Why Parties Displace Their Voters: Gentriﬁcation, Coalitional Change and the Demise of Public Housing∗

Winston Chou† Rafaela Dancygier‡ February 3, 2021

Forthcoming, American Political Science Review

Abstract Across advanced economies, affordable housing shortages are pushing low-income voters out of cities. Left governments frequently exacerbate these shortages by elimi- nating public housing. Why does the Left pursue policies that displace its voters? We argue that the Left’s long-term rebalancing towards the middle class and away from an increasingly stigmatized “underclass” has significantly attenuated the tradeoffs in- herent in reducing affordable housing. Focusing on Britain, we demonstrate that, by alienating low-income voters politically and reshuffling them across districts, housing crises have significant costs for Labour. Yet, drawing on interviews, we show that displacement is nonetheless compatible with electoral interests: the displaced make room for richer voters whom politicians believe will also support Labour. A quantitative analysis of Greater London’s 32 local authorities and 624 wards further documents trends in line with coalitional rebalancing. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that electoral foundations are key to understanding housing crises and gentrification.

∗Acknowledgments: For excellent research assistance we thank Chloe Horner, Jeremy Roth, and Sam Winter-Levy. For helpful comments, we thank Jeyhun Alizade, Lori Bougher, Jim Goldgeier, Tom O’Grady, Elizabeth Saunders, Bryan Schonfeld, and seminar participants at Princeton University. We are also very grateful for the guidance we received from three anonymous reviewers and the editors. This research was approved by Princeton University’s Institutional Review Board (#10481). Replication files may be downloaded from the American Political Science Review Dataverse (Chou and Dancygier, 2021). †Independent Scholar. [email protected]. ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7950-8015 ‡Professor, Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. [email protected]. ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9569-134X Introduction Cities across the globe are facing severe housing crises. Fewer and fewer people can afford to live in cities, evictions and homelessness are on the rise, and the demand for public housing far outstrips supply (Pittini et al., 2017). As costs climb, housing affordability has become an urgent political issue. In Berlin, 51% of renters are afraid of losing their apartment due to rising rents, and thousands have participated in rent protests (Paul, 2019). In London, voters ranked housing as the most important issue in the 2016 mayoral election, far ahead of other salient topics such as immigration, the economy, or healthcare.1 From Berlin to

London to San Francisco and beyond, those who make cities run can no longer aﬀord to live in them (Florida, 2016).

Affordable housing crises in global cities have been in the making for years. Yet governments have largely failed to contain them, and instead often pursued a bundle of “state-led gentrification” measures – including the elimination of public housing – that have driven up the cost of housing and caused significant stress among large sections of city residents

(Hochstenbach, 2016).

A noteworthy feature of this development is that state-led gentriﬁcation is frequently overseen by the Left (e.g., Goetz, 2011; Van Gent and Boterman, 2019). In the UK, the focus of this paper, Labour Party politicians have executed the sale and demolition of dozens of council estates, leading to the displacement of thousands of tenants. When council housing is replaced with pricier private ﬂats, the displaced make room for voters of higher means, sparking protests accusing Labour of “socially cleansing” entire neighborhoods (Lees, 2008). 1See Appendix A for this and other polls.

1 This represents a striking reversal: In the past, Conservative politicians used housing policy to eﬀectively rid their districts of Labour-voting council tenants, and the belief that inexpensive, public housing is conducive to Labour victories remains ingrained in Tory thinking

(Boughton, 2018).

Why, then, do Left governments enact policies that systematically displace and alienate part of their voter base? Perhaps the most common answer refers to local politicians’ need to boost tax revenues by attracting richer residents (Peterson, 1981). However, in the UK, as in much of Europe, ﬁscal centralization makes politicians’ concerns about the local tax base much less salient (Hilber and Sch¨oni, 2016).

In this paper we argue that aﬀordable housing crises – and the Left’s contribution to them

– have substantial electoral foundations. Housing policy that privileges higher-income voters, while unsettling to others, is in fact aligned with the Labour Party’s electoral incentives.

While displacement and housing stress can be costly in the short-run to Labour, these costs have largely been tempered by the party’s long-term rebalancing in favor of the upper and middle classes. Over the last several decades, Labour – like many of its center-left counterparts – has rebuilt its coalition to include larger shares of these richer voters, whose size has grown especially in cities (Gingrich, 2017; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). At the same time, it has distanced itself from low-income voters in both rhetoric and policy, going so far as to stigmatize them as an undeserving underclass (Evans and Tilley, 2017; Watt, 2008).

Housing policy favoring richer voters, we propose, is symptomatic of this reconﬁguration.

Simply put, center-left urban politicians do not view housing policies that replace poorer with richer voters as ideologically or electorally costly, and this calculus helps fuel aﬀordable housing crises and the demise of public housing.

2 We build our argument in several steps. First, we establish that substantial portions of

Labour’s electorate view the lack of affordable housing negatively and look to local governments to alleviate their housing stress. Labour’s failure to do so has cost the party: The demolition and sell-off of public housing by Labour-led councils has drawn mass protests, unfavorable media attention, and intra-party dissent. Further, the rise in evictions may have electoral repercussions. Using individual-level panel data, we show that eviction significantly reduces the likelihood that voters will support Labour, and that it often displaces Labour voters permanently from their electoral districts. Our analyses, among the first to examine how eviction affects political behavior and electoral coalitions, illuminate some of the political consequences of affordable housing crises.

Next, we show that long-run changes in Labour’s urban coalition dampen the electoral costs of these developments. Mapping historical trends, we demonstrate that the number of middle- and high-income voters has risen substantially in cities, and that today these voters constitute a sizable share of Labour’s contemporary urban electorate. Drawing on interviews with politicians, housing policy experts, and activists, we show that this transfor- mation directly informs how Labour politicians perceive the costs of displacing less affluent voters. Housing privatization dilutes electoral districts of Labour’s traditional constituents and generates the potential for backlash, but also makes way for wealthier voters who nev- ertheless support Labour. As a result, urban politicians generally do not perceive tradeoffs when contemplating the loss of public housing and gentrification of their districts. Rather, our interviews document, they view housing privatization as a mechanism for revitalizing declining areas and making them more livable and attractive to their constituents – albeit those belonging to the urban middle- and upper- classes.

3 Lastly, we support our interview evidence with quantitative analyses of council housing reductions in the 32 municipalities constituting Greater London. We ﬁnd little support for alternative explanations that emphasize the eﬃciency and pragmatism of housing privatization and instead uncover trends consistent with our qualitative conclusions and broader argument about coalitional rebalancing.

Taken together, our findings demonstrate that urban housing crises are consequences of the long-term electoral and ideological reconfiguration of center-left parties. In so doing, they complement research on the changing composition of the Left’s core electorate. Much of this work has focused on the Left adjusting its stances on economic and cultural issues to align with the preferences of the middle class (Beramendi et al., 2015; Boix, 2019; Gingrich and Häusermann, 2015; O’Grady, 2019). We propose that this repositioning can also take a more direct form, as Left parties pursue housing policies that recompose their electorates from the ground up.

Our work also draws connections between housing politics and realigned economies (Di- amond, 2016; Rickard, 2020; Schonfeld, 2019). That coalitional rebalancing has altered politicians’ preferences for their districts’ class composition has become particularly mean- ingful as richer voters ﬂock to cities. Scholars highlight how economic forces tied to the knowledge economy and the undervaluation of urban land, along with shifting tastes in favor of city living, have lured suburban higher-income voters back to the cities (Butler, 1997;

Rodden, 2019; Smith, 2005). Yet these moves are not simply borne out of economic logic or cultural processes, and they do not occur in a policy vacuum. Instead, they are both cause and consequence of cities’ approach to housing and gentriﬁcation. Our research explains how electoral incentives can help guide state-led gentriﬁcation, even among the Left.

4 Finally, we join a growing ﬁeld of scholars who argue that housing plays a critical role in the politics of contemporary democracies (Ansell, 2019; Fuller, Johnston and Regan, 2020;

Hankinson, 2018; Johnston and Kurzer, 2020). Rodden(2019), for example, shows how the nature of the housing stock aﬀects the class composition of electoral districts, while

Trounstine(2018, 2020) demonstrates how land use and housing regulations powerfully in-

ﬂuence racial segregation. Scholars have also examined how gentriﬁcation (Newman, Velez and Pearson-Merkowitz, 2016; Michener and Wong, 2018) and public housing demolitions

(Enos, 2016) inﬂuence political behavior across gender and racial groups in US cities. Others investigate how homeownership impacts turnout (Hall and Yoder, Forthcoming), redistribution (Andr´eand Dewilde, 2016; Ansell, 2014; Schwartz and Seabrooke, 2009; Van Gunten and Kohl, 2020), populism (Adler and Ansell, 2020), and trade preferences (Guisinger, 2017;

Scheve and Slaughter, 2001). Our study expands this research agenda by studying the eﬀects of evictions on political behavior and displacement, and by explaining why political parties pursue housing policies that distress and displace their supporters.

The Decline of Affordable Housing and the Role of the Left Urban housing costs have surged and now represent heavy financial burdens for many households, especially in metropolitan areas where massive housing shortages are at the root of the affordability crisis. Despite widespread hardship, governments have not taken adequate measures to contain housing crises. As Figure1 shows, while housing prices have shot up dramatically in OECD countries, public investment in housing has dwindled. Indeed, one marker of this shrinking investment – the elimination of public housing – has exacerbated the crisis. In Amsterdam, the share of socially-rented housing decreased from 54 percent in

5 1998 to 46 percent in 2014 (Hochstenbach, 2016). In Sweden, over 120,000 public housing units were sold between 2000 and 2010, with more than half of sales occurring in Stockholm

(Andersson and Turner, 2014). In the UK, the number of households living in public housing fell from nearly 4 million in 2000 to just over 2 million in 2012 (Pittini et al., 2015).

Real House Price Index Public Investment in Housing 150 0.25

0.20 125

0.15

100

0.10 Percent of GDP Percent

Percent of Index in 2001 of Index Percent 75 0.05

50 0.00

1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 2020 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 Year Year

Figure 1: Real House Prices versus Public Investment in Housing in OECD Countries. Public investment comprises capital transfers and direct investments in housing development. Since 2001, real house prices increased by more than 25% while public investment as a percentage of GDP fell by 66%. Sources: See Appendix G.

These trends are especially apparent in London, the most populous city in Western Eu- rope and among the least aﬀordable (in the Conclusion we place this case and our argument in comparative perspective).2 Figure2 illustrates the scale of London’s aﬀordability crisis.

In the upper-left panel, we plot the growth of real affordable housing costs, dividing the average rents charged by semi-private social landlords (who manage dwellings by non-profit housing associations), or by local councils, by the first quartile of worker income. Both have 2With more than 9 million residents, London is larger than the median EU state (Austria).

