors will lead to better outcomes, particularly for the social housing tenants.

Often this theory doesn't pan out in practice in part because the homes in mixed tenure developments are still siloed off from each other. The most obvious sign of this is in the phenomenon of ‘poor doors’ that gathered attention recently.  The difference in treatment between different buildings in a large estate redevelopment can have a similar effect.  In the same way that the Meriton apartments already adjacent to the Waterloo estate aren't perceived as part of a single community, it's likely that privately held buildings in the renewed Waterloo estate will be held separate from the publicly owned (but community housing managed) buildings.

But deeper than that, the application of social mixing doesn’t tend to actually solve the underlying challenges facing the community, or it only solves these issues in a manner that works for the more affluent newer arrivals. While Waterloo is well connected now through various public transport options, consider an estate with no public transport links. If the arrival of new residents is accompanied with a new road for easy driving back out, but the existing residents have no greater access to cars or petrol, then disconnection is likely to remain.
 

"The application of social mixing doesn’t tend to actually solve the underlying challenges facing the community, or it only solves these issues in a manner that works for the more affluent newer arrivals."

It’s also the case that the theory of social mixing transfers the cost of development away from government – handing over at least parts of an estate for someone else to do the work and reap the financial benefit. Over the time of Waterloo’s development successive governments have been asked to show their working on funding the various scenarios, including retaining public ownership of the whole, though to our knowledge no government has shared the results. This leaves space for doubt and a lack of confidence in the decision making.

We can't ignore that these developments come in an environment where public housing is not appropriately prized by government, and while we have seen increased funds available they are not being made available at a level that would be needed over time, and the public housing system is still expected to be largely self-funding – that is, funded by the tenants living in the homes. In its 2025 annual report, the Land and Housing Corporation reported receiving $870 million in rent, and government grants were focussed on new builds or responding to particular disasters. There is ultimately a series of choices further upstream. This significantly hampers and limits the range of options that can be made feasible. The federal government chooses to use Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) to community housing as a direct funding pool that is not available to public housing, and maintains welfare payments at extremely low levels. The state government chooses to limit eligibility to public and community housing and limit its own income stream as well.

What is often not on the table, is the ability for communities to choose for themselves what is important to them and what improvements they would like to see in their communities.

Giving communities choice and control

Jen Rignold, long-time resident and supporter of her public housing community at Airds-Bradbury, with another tenant-resident developed a number of reflections on how service providers, particularly housing providers, should work with residents in a guide we published Listen, Ask, Respect. In that guide she said:

"The exceptional service providers I have known have all followed a simple formula:

1. They sat quietly and listened
2. They asked what has been done/worked/not worked/etc
3. Then they asked what we wanted or needed to achieve
4. Then they worked in partnership with us."
 

This gets to a major aspect of building up communities – it’s about the community, and bringing new people into feeling part of the community. It’s notably not often part of the current approach to estate renewal. Giving communities a real sense of belonging, of choice and control, also ensures that the always uncomfortable process of relocating is experienced as part of a process that the community choice and influenced with real power.

Since 2018, estate renewals in London (where government funding is involved and more than 150 homes are effected) have been required to hold ballots to ensure plans have the residents' support. This drastically alters the dynamic of estate renewal. The community is involved from the beginning of the processes, not the end, and concerns or opposition can be aired and discussed and addressed or the project risks not moving forward. 

But it’s clear that giving residents meaningful decision-making input doesn’t stop renewal efforts – in October last year the largest renewal project so far got the green light from community residents with 177 homes being demolished to provide 650 new homes. This came in an estate where regeneration plans had previously stalled – the original plans starting in 2012. What’s notable is that while affordability was a part of the concerns, the community ultimately backed the reforms because they could also see the investment into the community’s infrastructure – road repairs, transport as well as facilities. 

Communities and tenants know best what they need – that’s why tenant participation that takes the time to build up structures for widespread and meaningful engagement, and hands real decision-making power to the community and then supports them with information and structures to utilise it are so powerful.

Recently we published a new report on tenant participation, examining the history of tenant participation across the previous decades and some potential new paths forward under the new Homes NSW model. We really encourage everyone involved in supporting public and community housing renters to read and engage with this area of social housing practice that is often overlooked.

Some essential reading on social mix and redevelopments: