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This chapter reviews the nature of poor housing and the type of housing that children, and particularly poor children, currently live in, and the potential impacts of poor housing on the lives of children. The scale of homelessness affecting families and young people, and its impact on their lives are addressed. It also explores the evidence on poor neighbourhoods and children. Housing conditions have significantly enhanced over time and households with children per se do not tend to live in poorer housing than others. Data on homelessness in the UK shows some reductions in recorded homelessness in recent years in England and Wales, although not in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The available evidence suggests that the effects of poor housing and homelessness on children may be considerable, although new evidence indicates that the circumstances leading up to homelessness may have a greater impact on children than living in temporary accommodation.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill is the oldest public-supported institution of higher learning in the United States. Since 1991, archaeologists at the Research Laboratories of Archaeology have conducted numerous archaeological investigations on its campus. These investigations have included archaeological surveys, site testing, monitoring of ongoing construction projects, and full-scale excavations. This chapter describes the results of excavations undertaken during the 1990s at two archaeological sites on the UNC campus. The Graham Memorial site, where a tavern and hotel stood from the mid-1790s until 1921, offers a perspective on one of Chapel Hill's first businesses that catered to university visitors and also provided room and board for students. The nearby Pettigrew site was the location of two successive buildings that also served student housing needs: the Poor House and later the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house.

This chapter assesses what the Scottish Parliament has achieved in the area of housing. Legislation in relation to housing has been a major part of the work of the Holyrood legislature. There have been no fewer than three major pieces of legislation focusing solely on housing, as well as housing featuring significantly in three other Acts. Indeed, one of the first pieces of legislation to reach the statute books from the new Scottish Parliament was the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001 and, at the time of writing, a Housing (Scotland) Act is likely to be passed in 2010. Looking, then, at the overall picture of the law, policy and economics of housing in this era, it is possible to make some kind of initial judgment on the first decade of housing under devolution. In crude terms, the lot of those in Scotland who are homeless, in poor-quality housing or suffering from absentee landlords is probably better than their equivalents in England and Wales over the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, the effectiveness of the changes continues to lie in the level of resources devoted to them and, what happens on the ground in the lives of badly housed or homeless citizens depends not on what powers are enshrined in statute but on whether financial resources make these provisions meaningful.

This chapter examines the extent to which children live in poor housing and environments, including experiencing homelessness, in the UK. We do not need research to know that children cannot flourish to their full potential if they live in insecure, cramped, damp or dangerous housing or live in environments characterised by noise, crime and pollution. While robust studies are few, reviews conclude that the cumulative evidence of many, often smaller, studies demonstrates a link between poor housing and poorer children’s well-being, particularly in terms of impacts on health (Shaw, 2004; Quilgars, 2011; Barnes et al, 2013), as well as longer-term poorer outcomes into adulthood (Marsh et al, 1999). There is also evidence that housing circumstances (such as cost, condition and location) can mitigate the effects of poverty (Tunstall et al, 2013). This chapter begins by reviewing the nature of poor housing in the UK before examining the scale of homelessness affecting families and young people. A third section examines the evidence on poor neighbourhoods and children.

One of the problems faced by the Charleston Orphan House and its residents was health. Situated on the northern edge of a city characterized by unhealthful conditions, the orphanage witnessed the children suffer diseases such as cholera and whooping cough. These were the same diseases that plagued the other children in Charleston regardless of color or ethnicity. Stricken children received medical care derived from contemporary ideas on etiology and therapeutics, including vaccination against smallpox. This chapter focuses on the history of health and medicine in the Charleston Orphan House and how it reflects and illuminates the state of both in the country in general and the city in particular. It also examines the conflict between the Orphan House and the Poor House in connection with the health of entering children.

This chapter explores the importance of housing for public health. There are ample data linking poor housing conditions to a broad range of infectious diseases, chronic diseases, injuries, childhood development and nutrition issues, and mental health concerns. In addition, the burden of poor housing is not distributed evenly across populations. Families with fewer resources are likelier to live in unhealthy homes, and they are less likely to be able to improve the condition of their living situations. Moreover, high housing costs often put families and individuals in the position of having to trade between healthy housing and other basic necessities, such as food or medication. Structural forces perpetuate housing inequities. Landlords and real estate agents have contributed to racial/ethnic segregation by blocking minorities from moving to predominately white neighborhoods, which often leads to the exclusion of minorities from high-quality housing, schools, and other public services. Further, predominantly minority communities receive less investment from lenders to improve housing quality and neighborhood environments. Thus, improving housing must mean improving housing equity, so that all can access the benefits of having a safe, healthy place to live.

This chapter examines the scale of the housing crisis: too few homes; too many living in intolerable housing conditions; and growing and ultimately unsustainable inequality between those who own property and those who do not. Poor housing harms lives. The high cost of home ownership means that the sort of people who would have been buying their first home a generation ago are now stuck in insecure, rented accommodation. They may have good income, but they lack wealth. Addressing these problems requires targeted public investment and stronger regulation. To suggest that all that is needed is more house building is to miss the point. However, part of the solution must be to address the chronic undersupply of new homes. This is a moral imperative, for conservationists as much as for anyone else.

This chapter explores how pre-regeneration estates became devalued places, largely connected to neoliberalisation and austerity policies and effects. Five devaluation strands are analysed: overcrowding, landlord neglect, population transience, crime and disorder, and stigmatisation. Overcrowded families living in small flats were unable to transfer to larger properties because social housing has contracted, trapping them in dwellings that no longer felt like home – un-homing. Although properties and estates were physically solid, they had been neglected due to inadequate investment, repairs and maintenance services. Landlord transfers (from the Greater London Council to the borough councils), plus managerialist restructuring (outsourcing and cutting back caretakers), also contributed to tenants’ complaints about living in a worsening environment. London estates have become more transient places due to the Right-to-Buy because of increased private landlordism, tenants and Airbnb guests. Crime, fear of crime and anti-social behaviour were important issues at some estates, but less so at others. Estates have become symbolically devalued via mass media territorial stigmatisation which has been exacerbated by austerity-related ‘poverty porn’ TV programmes. Despite such devaluations, residents generally positively valued their homes and estates (Chapter 6), and there was no mass desire to leave unlike in the case of US public housing projects (Wacquant).

This chapter examines the beginning phase of regeneration, and emphasises how residents became disillusioned, not least due to unsatisfactory consultation processes. Two examples of early-stage regeneration are discussed: the long-running, incomplete Canning Town/Custom House scheme in Newham, and the more recent Northwold estate scheme in Hackney. Residents raised similar concerns at each: inadequate consultation, unclear information, anxieties about demolition and the breakup and displacement of the existing community, and that the primary beneficiaries would be property developers rather than themselves. Residents often regarded consultation as confused and confusing, not due to ‘ignorance’ but rather resulting from the one-sided, obfuscatory and sanitised nature of consultation, including surveys that omit the D-word – ‘demolition’. The final section analyses residents’ responses to comprehensive redevelopment involving demolition. A profound value gap exists between regeneration rationales and mass media place myths about estates (‘sink estates’), and residents’ own attachments to their homes and neighbourhoods. Reponses to demolition are impacted by tenure and associated rehousing rights, with council/social tenants (with most rights) being relatively more favourably inclined than owner-occupiers or temporary tenants. The minority of social tenant demolition supporters tended to be those who were already un-homed either due to overcrowding or poor-quality housing.

Chapter 1 covers the years 1904 to 1915, from Archie Leach’s birth through his childhood to age 11. It offers information on the city of his birth, Bristol, and it considers his extended family’s background. It is revealed that his mother’s side of the family, the Kingdons, were particularly troubled and impoverished: his maternal grandfather died in the workhouse, his aunt was committed to a workhouse and subsequently the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, and one of his uncles spent his adolescence in a borstal-like facility. It also considers his mother’s aspirational nature and his parents’ unhappy marriage, which culminated in his mother’s disappearance just after his 11th birthday.