6 Real Social Rents in London Housing Stock in London Private Landlord Repossessions 160 160 240

220 140 Social Landlords 140 200 London 180 120 120 All Housing 160

100 100 140

Percent Increase Percent Local Authorities Council Housing 120 England 80 80 100

60 60 80

1999 2003 2007 2011 2015 2019 2001 2006 2011 2016 2020 2003 2007 2011 2015 2020

Real Private Rents House Prices Home Ownership in London 120 100 275

London London 250 80 110 225 % Owning 60 200 100 England 175 40 England % Renting 150 Percent Increase Percent 90

Absolute Percentage 20 125

80 100 0

2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 2020 1999 2003 2007 2011 2015 2020 1999 2003 2007 2011 2015 2019

Figure 2: Housing Trends in London. In the top-left panel, we plot the increase in below- market social rents, which we divide by the bottom quartile of worker income to reﬂect real housing costs. Real social rents have risen by roughly 30% since 2007 for social landlords and by 20% for local authorities. The upper-middle panel contrasts overal housing stock growth with the steep decline of local authority-owned council housing. In the remaining panels, we show trends primarily aﬀecting non-council housing residents and contributing to demand for public housing. Repossession actions by private landlords have approximately doubled since 2003. Real private rents, calculated by dividing private rents by median worker income, have increased by 15% in London compared to 5% in England. House prices have increased by 250% in London, driving down the rate of homeownership versus renting. Sources: See Appendix G. increased sharply since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008.

Though publicly-owned council housing remains by far the least expensive option, the upper-middle panel shows that it is also quickly evaporating. London’s council housing stock declined by more than 20% through the 2000s, due cumulatively to sales to sitting tenants, transfers to social landlords, and sell-oﬀs to private developers.

7 While the housing crisis falls most heavily on the poor, the remaining panels of Figure

2 show that it has impacted the entire housing market, creating more widespread hardship.

Skyrocketing rents and property prices have contributed to a doubling of evictions by private landlords and to a long-term decline in homeownership, especially in London. Council housing therefore remains an attractive option even for middle-class households. In fact, due to London’s class mix (see Section “Blunted Electoral Tradeoﬀs”) and expensive housing market, a relatively large share of council tenants do in fact belong to the middle class

(33%), though the working class (44%) and the long-term unemployed and economically inactive (17%) are most disproportionately represented (relative to their population size; see

Appendix A).

In London (and elsewhere), the elimination of aﬀordable housing and the displacement it triggers has unfolded under leftist governments. Local councils have facilitated large-scale private real estate developments via the “regeneration” of council land, a process usually entailing the demolition or privatization of council homes. Figure3 shows that council housing stocks have universally trended downwards in London (adjusting for Right-to-Buy sales to sitting tenants). Although Labour councils entered the 2000s with much more council housing, their hastened rate of decline yields a picture of convergence. Losses have been especially severe in Labour-controlled, Inner London boroughs – Tower Hamlets, Lewisham,

Lambeth, Hackney – each of which lost more than 10,000 council homes from 1998 to 2017.

These trends do not only reﬂect routine sales of council homes to sitting tenants, but can be traced to decisions by local councils to sell oﬀ housing en masse. For instance, in 2017, 8 of the 10 largest ongoing regeneration projects were approved by Labour councils (London

Development Database, 2017, authors’ calculations). Although a percentage of new private

8 Number of Council Homes Percentage of Initial Stock

400 100

90 300 Labour Boroughs 80 London 200

Percent 70 Thousands Mixed Control

100 Conservative Boroughs 60

0 50

1998 2002 2006 2010 2014 2017 1998 2002 2006 2010 2014 2017

Figure 3: Decline of Publicly-Owned Council Housing. Labour boroughs are controlled by Labour for more than 2/3rds of years 1998-2017. Conservative/Liberal Democrat boroughs are defined similarly. Since 2006, the decline in council housing stock (exempting Right-to- Buy sales) has been steepest in Labour boroughs, which lost approximately 100,000 council homes from 1998 to 2017. While still providing more council housing, Labour boroughs own approximately 60% of their 1998 stock, compared to 70-75% for non-Labour boroughs. Sources: See Appendix G. units are to be let at “affordable” rents, nearly all will be out of reach for existing tenants, as this designation only constrains rents to be less than 80% of market rates – effectively unaffordable for low-income residents.

Labour’s active role in private housing development represents a striking reversal. The mass expansion of public housing – by 1981, 31% of London households rented from the council (Watt and Minton, 2016) – not only ﬁt squarely within Labour’s ideological pro- gram, politicians have also long thought that it made electoral sense. The close association between Labour voting and council housing was such that, in the mid-1980s, the Conser- vative council of Westminster kept empty (or sold oﬀ) vacated council homes, a brazen attempt at gerrymandering that became known as the “Homes for Votes” scandal. On a

9 much larger scale, Thatcher’s Right-to-Buy policy – which gave council tenants the right to purchase their homes – was intended to boost support for Conservatives among a new class of homeowners (Studlar, McAllister and Ascui, 1990). The Conservatives’ belief that growing council housing would also grow Labour’s electorate has held to this day. As Nick

Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister in the 2010-2015 coalition government, recalls about the Tory leadership’s reaction to his housing proposal: “[They] looked genuinely nonplussed and said, ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’ They genuinely saw housing as a Petri dish for voters” (Boughton, 2018, 264). Indeed, Labour has been and remains by far the most popular party among council tenants (see Appendix A).

In short, the replacement of affordable council housing with expensive private flats goes against long-held Labour interests and ideological commitments. In the next section, we show it can also be politically costly to Labour, heightening the puzzle of why Left governments proactively pursue gentrification.

Political Costs of Urban Housing Crises The lack of aﬀordable housing troubles most Londoners. In 2015, 89% of Londoners thought their city was facing a housing crisis. 54% agreed that their housing costs were causing them stress, climbing to 70% among renters (see Appendix A). These grievances, along with the spectacular increase in evictions and displacement, have provoked a collective backlash. For example, in 2015 an estimated 5,000 Londoners gathered around City Hall to protest demolition activities on more than 70 council housing estates (Townsend and Kelly,

2015). Housing activists have united disparate groups spanning socioeconomic and ethnic

10 backgrounds – council tenants, private renters, architects and planners, and even celebrities3

– to protest state-led gentriﬁcation and the splintering of communities (Watt and Minton,

2016). They have employed tactics from physically preventing bailiﬀs from entering homes to squatting in vacant council housing estates (Hancox, 2016).

These campaigns have put the spotlight on the adverse consequences of housing privatization and the involvement of Labour councilors in what has come to be labeled “social cleansing.” Illustrating their eﬀectiveness, Figure4 charts the number of Guardian articles that mention the term “social cleansing” in relation to UK housing policy. The 2015-16 spike coincides with the protests, but the topic had gained salience in prior years. Between 1992

(when the term ﬁrst appeared) and 2019, 223 articles appeared and, despite the newspaper’s left-of-center orientation, only four discussed Labour’s role in a positive light.

Articles Mentioning "Social Cleansing" 0

1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 2019

Year

Figure 4: Number of Guardian Articles Mentioning “Social Cleansing” in Relation to Housing in the UK, 1992–2019. Dashed line represents smoothed average ﬁt using lowess regression. Source: Authors’ compilation. 3Comedian Russell Brand has boosted the visibility of several housing campaigns.

11 Beyond organized protests and news articles, state-led gentriﬁcation and subsequent af-

fordability crises may inﬂuence electoral outcomes through less public channels. In the

remainder of this section, we demonstrate that eviction can reduce political engagement and

also permanently reshape the electorate by reshuﬄing voters across electoral boundaries.

To examine these channels, we utilize 18 waves of the British Household Panel Survey

(BHPS), a national panel survey conducted from 1991 to 2008.4 Our focal independent

variable is an indicator for whether a respondent moved due to “eviction, repossession,

or other forced move.”5 We begin by investigating the within-person relationship between evictions and political engagement. Our hypothesis is not that evictees consciously identify and punish Labour as the cause of their housing stress (though they may), but that evictions

– as disruptive, deeply unsettling events (Desmond, 2016; Thurber et al., 2021) – cause individuals to withdraw from political life, pulling support from political parties. As such, here we construct our dependent variable – disaﬃliation – as an indicator that equals one if

the respondent answers the following questions in the negative:

VOTE1. Generally speaking do you think of yourself as a supporter of any

one political party? YES or NO

If VOTE1 == No, ask:

VOTE2. Do you think of yourself as a little closer to one political party

than to the others? YES or NO 4We cannot use the Understanding Society panel, which follows the BHPS, because it severely

underreports evictions due to ambiguous question ﬁltering. 5To be sure, eviction is not the only means by which gentriﬁcation can displace residents.

We focus on it as it is the most salient of these and straightforward to measure.

12 In addition to disaffiliation, eviction may reduce local Labour support via relocation. To measure this channel, we study displacement, which equals one if a respondent relocates to a different local authority (such moves generally also mean relocation to different parliamentary constituencies). Because local election turnout is around 40% and wards are small (in 2018 the average ward electorate was 9,434), small changes in affiliation and composition can have significant impacts on electoral outcomes (cf., Anzia, 2013).

There are two main concerns towards estimating these effects. First, individuals who are evicted may be unique along unobserved time-invariant characteristics. Second, eviction can be correlated with other events that also affect political behavior. The richness and panel structure of the BHPS allow us to address each concern. First, by comparing outcomes within the same person over time, we can address unobserved confounders that are fixed within individuals. Second, we can control for events that frequently precipitate eviction, namely unemployment, divorce, and sickness and disability, that may also affect political behavior and displacement. Lastly, we conduct placebo regressions that predict past political behavior as a function of future evictions. To the extent that our models accurately predict no “effect” of future evictions on outcomes, we have more confidence that our non-placebo model captures an actual causal effect.

Estimates from linear probability models are shown in Table1. In Column (1), we show using first-differences that eviction is associated with a four point increase in the probability of disaffiliation. The estimate from a regression with individual fixed effects (Column (2)) is somewhat smaller, about 2.4 points. Adding year fixed effects to capture aggregate time trends and time-varying controls increases the estimated effect size to 4.1 points.

Figure5 illustrates some placebo estimates (i.e., the “eﬀect” of eviction on past out-

13 DV: Probability of Disaffiliation (1) (2) (3) (4) One-way Two-way Two-way FD FE FE FE ∗∗∗ ∗∗ ∗∗∗ ∗∗∗ Evictedt 0.043 0.024 0.031 0.041 (0.011) (0.010) (0.010) (0.012) Employedt−1 0.004 (0.011) Divorcedt−1 −0.019 (0.030) Health Problemst−1 0.014 (0.012) Log Aget −0.040 (0.149) Constant 0.005∗∗∗ (0.002) N 11,371 13,074 13,074 10,336 ∗p < .1; ∗∗p < .05; ∗∗∗p < .01 Table 1: Estimated Effect of Eviction on Political Disaffiliation. Linear probability model; robust standard errors in parentheses. This table presents within-individual results for the effect of eviction on the probability of disaffiliation. comes) as well as estimates of the effect duration from the model in Column (4) of Table1.

The estimates are statistically insignificant in the previous waves (suggesting that the ignor- ability assumption is valid for this model). The estimated effect of eviction on disaffiliation, approximately 4.1 percentage points, is highlighted.6 The volatility of estimated effects is somewhat higher after eviction than before it. 6To benchmark this effect size, we compared eviction to a strong predictor of political affilia-

tion, educational attainment. Compared to high school graduates, university graduates are

on average 13.5% more likely to support or feel close to a political party. As such, our eﬀect

size represents about 30% of the cross-sectional relationship between university graduation

and aﬃliation. We further observe that aﬃliation rates in our sample of respondents who

were ever evicted range from 32% in 1992 to 52% in 2008 – meaning our eﬀect size represents

between 8% to 13% of the baseline.

14 6

−3

−6 Probability of Disaffiliation

−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

Figure 5: FE Estimates of Effect of Eviction on Political Disaffiliation: Placebo Test and Effect Duration. This figure shows the estimated effect of eviction on political disaffiliation in the five years before and after eviction. Estimates are from OLS with fixed effects and time-varying controls as in Column 4 of Table1 with thick bars denoting standard errors and thin lines denoting 95% CIs. Eviction increases the probability of disaffiliation by 4 percentage points in the year of eviction. Prior to eviction, the placebo estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero.

We also examined the implications of evictions for Labour speciﬁcally, subsetting our sample to those who voted for Labour in the 1992 general election, the ﬁrst covered in our sample.

We estimate the same model with two-way fixed effects and time varying controls and plot effects in Figure6. We obtain a larger point estimate of the effect of eviction on disaffiliation for these voters, about 6 points (top panel). The middle panel shows that eviction leads to a significant decline, equal to about 7.5 points, in the probability that these voters support

Labour; though for both eﬀects we do not ﬁnd evidence of persistence.7

7Labour support is coded as 1 if respondents reply Yes to VOTE1 above and identify Labour as the party that they support.

15 15 10 5 0 −5 −10 Probability of Disaffiliation −15

−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

15 10 5 0 −5 −10

Probability of Supporting Labour −15

−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

15 10 5 0 −5 −10 −15 Pr. of Changing Local Authorities Pr.

−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

Figure 6: FE Estimates of Effects of Eviction on Labour Supporters. Eviction increases the probability of disaffiliation by about 6 points in the year of eviction. It decreases the probability of supporting Labour by roughly 8 points and increases the probability of displacement by a similar amount. The displaced do not return to the former local authority for at least five years.

16 Thus far, our analyses suggest that eviction represents a negative shock to political aﬃliation, and that this eﬀect is larger for Labour supporters than for evictees as a whole.

However, these eﬀects are also short-lived and volatile, and therefore may not register among councilors. A more enduring and noticeable way in which eviction reduces (local) support for Labour relates to the departure of voters: Eviction leads to a 7.6 point increase in the probability that a respondent changes local authorities entirely (bottom panel of Figure6).

This move is highly persistent: there is no evidence that evictees move back in the years following their eviction. This ﬁnding underscores that, from local politicians’ perspectives, eviction has the twin eﬀect of alienating supporters in the short-term and displacing them in the long run.

In sum, policies that exacerbate aﬀordable housing crises generate political costs stem- ming from negative media coverage, collective protests, and individual-level reactions. Why, then, have local Labour politicians enacted policies that anger, harm and even displace their voters? We next consider several potential explanations and then propose our coalitional rebalancing argument.

Existing Explanations A commonly-cited reason for local governments’ privileging the housing interests of richer voters are ﬁscal pressures. Local politicians, irrespective of their ideological leanings and partisanship, need to raise revenues to make their cities run and prosper. To do so, they have to prioritize growth-oriented policies that bring in business and high-income taxpayers.

An overemphasis on social welfare policies and low-income housing risks driving away these groups. These arguments are particularly relevant in the US, where ﬁscal centralization and

17 federal aid to municipalities are low (Ferreira and Gyourko, 2009; Peterson, 1981; but see

Connolly and Mason, 2016 and Kirkland, Forthcoming). But they apply much less in the

UK, where, due to extensive fiscal centralization and a national grant equalization system, municipalities have not relied much on local taxes.8 Instead, UK local authorities have had “virtually no positive fiscal incentives to permit new development. . . [for development generates] significant infrastructure-related costs and strain to local public services, but

[municipalities] reap few beneﬁts in the form of local tax revenue” (Hilber and Sch¨oni, 2016,

294).9 Likewise, these costs can temper councilors’ desire to promote economic growth via attracting new residents and corporations. Though some cash-strapped councils may be tempted to sell off public land, including council estates, to replenish their coffers, the replacement of council housing with more densely populated private flats raises demand for council-funded services and infrastructure and therefore does not tend to provide the desired revenue boost.10

Another explanation foregrounds demand: Similar to trends in other OECD countries, 8In 2010, central government grants constituted 71 percent of total local revenue in the UK compared to 26 percent in the US. The same year, local tax revenue represented 6 percent of all government tax revenue in the UK and 24 percent in the US (Wolman, 2014). 9Note, however, that the Conservative government recently enacted laws allowing authorities to retain more of their tax revenues, which may change theses calculations. 10Resistance to large-scale development (and hence politician reticence) in part stems from

worries about strains on public services; see Bowie(2010, 208) on insuﬃcient infrastructure

monitoring related to residential development in London and O’Grady(2020) on local

opposition to home-building.

18 there is now a broad consensus about the need to increase urban housing supply. This consensus is enshrined in the London Plan, which stipulates housing construction targets.

Local authorities are legally obliged to align their development plans with the London Plan, although they have considerable freedom to choose how they will deliver housing within its broad parameters (Bowie, 2010).

We certainly do not deny the significance of demand to housing policy. But demand alone is insufficient to explain why local governments single out council housing, rather than facilitate greater development in other parts of the borough. The demolition of council housing and its replacement with more densely structured private dwellings is just one avenue by which boroughs can increase supply. Yet London councils have been extraordinarily reticent to approve major residential development on private land (Hilber and Schöni, 2016).

The extreme inelasticity of London’s housing supply indicates that development is subject to the same political and regulatory pressures that constrain construction in cities around the world (Glaeser, Gyourko and Saks, 2005). Even if the reduction of council housing were solely driven by market forces, this would not explain why council housing tenants are more exposed to these forces compared to other London citizens.

A third potential explanation emphasizes pragmatism. In the context of a broad-based consensus about the need for additional housing, politicians have argued that council housing presents signiﬁcant ineﬃciencies: Too few residents are housed in increasingly deteri- orating conditions. Continued maintenance is too costly, especially in an age of austerity and government cutbacks. Conservatives had long held this view, but by the 1990s even

Labour pushed for the quasi-privatization of many public services, including housing. Ac- cording to Tony Blair, New Labour’s support for the systematic transfer of council housing

19 to private, not-for-proﬁt housing associations was an example of the party’s shift towards a pragmatic, non-ideological approach to governance. Commenting on a large-scale housing transfer in Manchester, Blair noted that the switch to private ownership was about “putting

New Labour values into action. . . [and burying] for good the old ideological split between public and private sector. . . what matters is what works” (cited in Ginsburg, 2005, 8).

By this account, often put forth by local politicians, the imperative to deliver quality aﬀordable housing in the most eﬃcient manner possible drives regeneration (e.g., Kober,

2018). From a pragmatic perspective, regeneration is motivated by the desire to improve

(rather than eliminate) the affordable housing supply, for example by upgrading council homes and redesigning inefficient layouts. However, the fact that regeneration often leads to drastic reductions in affordable housing and to mass displacement undermines this interpre- tation.11 Further, as an implication of this view, we should observe a correlation between the reduction of council housing and the characteristics of the initial stock, for example the quality of amenities and the degree of overcrowding. To preview our results, we do not.

Public-private pragmatism cannot account for the patterns we observe, but we do not doubt that trends towards market-driven solutions that have unfolded since the 1980s in many OECD countries have also left their imprint on housing regimes. These ideological shifts, mostly initiated by center-right national governments, surely matter in reducing overall resistance to privatization, including of housing (Bohle and Seabrooke, 2020), and as such are an important background condition that our study holds constant.

In a similar vein, the central government’s limited support clearly makes it diﬃcult to 11Given this inconsistency, it is also possible that councilors pursuing regeneration seek to

please senior party leaders who are less attuned to these local challenges.

20 build new council homes, while austerity measures have increased pressure on municipalities to raise funds. But as we detail below, on their own these background conditions cannot explain why local Labour politicians have enacted policies that intentionally facilitate gen- triﬁcation, especially since these policies frequently predate the onset of the Great Recession and subsequent government cutbacks. They also cannot predict why Labour targets certain wards with redevelopment and holds back in others. To make sense of these choices, we need to complement ideological and economic trends with electoral rationales.

Housing Policy and Coalitional Rebalancing We argue that to understand the housing policies of today’s Left, a key factor is the attenuation of class voting in the broader electoral context that encompasses contemporary social democratic parties, particularly in urban metropolises. The middle class – and, in cities, even the upper class – have become pillars of the center-left’s electoral coalition. Social democratic parties, including Labour, have played an active role in fashioning this realignment by adopting policies that appeal to middle class voters: a greater emphasis on social investment policies, reduced attention to cross-class redistribution, and support for free markets and open borders, coupled with progressive stances on cultural issues such as immigration and

LGBTQ rights (Beramendi et al., 2015; Boix, 2019; Gingrich and H¨ausermann, 2015; Oesch and Rennwald, 2018; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020). Concomitantly, through their rhetoric and policies, social democratic parties have distanced themselves from low-income voters. New

Labour in particular embraced policies and recruited politicians that moved the party closer to the economic center (Gingrich, 2017; Horne, 2020; O’Grady, 2019), and in rhetoric also disassociated itself from the most deprived members of the working class. The party’s 1997

21 manifesto explicitly called for a “stop [to] the growth of the ‘underclass’ ” (cited in Evans and Tilley, 2017, 122). More ideological construct than precisely deﬁned category, members of New Labour’s “underclass” often inhabit council estates. The party singled out estates as sites of dysfunction and decay and enacted policies, such as the 2003 Anti-Social Behavior

Act, that sought to control the behavior of estate residents. As summarized by Watt(2008,

347): “Council tenants occupy the defective ‘other’ category in New Labour‘s Third Way urban/housing policy, a category against which ‘normal’ British citizens are counterposed in relation to employment, anti-social behaviour, active citizenship, etc.”

These shifts in policy and rhetoric, while national in character, have important local implications: Labour’s rebalanced coalition and the associated weakening of class voting mean that local Labour parties have much less to fear from the gentriﬁcation of their districts.

Policies that used to be be electorally costly for Labour present far fewer tradeoﬀs today.

We propose that the attenuation of class voting has signiﬁcant consequences for housing.

Local politicians often have discretion over housing policy. Politician preferences can therefore influence the class composition of their districts. Whereas leftist politicians were wary of gentrification in the past, today the coalitional rebalancing of their parties implies that the in-migration of richer voters does not necessarily generate electoral costs. Though sections of today’s Labour Party are critical of the market-based shifts that occurred under Blair, the weakened relationship between class and partisanship in today’s inner-city districts means that ideological qualms about privatization – if they exist at all – aren’t reinforced by electoral concerns. In short, electoral incentives often no longer put the brakes on gentrification among the Left.

This new urban calculus has several consequences. First, it means that local politicians

22 can weigh the electoral penalties associated with privatization and housing affordability crises against the vote gains arising from newly settled richer voters. These richer voters experience far less housing stress. They are thus less likely to punish Labour for exacerbating the affordability crisis and are instead drawn to the party for its stance on other economic and cultural issues. Second, policy areas that used to confront the Left with difficult choices no longer present vexing dilemmas. Specifically, across partisan lines local politicians share the desire to build safe and prosperous communities. While well-intentioned, the resulting regeneration plans often go hand-in-hand with displacement, leading to outcries that Labour is engaged in “social cleansing.” Electoral incentives are meant to check such growth, but the decline in class voting loosens these checks.

If, as we argue, coalitional rebalancing has been a key driver of Labour’s approach to council housing, we should observe that electoral incentives align with the party’s regeneration choices. First, we hypothesize that Labour councils are more likely to reduce council housing in areas with greater demand from middle-income voters, reflecting the rising significance of this group in their electoral coalition. Second, we hypothesize that politicians will be more motivated to get rid of council housing where it is stigmatized as a source of crime and disorder. Importantly, this stigmatization focuses more on the externalities of poor council housing conditions – chiefly crime and the threat of riots – for non-council housing residents, rather than internal problems that council tenants have to deal with, such as overcrowding and poor housing conditions. In other words, the elimination of council housing in crime-prone neighborhoods is not primarily meant to serve low-income residents who are exposed to such crime, but is instead supposed to make these areas more livable and attractive for the middle class.

23 Finally, given that demolition results in displacement and backlash we posit that Labour councils are most likely to reduce council housing in strong Labour wards, where they can afford to lose “excess” votes and withstand controversies about “social cleansing.” Though local Labour parties do not expect gentrification to cost them votes in the medium term, electoral safety allows them to easily weather the transition phase between demolition and the construction of pricier private dwellings. We consequently expect that Labour politicians will be more responsive to rising middle incomes and crime rates where they are most electorally secure and can afford to lose votes in the near term.

A point of clarification before we proceed: Since local councils are in charge of approving council housing demolitions and developers’ planning applications, we focus on the calculus of local politicians. Yet from the perspective of the national Labour Party spreading low-income voters more evenly across the electoral map could be beneficial, even if such displacement implies short-term costs for individual politicians. The generalizability of our argument thus partly depends on whether local politicians can directly influence housing.

While, in comparative perspective, UK local authorities control a large housing stock, policies such as zoning or rent controls are widespread (see Appendix F) and can also signiﬁcantly shape electorates (cf., Trounstine, 2020). We return to questions of generalizability in the

Conclusion.

Evidence In this section, we substantiate our argument with two types of evidence. First, drawing on interviews and secondary sources, we show that Labour politicians welcome housing policies that aim to engineer a better “social mix” in deprived and crime-ridden neighbor-

24 hoods, even at the cost of displacing low-income residents. We contextualize this finding against the backdrop of Labour’s gradual disassociation from the marginalized “underclass,” its turn towards the middle class, and the accompanying attenuation of class voting. We find that awareness of this attenuation is prevalent among our interviewees, who, we show, consequently do not perceive gentrification as posing long-run electoral tradeoffs, particularly when it occurs in safe Labour seats.

Second, we examine how these qualitative assessments bear out quantitatively. Whereas indicators of pragmatic privatization do not systematically correlate with council housing decline in Greater London, we show that higher middle incomes – a marker of housing demand among the middle class – and crime levels are strong predictors of council housing losses. Further, these relationships intensify in electorally safe Labour wards, underscoring the electoral foundations of state-led gentriﬁcation.

Blunted Electoral Tradeoﬀs

Above we showed that the loss of aﬀordable housing poses electoral and political risks to Labour. Here, we demonstrate that, despite such risks, it remains compatible with local

Labour parties’ electoral incentives due to coalitional rebalancing. The shifting connections between class and party support underpinning these ﬁndings are shown in Figure7, which draws on responses to the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) to plot Labour support by respondent class from 1983 to 2018. Class groups are based on the Socio-Economic Group

(SEG) classiﬁcation, which groups together people with jobs of similar social and economic status.12 While professional groups have increased their support for Labour, the opposite is 12In Appendix C , we show that SEG classiﬁcation correlates strongly with income.

25 true for the working class (see also Evans and Tilley(2017) and Gingrich(2017)).

I. Professional, employer, manager II. Intermediate non−manual III. Junior non−manual

60 60 60

40 40 40

20 20 20

0 0 0

1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

IV. Skilled manual V. Semi−skilled VI. Unskilled manual

60 60 60

Percent Supporting Labour Percent 40 40 40

20 20 20

0 0 0

1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

Year

Figure 7: Support for the Labour Party over Time, by Socioeconomic Group (1983-2018). BSAS, authors’ calculations, weighted data. Note: “Semi-skilled” includes manual and per- sonal service workers.

These changes in support are accompanied by dramatic socio-demographic shifts. As

Table2 shows, over the decades the upper and middle classes have grown considerably.

As in other global cities (Florida, 2016), this growth is especially pronounced in London.

Combining these electoral and demographic trends, Figure8 depicts that the two highest- earning classes now constitute over 50% of Labour’s coalition in London, while the two lowest- earning classes only make up 20% – remarkable shifts when compared to earlier years.13

That voters of higher means constitute a sizable part of Labour’s London coalition means that many Labour voters do not feel squeezed by housing costs, even as they agree that the 13See Appendix C for a regression estimating the eﬀect of class on Labour support over time.

26 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s London 20 25 22 22 I. Professional, employer, manager Outside London 16 21 18 20 London 14 17 28 30 II. Intermediate non-manual Outside London 13 13 22 25 London 24 22 19 16 III. Junior non-manual Outside London 21 21 17 15 London 19 17 14 14 IV. Skilled manual Outside London 20 18 17 18 London 17 14 14 16 V. Semi-skilled Outside London 20 18 17 18 London 5 4 3 2 VI. Unskilled manual Outside London 6 7 5 4

Table 2: Class Composition in London and Outside London over Time (1983-2018, %). BSAS, authors’ calculations, weighted data. housing crisis is real – over two thirds think that local house prices are too high – and that government needs to ﬁnd solutions to it (the preferences in this paragraph are based on the

BSAS and other polling data; see Appendix A). For example, 41%/37% of all/high-income

Londoners think that social housing is the dwelling type most needed in their local area.

Additional private rentals are universally considered the least popular option. Likewise, increased funding for social housing is generally seen among one of the more useful policies to address affordability, while making it easier for developers to build homes is considered among the least useful. However, these shared preferences may not translate into a shared political response, as richer voters do not feel the pinch: High-income Londoners are half as likely to find it difficult to pay their rent or mortgage compared to low-income Londoners.

Richer votes are also far more likely to be homeowners, who stand to gain from rising prices. Moreover, reﬂecting the increased stigmatization of “problem estates” inhabited by the “underclass,” there are signs of ambivalence: When asked about social housing’s main disadvantage, by far the most commonly-cited concern, especially among richer voters, was

27 htiflec oa osn oiy(e pedxEfrdetails). for E – Appendix planning-related (see political, policy economic, housing – local influence factors that of range a interviews). about across asked consolidated were themes Interviewees similar once recruitment hous- stopped as (we well activists as ing processes, planning with familiar with individuals interviews politicians, phone former and and in-person current 17 conducted ap- we politicians’ gentrification, and local housing shape to that proach motivations and perceptions the investigate To decisions? weighted calculations, behavior.” authors’ “anti-social BSAS, Source: groups. (1983-2018). middle-income belong- Group and individuals of Socioeconomic high data. consists By to increasingly Time coalition to London over ing Labour’s London that in shows figure Coalition This Labour’s 8: Figure

n foritriw’poiettee a h ue lcoa oto displacement. of cost electoral muted the was themes prominent interviews’ our of One policy housing politicians’ aﬀect preferences accompanying and shifts electoral these Do Percent of Labour Supporters 20 30 10 0 1980s 1990s 2000s 28 2010s VI. Unskilled V. Semi−skilled IV. Skilled III. Junior II. Intermediate I. Professional When commenting on the voting behavior of middle-class residents moving into gentrifying neighborhoods, there was consensus that these residents posed no electoral threat to Labour.

As one Lambeth Labour councilor remarked:

Yes, they’d be Conservative anywhere else, but Labour in London. They read

Guardian, Independent, vote Labour, many work in the public sector, doctors,

teachers, civil servants. They vote based on values. . . They are certainly not

voting Conservative.14

A Conservative MP with experience in planning and London local government detailed the electoral implications in Southwark (South London), where the highly controversial demolition of the Heygate estate made way for thousands of high-end private ﬂats ﬁnanced by

Australian developers:

Look at places like Southwark [. . . ] The motivation of these pragmatists in

pushing through these projects: they think it’s good for the community, it’s good

for safety, it’s good for the environment – in the sense of reducing crime, etc. –

and it’s not bad for the councilors politically. They want their areas to be mixed

in terms of class [. . . ] They’re not going to pay an electoral price in displacing

some voters, these are safe seats [. . . ] and it’s happening in places where they

don’t think they’ll pay an electoral price for losing some lower-income voters

[. . . ]. Many of these new middle class people moving in will also vote Labour, so

I don’t think they face that much of a trade-oﬀ electorally.15 14Interviewed on April 5, 2018. 15Interviewed on March 28, 2018.

29 A Haringey Labour councilor further highlighted how coalitional considerations shaped

the planned demolition of a large council housing estate in his borough:

They [Labour councilors promoting demolition] call themselves pragmatic. I

don’t think they are. They forgot what the Labour Party is supposed to be

about. It’s supposed to be a party for the workers, for the least privileged. They

just wanted to help the developers, and they wanted to help the middle class [. . . ]

They wanted to “clean up” the area, but it wasn’t helping ordinary workers. And

they wanted the votes of the richer folks. They forgot about ordinary people.16

This critique notwithstanding, when asked whether the controversial demolition plans would hurt the local Labour Party, he concluded:

No, I don’t think so. I think most of the new residents, to be honest, are Labour

themselves. I don’t think the party has lost votes in that sense, in the sense

of Labour voters moving away from the area, because the people moving in are

quite Labour too. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.17

A Liberal Democratic councilor serving in the same local authority concurred:

“I’m sure they [the incoming residents] will mostly vote Labour. Of course, I want

them to vote Lib Dem, we should get some. But yes, a lot will vote Labour. So,

yes, the Labour councilors don’t pay any price for pushing through demolitions,

at least in short-term voters.”18 16Interviewed on June 22, 2018. 17Ibid. 18Interviewed on March 20, 2018.

30 Our interviews demonstrate that local politicians do not perceive the elimination of council housing as politically costly, given the lack of partisan diﬀerentiation between displaced and gentrifying residents. Furthermore, the marginalization of low-income voters is neither accidental nor unforeseen. The Haringey regeneration scheme bluntly acknowledged that most displaced tenants will only be able to aﬀord the new homes if they are successful in

“accessing jobs and also increasing their incomes” (Garner, 2015). In Newham, Labour mayor Robin Wales allegedly told housing activists, “If you can’t aﬀord to live in Newham, you can’t aﬀord to live in Newham” (Stone, 2014).

As the previous quotes suggest, this cavalier attitude towards the loss of low-income voters is especially pronounced when council housing is stigmatized as a source of crime and disorder that can be “cleaned up” by social mixing. Some interviewees genuinely believed that social mixing would benefit the local community, for example, by raising wages and the quality of schooling. Others were more cynical. A former Haringey housing officer traced the planned council housing sell-off to the perceived lawlessness and dysfunction of local residents:

After the riots in 2011, [then London Mayor] Johnson wanted to come in and

take Haringey out of the control of the democratically-elected council and give it

to a quango. To avoid this, there was a deal between Johnson and Kober [then

Labour leader of the council]. In return for keeping control of the council, social

cleansing would take place, they would move the people out who were causing

the problem.19 19Interviewed on April 3, 2018.

31 The view of displacement as social cleansing was echoed by an activist trying to stop the sell-oﬀ in Haringey:

Labour councilors [. . . ] wanted to create a “stronger Haringey” and change the

kind of people who live in the borough. It’s like social cleansing [. . . ] Also it

followed the Haringey riots. The Labour councilors wanted to regenerate Tot-

tenham, they saw it as too down at heel, there were too many poor people [. . . ]

They looked at other boroughs, they saw regeneration going on, they went to

these big exhibitions with the big developers in Olympia and France, and they

thought they wanted to do this too.20

This line of critique, common among left-wing activists and commentators, underplays that many councilors and planners do believe that greater social mixing will ultimately improve the lives of low-income residents. It also neglects the fact that regenerations generally increase the housing supply, even if the resulting stock is ultimately too expensive for prior tenants.21 Nonetheless, the experience in Haringey mirrors developments elsewhere. Coun- cil tenants facing displacement feel that politicians’ stigmatization makes them especially vulnerable. A coordinator of a London-wide network of organizations that seek to balance community needs against those of private developers analyzed the motivation of politicians as follows:

Why, given all their public landholding [. . . ] why is it [council housing] seen as

an easier target? Or more convenient, or more desirable to actually go most of 20Interviewed on March 15, 2018. 21Interview with a London housing policy expert, April 4, 2018.

32 all for the disposal of public land where there’s a council estate? [Because of]

stigmatization, we don’t really want council tenants any longer [. . . ] want to be

a diﬀerent kind of local authority.22

These local developments and impressions occur against the backdrop of national party repositioning. Associating council housing with crime and social decline was central to New

Labour’s approach to urban policymaking. Blair made his inaugural speech as prime minister at the notorious South London Aylesbury estates, warning “There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the postwar planners is derelict concrete” (Beckett, 2016). Though Blair prefaced his speech by referencing the government’s responsibility towards the poor, the regeneration policies that followed often did not benefit this group. Indeed, even the head of Aylesbury’s regeneration department reportedly noted, too much social housing generated “the wrong sorts of residents” (Beckett, 2016). To critics, Labour’s regeneration agenda – then and now – thus also underscores the party’s class contempt towards the poor. Selling off state-owned housing would eliminate the cultures that sustain dysfunction and decay in developments that Labour had branded “sink” or “dump” estates and make these neighborhoods livable for upwardly mobile gentrifiers targeted by party leaders (Hasting, 2004; Johnston and Mooney,

2007).23

Labour’s desire to rebalance its coalition in these ways has had clear implications for housing, as the subsequent weakening of class voting greatly reduces the electoral costs of such stigmatization and ultimate displacement. Our interviewees mentioned these blunted 22Interviewed on April 6, 2018. 23Parallel phenomena are observed in Australia (Arthurson, 2004) and the US (Goetz, 2011).

33 tradeoﬀs. Nonetheless, the previously noted backlash against state-led gentriﬁcation and the

individual-level eﬀects of eviction also indicate that Labour could pay electoral costs in the

short-term.

For instance, in a 2016 by-election in Gipsy Hill (Lambeth), a Green Party candidate who

made opposition to demolition a centerpiece of his campaign came within 36 votes of beating

the Labour candidate. A housing policy expert familiar with Lambeth politics told us that

it was the part of the ward that was threatened by demolition that swung overwhelmingly to

the Green Party.24 Two years later, when all three seats in the Labour-led ward were up for

election, and with demolition still on the agenda, the same candidate managed to capture

the seat. When we interviewed the Labour candidate who had lost, he acknowledged the

increasing role of housing in electoral politics: “It’s indisputable that housing has become

a touchstone, and we’re seeing more activism from diﬀerent housing groups. It’s clearly

impacting elections.”25 Though events in Gipsy Hill are exceptional, they illustrate that regeneration can incur electoral penalties for Labour. At the same time, Labour’s overall dominance – the party won 57 out of 63 seats – provided the party with suﬃcient leeway to absorb these losses, suggesting that electoral safety could be an important factor in Labour’s approach to housing, as was also indicated in our interviews.

To summarize, even though the elimination of council housing is unpopular among many

Labour supporters, our interviews document a widely-shared perception that Labour’s dom- inant electoral position allows the party to promote demolition and regeneration, especially when council estates are stigmatized as sites of crime and disorder and when displaced ten- 24Interviewed on April 4, 2018. 25Interviewed on July 27, 2018.

34 ants are replaced with richer voters who also align with Labour.

Quantitative Analysis of Council Housing Reductions To examine the broader implications of our qualitative ﬁndings, we conduct a quantitative

analysis of council housing reductions in London’s 624 wards. Our outcome variable, council

housing concentration, is deﬁned as the percentage of households in each ward that rent their dwellings from local authorities in the 2001 and 2011 Censuses (see Appendix G for variable deﬁnitions and sources).26 Using OLS with standard errors clustered by borough, we model the 2011 council housing concentration controlling for the 2001 council housing concentration. Our models draw the following comparison: Given two wards with the same initial council housing concentration in 2001, what are the predictors of more or less council housing concentration in 2011?

Following our qualitative evidence, our main explanatory variables are crime and median income, as well as their interaction with local Labour strength. We consider these interactions given the short-term electoral costs of displacement we documented earlier. While our interviews suggest that these costs are eventually compensated by the inﬂux of middle- income voters, this replacement is not instantaneous and should therefore be less attractive to politicians in weaker seats. We measure Labour strength by the number of seats won by the party in 2006, the midpoint of our observation window.27 This variable ranges from 0 to 26We use this measure because there is no direct measure of ward-level council housing stocks.

While it does not allow us to separate council housing reductions from Right-to-Buy (RTB),

we proxy for RTB using the change in homeownership from 2001 to 2011. Our results are

robust to including this proxy. 27Results are substantively identical if we use the average number of seats won in 2002 and

35 3; nearly all wards have three seats. To avoid reverse causality concerns, all other variables are measured in 2001.

In our theoretical framework, higher median incomes correspond to stronger demand for housing from middle-income voters, whose support Labour wishes to secure. Because income may correlate with general housing demand, we include additional measures of demand: the number of households renting privately, count of home sales, median home price, population density and overall number of households, and degree of overcrowding in the private rental market. Our results for income hold whether or not we include these controls.

To evaluate the pragmatic privatization hypothesis, we include measures of the quality of council homes: the proportion of council homes without central heat and with individual showers. If, as is sometimes claimed by politicians, regeneration is meant to improve council housing, we expect to ﬁnd that lower housing quality predicts council housing reductions.

To test whether regeneration is motivated by overcrowding and inefficient use of space, we also include the proportion of council homes constructed as flats (versus individual homes) and the proportion that is formally defined as overcrowded by a ratio of tenants to rooms.

Lastly, we include demographic information on wards: the unemployment rate, percent of households receiving income support, and ethnic distribution inside and outside of council homes (note that, compared to the US, public housing is less racialized in the UK and Europe

(cf., Watt and Minton, 2016)). To capture local ﬁscal incentives for development, we include the percent of homes in the lowest local tax bracket.

The results for our complete sample of 624 wards are shown in Table3. In Column

1, we show that, conditional on council housing concentration in 2001 and borough ﬁxed 2006, the two elections spanning our observation window.

36 effects, higher levels of crime and median income in 2001 correspond to lower council housing concentration in 2011. We standardize the crime and median income variables, so that their coefficients describe the marginal change in council housing concentration associated with one-standard deviation increases in these variables. In Column 2, we interact these variables with the number of seats held by Labour at the ward-level. Again, crime and income are standardized, so that the main effect of Labour seats corresponds to its effect at the means of these variables. The coefficients on the interaction terms indicate more strongly negative relationships in strong Labour wards, although not significantly so in this model. In Column

3, we reﬁt the model with additional measures of housing demand and ward demographics.

Introducing these covariates leads the main eﬀects of crime and income to lose statistical signiﬁcance, but increases the magnitude and precision of their interactions with Labour strength.

In sum, reductions in council housing in response to crime and gentriﬁcation are conditional on Labour strength. This could be for two reasons. First, as we hypothesize, it could be that Labour boroughs anticipate the risk of displacing council tenants and reduce the council housing stock only in politically-secure wards. Second, it could be that non-Labour boroughs seek to undermine Labour by getting rid of council housing in wards where Labour is strong (the governing local authority party decides demolitions and regeneration schemes, not individual ward councilors).

To rule out the second possibility, in Table4, we limit our analysis to Labour-controlled boroughs, or boroughs won by Labour in 2002 and 2006, the local elections spanning our observation window.28 We subdivide wards within these boroughs based on whether Labour 28In Appendix Table D.1, we show that our results are similar, if attenuated for income,

37 DV: Council Housing Concentration in 2011 (1) (2) (3) Gentrification and Residualization Covariates measured in 2001 unless otherwise noted Council Housing Concentration 0.76∗∗∗ 0.76∗∗∗ 0.65∗∗∗ (0.03) (0.03) (0.07) Labour Strength (2006) 0.08 0.02 0.06 (0.16) (0.16) (0.18) Log Crime Rate (std.) −0.49∗∗∗ −0.35∗∗ −0.08 (0.14) (0.14) (0.12) Log Median Income (std.) −0.76∗∗ −0.56∗ 0.96 (0.33) (0.31) (0.77) Labour Strength × Log Crime Rate (std.) −0.17 −0.29∗∗∗ (0.11) (0.09) Labour Strength × Log Median Income (std.) −0.23 −0.49∗∗∗ (0.17) (0.17) Pragmatic Privatization % Council Homes without Heat −0.03 (0.02) % Council Homes with Own Shower 0.04∗ (0.03) % Council Homes in Flats −0.003 (0.01) % Council Homes Overcrowded 0.30 (0.20) Additional Covariates Borough Fixed Effects XXX Housing Demand Indicators X Demographic Indicators X Mean of DV 13.07 13.07 13.07 N 624 624 624 R2 0.89 0.89 0.90 Adjusted R2 0.88 0.88 0.89 ∗p < .1; ∗∗p < .05; ∗∗∗p < .01 Table 3: Correlates of Council Housing Reduction in Wards. This table shows the results of OLS models that predict council housing concentration (the proportion of residents in a ward who live in council homes) in 2011, controlling for the concentration in 2001. Negative (positive) coefficients correspond to a decrease (increase) in council housing concentration. Units of analysis are wards and standard errors are clustered by boroughs. controls all three seats (“strong Labour wards”) or not (“weak Labour wards”).

As Table4 shows, higher levels of crime and median income generally correlate with a decline in the council housing concentration in Labour-controlled boroughs. Yet, as shown when including boroughs that were only controlled by Labour in 2002.

38 in Columns 3 and 6, these relationships are strongest in strong Labour wards in Labour- controlled boroughs. The coeﬃcients on crime and income are signiﬁcant, both statistically and substantively: in our full model (Column 6), a one-standard deviation increase in log crime (income) corresponds to a 1 (4.2) percentage point decrease in council housing concentration. Consistent with our argument that Labour politicians anticipate the electoral costs of council housing reductions, these relationships attenuate and even reverse sign in weak

Labour wards: In Columns 2 and 5, we ﬁnd that, in wards with fewer than three Labour councilors, median income is not signiﬁcantly related to council housing reduction, while in

Column 2 (though not Column 5) we find a positive and significant relationship between crime and council housing retention. In contrast, the pragmatic privatization variables are mostly insignificant, and their partial correlations with council housing concentration do not vary systematically across wards.

To illustrate these relationships, in Figure9 we plot the relationships between crime, median income, and ward-level council housing reductions in Labour-controlled boroughs, again separating weak and strong Labour wards. As the ﬁgure shows, in the former, crime and median income are weakly related to the 2011 council housing concentration (controlling for

2001 council housing concentration). Conversely, in strong Labour wards, these relationships are negative and statistically signiﬁcant.

Our quantitative ﬁndings illuminate the wider ramiﬁcations of our interview evidence.

We find that the decline of council housing in Labour boroughs has concentrated in areas with higher levels of crime and rising middle incomes, where we expect demand for state-led gentrification and “social cleansing” to be highest. We find that these trends have electoral dimensions, becoming more intense in areas where Labour is electorally secure. This is

39 DV: Council Housing Concentration in 2011 All Weak Strong All Weak Strong Wards Labour Labour Wards Labour Labour (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Gentrification and Residualization Covariates measured in 2001 unless otherwise noted Council Housing Concentration 0.68∗∗∗ 0.70∗∗∗ 0.68∗∗∗ 0.70∗∗∗ 0.76∗∗∗ 0.52∗∗∗ (0.03) (0.08) (0.04) (0.13) (0.19) (0.13) Log Crime Rate (Std.) −0.66 1.61∗∗∗ −1.67∗∗∗ −1.21∗∗ 0.39 −1.01∗∗ (0.66) (0.36) (0.42) (0.53) (1.64) (0.50) Log Median Income (Std.) −0.73 0.98 −2.87∗∗∗ 0.75 3.60 −4.20∗∗ (0.63) (1.13) (0.50) (1.52) (2.26) (1.72) Pragmatic Privatization % Council Homes without Heat −0.06 −0.31 −0.02 (0.08) (0.21) (0.11) % Council Homes with Own Shower 0.24 1.44∗ −0.26 (0.49) (0.76) (0.28) % Council Homes in Flats 0.07∗∗∗ −0.03 0.06∗∗ (0.02) (0.06) (0.03) % Council Homes Overcrowded 0.12 −0.80 0.48 (0.38) (0.60) (0.43) Additional Covariates Borough Fixed Effects XXXXXX Housing Demand Indicators XXX Demographic Indicators XXX Mean of DV 20.23 17.57 22.14 20.23 17.57 22.14 N 127 53 74 127 53 74 Adjusted R2 0.83 0.70 0.90 0.84 0.78 0.91 ∗p < .1; ∗∗p < .05; ∗∗∗p < .01 Table 4: Interactions with Labour Strength Within Labour Boroughs. Using OLS models with standard errors clustered by borough, this table shows the conditional relationships between crime and median incomes, on the one hand, and local Labour strength, on the other, in Labour-controlled boroughs. These relationships are mostly negative and significant in strong Labour wards.

40 consistent with our qualitative ﬁnding that local politicians undertake regeneration projects where they perceive little electoral risk.

Weak Labour Wards Strong Labour Wards All Wards in Labour Boroughs in Labour Boroughs in Labour Boroughs 40% 40% 40%

30% 30% 30%

20% 20% 20%

10% 10% 10%

0% 0% 0%

Council Housing Concentration in 2011 Council Housing Concentration 50 100 200 400 50 100 200 400 50 100 200 400 Crimes per 1,000 Residents

Weak Labour Wards Strong Labour Wards All Wards in Labour Boroughs in Labour Boroughs in Labour Boroughs 40% 40% 40%

30% 30% 30%

20% 20% 20%

10% 10% 10%

0% 0% 0%

Council Housing Concentration in 2011 Council Housing Concentration 18k 24k 30k 36k 18k 24k 30k 36k 18k 24k 30k 36k Median Annual Household Income (GBP)

Figure 9: Interactions between Labour Strength, Crime, and Median Income in Labour Bor- oughs. This ﬁgure plots the predicted ward-level council housing concentration in 2011, controlling for the concentration in 2001, against crime and median income in Labour-controlled boroughs. The relationships between these variables and council housing are most negative in strong Labour wards.

Conclusion Cities across advanced economies face acute shortages of aﬀordable housing. These crises result in part from political decisions that constrain the supply of inexpensive housing. A notable feature of today’s urban housing crises is that left-led local governments have often

41 contributed to their making, exposing many of their voters to significant hardship. We have argued that the urban Left’s approach to housing must be understood in light of its reconfigured electoral coalition. The attenuation of class voting – which national party elites helped engineer – facilitates state-led gentrification locally.

How generalizable are these arguments? In Box1, we present several factors that raise the odds that center-left politicians will pursue state-led gentriﬁcation, allowing us to place the

UK case in context and identify sources of change. Whereas many of the demographic, political and housing regime trends that have characterized the UK are evident in other OECD countries, electoral institutions likely intensify the electoral foundations of local housing strategies in Greater London.

On the political side, we highlighted that the center-left’s turn towards policies appealing to middle and upper-income voters represents a broader cross-national trend. Yet as even middle-income voters begin to suﬀer from excessive housing costs, it will be increasingly important for left parties that pursue state-led gentriﬁcation to engage these voters on the basis of social issue preferences. Similarly, ethnic minority voters, who are disproportionately exposed to housing stress (see Appendix Table A.7), have been an important part of the center-left’s urban coalition. But as the Left’s hold on this group is loosening (cf. Dancygier,

2017), defending gentrification may become more costly. In short, once housing costs begin to overwhelm other salient issues at the ballot box, center-left parties may retreat from promoting state-led gentrification. Complementing our work on politician strategies, future research should thus examine the trade-offs that cross-pressured voters are willing to make as housing crises confront them with competing interests.

Additional work can also study the eﬀects of electoral institutions. The UK’s local elec-

42 toral system – plurality electoral rules in wards with small electorates – makes it particularly likely that center-left politicians do not face credible challengers to their left and that housing policies can reshape the electorate in signiﬁcant ways. Greater London may thus be a

“most likely” case for our argument, along with cities that also have district-based plurality elections. While the inﬂux of richer voters, the decline of the native working class and the rise of (cross-pressured) ethnic minority voters characterizes many global cities, the extent of state-led gentriﬁcation will partly depend on the coalition patterns these groups produce. In

Berlin, for instance, where parties operate in an at-large PR system, a Social Democrat-Left-

Green coalition introduced rent controls in 2020, with the explicit aim to stop displacement.

In other PR-based cities, however, similar demographic makeups may lead to alliances between social democrats and more centrist forces, paving the way for state-led gentriﬁcation

(see Van Gent and Boterman(2019) on the case of Amsterdam).

One question that merits further exploration is whether in plurality settings fights over gentrification develop within parties whereas in PR systems they occur across parties com- prising the Left. In Greater London, anti-regeneration protests used to be organized by leftist opposition groups, but as the housing crisis has deepened they have been supported by local Labour members. Comprised of the party’s left flank, these members’ primary strategy is deselection – working to keep Labour politicians viewed as complicit in regeneration off the ballot. Deselection campaigns have compelled dozens of Labour politicians to stand down, prompting accusations of a “purge” by “Corbynistas” (Crerar, 2017), but also the cancellation of controversial demolition plans, including in Haringey.

These tensions may portend a paradigm shift in housing. Beginning in the 1980s, housing regimes in the UK and other countries began to conceptualize housing less as a social right

43 Party Positioning & Voter Preferences • Platforms: National center-left party platform appeals to richer voters • Class sizes: Richer voters are sufficiently sizable to form a critical voting bloc • Cross-pressures: A second dimension (e.g., cultural issues) binds voters who are harmed by rising housing costs to the center-left Electoral Institutions • Plurality electoral rules: Center-left politicians rarely face credible opposition from politicians appealing to economic leftists • Coalitions: Center-left politicians rarely need to enter coalitions with politicians appealing to economic leftists • Electorate Size: Size of districts is sufficiently small such that housing policies significantly influence the composition of the electorate Fiscal Institutions • Taxes on local residents finance district services/required spending Housing Regimes • Policies: Politicians have discretion over housing policies that impact their districts’ class composition (e.g., zoning, rent controls, public housing construction/demolition) • Paradigms: Housing is seen less as a social right, more as an asset

Box 1: Factors Conducive to Center-Left Politicians Pursuing State-Led Gentriﬁcation than as an asset (Bohle and Seabrooke, 2020). The consequences of this shift, including dramatic increases in evictions and homelessness, have begun to receive more widespread attention, becoming intertwined with concerns about rising economic inequality and the

COVID-19 pandemic. Interestingly, public housing traces its origins to 19th century middle- class fears about the airborne spread of disease caused by bad housing conditions (Boughton,

2018; Ravetz, 2003). Given the centrality of the middle class in urban politics today, research can investigate whether these and other sentiments may once again reorient housing regimes away from market-dominated solutions.

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51 Online Appendix

Why Parties Displace Their Voters: Gentriﬁcation, Coalitional Change and the Demise of Public Housing

American Political Science Review Winston Chou and Rafaela Dancygier Appendix

A Tenure Characteristics and Housing Preferences 2

B Eﬀects of Eviction: Additional Analyses 11

C Social Class: Correlation with Income and Labour Support 12

D Determinants of Council Housing Reductions 14

E Interview Sample 17

F Social Housing Stock and Rent Control Policies Across Countries 19

G Data Sources and Variable Deﬁnitions 21 A Tenure Characteristics and Housing Preferences

This section presents information on housing tenure and preferences in London. Tenure characteristics are derived from the census and from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS). Data on housing preferences are based on two sources, the BSAS and published polls conducted in London by several different survey firms. We present BSAS data (starting in 2010, when the BSAS included the first housing module) by income. Due to sample size constraints (we restrict our analyses to Londoners), we break this sample down into two income groups rather than provide a more disag- gregated income or class measure (we code those below median household income as “low-income” and those at or above the median income are considered “high-income”). Published London polls are from a variety of sources, see table captions.

Homeownership Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) 1980s 31.09 71.56 58.47 1990s 36.12 74.98 60.22 2000s 37.48 74.52 58.22 2010s 31.56 63.02 49.92

Table A.1: Homeownership in London by Income, 1980s-2010s. (N = 8,969; 1983–2018 British Social Attitudes Survey, London respondents, weighted data)

2 London North North York- East West East South South Wales East West shire Mid- Mid- East West and The lands lands Humber 1. Higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations 3 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2. Lower managerial, administrative and professional occupations 13 7 8 8 8 8 10 10 9 8 3. Intermediate occupations 12 8 8 8 7 8 9 9 8 7 4. Small employers and own account workers 8 4 6 6 6 6 9 9 8 6 5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations 8 9 8 9 10 9 10 10 10 9 6. Semi-routine occupations 19 24 23 24 23 25 24 24 25 24 7. Routine occupations 17 30 28 29 29 26 25 24 26 27 8. Never worked and long-term unemployed 17 15 16 14 13 16 10 10 11 15 Not classiﬁed 3 1 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1

Table A.2: Composition of Council Housing Tenants by National Statistics Socio-economic Classiﬁcation and Region in 2011 (%). Source: Census data available at https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/, Table DC4605EW, authors’ calculations. 3 Most Important Issues Facing London (%) Total Social Grade Tenure AB C1 C2 DE Own All Pri- Social Rent vate Rent Rent Housing 56 55 60 55 55 48 65 68 63 Immigration 38 32 34 51 45 41 36 33 39 Security/terrorism 26 29 23 24 28 29 23 24 21 Healthcare 23 23 26 22 21 26 21 17 25 Crime/policing 22 21 22 24 24 22 23 22 24 Homelessness 21 17 21 19 27 16 25 21 30 Roads/congestion 19 21 18 21 18 21 17 17 17 London’s economy 17 20 15 16 16 19 16 19 13 Public Transport 16 19 19 11 10 17 14 17 11 Air pollution 15 16 16 13 14 16 14 17 12 Education/Schools 14 18 14 13 11 16 13 15 11 Rubbish pickup 3 3 3 4 3 3 3 4 3 Culture & arts 1 1 1 3 * 1 1 2 1 Don’t know 2 2 2 1 3 2 3 2 3

Table A.3: Most Important Issues Facing Londoners Ahead of 2016 Mayoral Election. Answers to the question “What would you say are the two or three most important challenges facing London today?”. Social Grade is a classiﬁcation system based on occupation, with ABC1/C2DE referring to upper and middle/lower class occupations. (N = 2,062; BBC London Mayor Online Opinion Poll; London respondents, weighted data; * = insuﬃcient numbers. Available at https://tinyurl. com/y47jt8s9.)

Shortage of Aﬀordable Housing Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) Agree strongly 56.47 37.39 45.70 Agree 37.42 41.93 39.97 Neither agree nor disagree 3.56 9.46 6.89 Disagree 0.67 9.37 5.58 Disagree strongly 1.87 1.84 1.86

Table A.4: Affordable Housing Shortage in Local Area. Answers to the question: “Thinking about the affordability of homes for most people in your local area, to what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement? There is a shortage of homes that are affordable in my local area.” (N = 173; 2018 British Social Attitudes Survey, London respondents, weighted data)

4 House Price Levels Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) Much too high 42.08 37.96 39.53 Slightly too high 33.28 29.69 31.06 About right 23.96 29.96 27.67 Slightly too low 0.00 2.40 1.48 Much too low 0.68 0.00 0.26

Table A.5: House Price Levels in Local Area. Answers to the question: “Do you think house prices in your area are too high, too low or about right?” (N = 247; 2010 British Social Attitudes Survey, London respondents, weighted data)

Difficulty Paying Rent or Mortgage Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) Very easy 13.57 15.03 14.43 Fairly easy 40.72 63.55 54.22 Fairly Difficult 36.21 20.02 26.64 Very Difficult 9.49 1.40 4.71

Table A.6: Difficulty Paying Rent or Mortgage. Answers to the question: “Some people easily afford their rent/mortgage payments, others find it difficult to pay. How easy or difficult is it for your household to pay the rent/mortgage payments? Is it...?” (N = 182; 2010 British Social Attitudes Survey, London respondents, weighted data)

Housing Stress A great A fair Not very None at Don’t deal (%) amount (%) much (%) all (%) know (%) All 22 32 21 23 1 Tenure Owner Occupied 11 28 27 33 1 Social Rent 34 29 17 17 3 Private Rent 32 44 13 10 1 Any Rent 33 37 15 13 2 Location Inner London 26 33 19 21 1 Outer London 19 32 23 24 2 Ethnicity White 14 34 23 27 1 Black & Ethnic Minority 34 29 20 16 2

Table A.7: Degree of Stress due to Housing Cost. Answers to the question: “To what extent, if at all, do you personally feel that concerns about the cost of your housing cause you stress these days? Do they cause you...?” (N = 1,000; 2015 Ipsos Mori Poll, London respondents, weighted data. Available at https://tinyurl.com/y44b94y7.)

5 Strongly Tend to Neither agree Tend to Strongly Don’t agree agree nor disagree disagree agree know There is currently a housing crisis in London 68 21 4 3 3 2 Housing in London will become more aﬀordable over the next two years or so 4 5 5 18 64 5

I don’t believe I will ever be able to aﬀord to buy a home in London 53 19 6 12 8 2

I would consider leaving London if house prices and rents continue to rise 28 16 10 17 26 3

I am considering moving out of London and taking a job in a diﬀerent city region because the rent/mortgage costs in London are too high 20 13 10 19 33 5

Table A.8: Assessments and Consequence of Housing Costs (%). (N = 1,000, except for question about home buying which is not asked of owners where N = 334; 2015 Ipsos Mori Poll, London respondents, weighted data. Available at https://tinyurl.com/y44b94y7.)

Government Action to Make Homes More Affordable Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) Give some sort of financial assistance to first time buyers 33.55 28.90 30.66 Give more money to housing associations and local authorities to build affordable homes for those on low incomes 31.58 19.89 24.32 Get banks to increase access to mortgages 16.03 21.52 19.44 Give more money to shared ownership schemes 6.14 11.1 9.22 Make it easier for developers to get planning permission to build more homes 7.52 7.29 7.38 Make it more expensive to purchase second homes 4.37 7.65 6.41 Something else 0.35 2.46 1.66 Do nothing 0.47 1.18 0.91

Table A.9: Most useful government action to make homes more aﬀordable. Answers to the question: “If the government were going to do something to make homes more aﬀordable, what do you think the most useful action would be? Please choose one option from the card” (N = 472; 2010 & 2014 British Social Attitudes Survey, London respondents, weighted data).

6 Housing Type Most Needed Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) Rented from local authorities or housing associations 48.08 36.81 41.10 Rented from private landlords 13.73 9.58 11.16 Part-owned and part-rented 24.44 35.39 31.22 Homes to buy 27.75 39.48 35.02 No homes needed 9.33 15.61 13.22

Table A.10: Housing Type Most Needed. Answers to the question: “If new homes were to be built in your local area, which, if any, of these types of homes do you think are most needed? (Check all that apply)” (N = 427; 2010 & 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey, London respondents, weighted data)

Social Housing Main Disadvantage Income Low (%) High (%) Total (%) Anti-social behavior problems on estates 25.67 47.23 39.06 Little choice over location 16.11 10.18 12.43 Diﬃcult to move to other types of property when needs change 16.50 8.19 11.34 No disadvantage 10.95 6.11 7.95 Anti-social neighbors 5.00 5.58 5.36 Can’t invest in the housing market - lack of security for the future 1.24 7.51 5.13 Homes are kept in a poor state of repair 3.45 4.44 4.06 Poor repairs and maintenance service 4.58 3.23 3.74 Don’t like the types of properties 3.27 3.94 3.69 Little choice over the type of property tenants can live in 6.87 1.05 3.26 Little choice over what happens to the property 2.87 0.95 1.68 The location of their homes 0.91 1.58 1.33 Rents are too high 2.57 0.00 0.97

Table A.11: Main Disadvantage of Social Housing. Answers to the question: “And from what you know or have heard, if you had to choose just one of the things on this card, which one would you say is the main disadvantage of renting from a local authority or housing association as opposed to renting a home privately?” (N = 243; 2010 British Social Attitudes Survey)

7 Support for Diﬀerent Housing Policies (%) Total 2010 Vote Social Grade Con Lab LD ABC1 C2DE Encouraging London councils to build more social housing Support 66 57 78 78 67 65 Oppose 15 26 9 11 18 11 Don’t know 18 17 13 11 15 23 Adding new council tax bands for homes worth more than £1 million Support 65 61 71 77 67 61 Oppose 17 24 16 10 20 13 Don’t know 18 15 13 13 13 26 Making it more diﬃcult for foreign investors to buy London property Support 60 64 64 72 62 58 Oppose 20 19 18 17 21 18 Don’t know 20 17 18 11 16 24 Extra taxes on second homes Support 59 54 65 75 63 54 Oppose 25 33 24 15 26 24 Don’t Know 15 13 10 10 11 21 A new annual tax of 1% of the value of homes worth more than £2 million (so-called “mansion tax”) Support 58 45 67 77 59 57 Oppose 21 35 14 15 25 15 Don’t know 21 20 19 7 16 28

Table A.12: Support for Different Housing Policies in London. Respondents were presented with a range of housing policies in the context of a survey about housing costs in London. The above five policies received the most overall support. (N = 1,209; 2014 YouGov Poll, London respondents, weighted data. Available at https://tinyurl.com/yyhwnyo6. “2010 Vote” refers to respondents’ vote choice in the 2010 general election. Con, Lab, LD stands for Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats, respectively. Social Grade is a classification system based on occupation, with ABC1/C2DE referring to upper and middle/lower class occupations.)

8 Party Identification of Council Housing Tenants

1.0 Labour Conservative No Party 0.8

0.6

0.4 Proportion

0.2

0.0

1983 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2018

Year

Figure A.1: Party Identification of Council Housing Tenants. Using the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS), this figure plots the party identification of respondents who rent their accommodations from local authorities. For clarity, we only present the three most popular options: Labour, Conservative, and no PID. Proportions are weighted using the BSAS’s non-response weights.

9 Party Identification of Council Housing Tenants in London

1.0 Labour Conservative No Party 0.8

0.6

0.4 Proportion

0.2

0.0

1983 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2018

Year

Figure A.2: Party Identification of Council Housing Tenants in London. Using the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS), this figure plots the party identification of respondents in London who rent their accommodations from local authorities. For clarity, we only present the three most popular options: Labour, Conservative, and no PID. Proportions are weighted using the BSAS’s non-response weights.

10 B Eﬀects of Eviction: Additional Analyses

20 15 10 5 0 −5 −10 −15 Probability of Disaffiliation −20

−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

20 15 10 5 0 −5 −10 −15 −20 Probability of Supporting Conservative −5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

20 15 10 5 0 −5 −10 −15 −20 Pr. of Changing Local Authorities Pr.

−5 −4 −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3 4 5

Years Since Eviction

Figure B.1: Fixed Effect Estimates of Effects of Eviction on Conservative Supporters. This figure reproduces Figure 6 for panel survey respondents that voted for the Conservatives in 1983, the first general election covered in the panel. In contrast with Figure 6, we do not find a significant effect of eviction on any of the three DVs, at least in the year of eviction.

11 C Social Class: Correlation with Income and Labour Support

SES Group High Income Middle Income Low Income I. Professional, employer, manager 0.62 0.25 0.13 II. Intermediate non-manual 0.51 0.32 0.16 III. Junior non-manual 0.33 0.36 0.31 IV. Skilled manual 0.28 0.38 0.34 V. Semi-skilled 0.19 0.36 0.45 VI. Unskilled manual 0.09 0.31 0.60

Table C.1: Weighted proportion of individuals in high/middle/low income terciles by socioeconomic group (overall)

SES Group High Income Middle Income Low Income I. Professional, employer, manager 0.71 0.17 0.11 II. Intermediate non-manual 0.59 0.25 0.16 III. Junior non-manual 0.39 0.30 0.31 IV. Skilled manual 0.34 0.34 0.32 V. Semi-skilled 0.24 0.31 0.45 VI. Unskilled manual 0.12 0.29 0.59

Table C.2: Weighted proportion of individuals in high/middle/low income terciles by socioeconomic group (London only)

12 DV: Probability of Supporting Labour (0/1) Year −0.012∗∗∗ (0.001) I. Professional, employer, manager −36.007∗∗∗ (2.767) II. Intermediate non-manual −28.352∗∗∗ (2.783) III. Junior non-manual −27.340∗∗∗ (2.763) IV. Skilled manual 7.085∗∗∗ (2.678) VI. Unskilled manual 1.088 (4.234) Year interacted with: I. Professional, employer, manager 0.018∗∗∗ (0.001) II. Intermediate non-manual 0.014∗∗∗ (0.001) III. Junior non-manual 0.014∗∗∗ (0.001) IV. Skilled manual −0.004∗∗∗ (0.001) VI. Unskilled manual −0.0005 (0.002) Constant 23.154∗∗∗ (1.911) Observations 100,043

Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01

Table C.3: Probability of Supporting Labour, by Year and Socioeconomic Group, 1983-2018. Ref- erence group: V: Semi-skilled. Probit coeﬃcients with standard errors in parentheses; weighted data. Source: BSAS.

13 D Determinants of Council Housing Reductions

DV: Council Housing Concentration in 2011 Labour Borough in 2002 Labour Borough in 2002 and 2006 All Weak Strong All Weak Strong Wards Labour Labour Wards Labour Labour (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Gentriﬁcation and Residualization Covariates measured in 2001 unless otherwise noted Council Housing Concentration 0.67∗∗∗ 0.85∗∗∗ 0.56∗∗∗ 0.70∗∗∗ 0.76∗∗∗ 0.52∗∗∗ (0.11) (0.13) (0.12) (0.13) (0.19) (0.13) Log Crime Rate (Std.) −0.84∗∗∗ −0.35 −1.44∗∗ −1.21∗∗ 0.39 −1.01∗∗ (0.26) (0.27) (0.59) (0.53) (1.64) (0.50) Log Median Income (Std.) −0.29 0.02 −2.01 0.75 3.60 −4.20∗∗ (1.14) (1.32) (1.28) (1.52) (2.26) (1.72) Pragmatic Privatization % Council Homes without Heat −0.03 0.04∗ −0.09∗ −0.06 −0.31 −0.02 (0.03) (0.02) (0.05) (0.08) (0.21) (0.11) % Council Homes with Own Shower 0.01 0.02 −0.21 0.24 1.44∗ −0.26 (0.03) (0.04) (0.22) (0.49) (0.76) (0.28) % Council Homes in Flats 0.02 0.02∗∗ −0.0003 0.07∗∗∗ −0.03 0.06∗∗ (0.01) (0.01) (0.03) (0.02) (0.06) (0.03) % Council Homes Overcrowded 0.09 −0.26 0.39 0.12 −0.80 0.48 (0.30) (0.39) (0.37) (0.38) (0.60) (0.43) Housing Demand Indicators Private Renting Concentration 0.01 0.04 0.39∗∗∗ −0.11 0.16 0.40∗∗ (0.10) (0.09) (0.15) (0.19) (0.17) (0.17) Log Home Sales −2.66∗∗∗ −1.88 −2.79∗∗ −2.64 −10.58∗∗∗ −1.47 (1.00) (1.20) (1.11) (1.73) (1.76) (1.57) Log Median House Price 0.84 2.68 0.63 −0.42 2.09 −0.01 (2.23) (3.14) (2.57) (2.35) (2.35) (3.33) Log Population Density 0.72 1.43∗∗∗ −0.03 −0.17 0.80 −0.39 (0.50) (0.52) (0.73) (0.91) (2.53) (0.82) Log Households 2.68 −6.32 10.55∗∗∗ 8.76∗∗∗ 20.87∗∗∗ 8.38 (3.91) (4.27) (3.44) (2.57) (6.76) (6.30) % Private Rentals Overcrowded −0.10 0.01 −0.91∗∗ 0.40 −0.85∗ −1.42∗∗∗ (0.19) (0.19) (0.39) (0.51) (0.46) (0.43) Additional Covariates Borough Fixed Eﬀects X X X X X X Demographic Indicators X X X X X X Mean of DV 14.91 12.25 18.78 20.23 17.57 22.14 N 290 172 118 127 53 74 R2 0.89 0.90 0.93 0.88 0.89 0.94 Adjusted R2 0.88 0.87 0.90 0.84 0.78 0.91 ∗p < .1; ∗∗p < .05; ∗∗∗p < .01

Table D.1: Interactions with Labour Strength in Labour Boroughs. Using OLS models with borough-clustered standard errors, this table shows the conditional relationships between crime and median incomes, on the one hand, and local Labour strength, on the other. The negative relationships are strongest in strong Labour wards in strong Labour boroughs (i.e., wards with three Labour councillors in boroughs that Labour won in 2002 and 2006).

Columns 4-6 in Table D.1 are the same as in Table 4 in the main paper. In Columns 1-3,

14 we refit our models including boroughs that were controlled by Labour after the 2002 election (but not necessarily the 2006 election). The pattern is similar: the negative relationships between council housing reductions and crime and income are stronger in strong Labour wards in these boroughs. However, the coefficient on income is smaller (-2 points compared to -4.2 points) and not statistically significant. In the paper, we focus on boroughs won by Labour in 2002 and 2006 as these are more appropriate to our data (on council housing reductions from 2001 to 2011) and theoretical framework (which predicts that Labour is more likely to reduce council housing when it is electorally secure).

To show that the conclusions from Tables D.1 and 4 do not depend on the inclusion of covariates, in Figure D.1 we plot the coefficients on (standardized) crime and median income from the models in Table 4 as well as simpler models omitting the demographic and housing indicator variables. The estimated coefficients from these models are generally insignificant and occasionally positive in weak Labour wards located in stronger Labour boroughs. By contrast, we consistently find negative, statistically significant, and substantively large coefficients on crime and income in strong Labour wards located in Labour boroughs. The “swing” from positive to negative coefficients is especially pronounced for income (right panel): In weak Labour wards in boroughs with Labour councils, a standard deviation increase in income corresponds to a 3.6% point increase in the council housing concentration, while in strong Labour wards this figure is -4.2 percentage points.

15 Crimes per 1,000 Residents Median Household Income All Wards All Wards Weak Labour Wards Strong Labour Wards Weak Labour Wards Strong Labour Wards 10 in Labour Boroughs 10 in Labour Boroughs

5 5

0 0

−5 −5

Labour Borough in 2002, No Controls Labour Borough in 2006, No Controls All Controls Percentage of Households in Council Housing Percentage −10 All Controls −10

Figure D.1: Relationships between Council Housing, Labour Strength, and Crime and Income. This ﬁgure plots the magnitude of the relationships between crime, median household income, and the percent of households in council housing in wards. The correlation coeﬃcients are more negative and precisely estimated in strong Labour wards, or wards where Labour holds all three seats. In strong Labour wards, a standard deviation increase in crime is associated with a 2 point decline in the council housing concentration from 2001 to 2011, while a standard deviation in income is associated with roughly a four point decline in council housing concentration.

16 E Interview Sample

This study received approval from Princeton University’s Institutional Review Board (#10481). In the recruitment emails and before interviews began, interviewees were presented with a consent form indicating that their participation was voluntary and could be stopped by them at any time.

Our sampling frame consisted of politicians, activists, and housing policy experts in Greater London. We oversampled individuals working in boroughs that experienced regeneration and past or pending council housing demolition. We recruited interviewees over email, beginning in March 2018. Interviews took place from March 2018 to June 2018. Interview length varied from approximately 10 minutes to nearly 2 hours. 5 interviews were conducted in-person in London, and 12 interviews were conducted over the phone. We stopped recruitment once similar themes consolidated across interviews.

The main goal of our interviews was to ascertain how local politicians approach council housing, with particular emphasis on the perceived costs and beneﬁts associated with the elimination of council housing. Interviews were semi-structured and included, among other topics, questions about: the planning and decision-making process; the overall housing market and presumed eﬀects of housing policies on the housing market; the electoral and demographic implications of housing policies; the involvement of civil society groups in housing policy; the stances of the national parties on housing.

Interview Sample Contacted Interviewed Response Rate (%) Elected Politician 24 7 29 Housing Activist 9 5 56 Housing Policy Expert 8 5 63 All 41 17 41

Table E.1: Interview Sample

Housing is currently a controversial and politicized topic, and, as expected, many of the politicians we contacted did not accept our invitation for an interview. Nonetheless, we achieved a respectable response rate of 29% among politicians (see Table E.1). Since politicians, especially if currently serving, may not always reveal their true motivations, and to gain additional insights, we

17 also spoke to several experts (e.g., former and current surveyors, housing oﬃcers, policy experts), some of whom had worked with elected politicians and were familiar with the issues at stake. Housing activists provided additional information on how they and the communities they represent perceive the motivations of politicians and the social and economic consequences of housing policies.

18 F Social Housing Stock and Rent Control Policies Across Coun- tries

Social Housing Stock % of Total Housing Stock Year Australia 4.4 2017 Austria 20.0 2018 Canada 4.1 2011 Czech Republic 0.4 2011 Denmark 21.2 2018 Estonia 1.1 2017 Finland 10.5 2017 France 14.0 2018 Germany 2.9 2017 Hungary 4.0 2013 Iceland 11.1 2018 Ireland 12.7 2016 Japan 3.1 2018 Korea 6.4 2015 Latvia 0.2 2013 Lithuania 0.8 2017 Luxembourg 1.6 2013 Malta 5.5 2013 Netherlands 37.7 2018 New Zealand 3.7 2018 Norway 4.3 2018 Poland 7.6 2017 Portugal 2.0 2011 Slovenia 6.4 2015 South Africa 12.6 2016 Spain 4.0 2017 United Kingdom (England) 16.9 2018 United States 3.3 2017

Table F.1: Social Rental Dwellings as a Share of the Total Number of Dwellings. 2018 or latest year available. For New Zealand, data refer to the number of social housing places (public housing) that are funded through central government. This does not include social housing provided by regional and municipal authorities. Data refer to responses as in the 2019 Questionnaire on Aﬀordable and Social Housing, except for Canada, Czech Republic, Hungary, Korea, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal and Slovenia where they refer to 2016 Questionnaire on Aﬀordable and Social Housing. Source: http://www.oecd.org/social/affordable-housing-database/housing-policies.

19 Rent Control Policies Control of Initial Rent Levels Free Regulated Both Free Control of and Regulated Rent Increases Australia x Austria x x Belgium x x Brazil Bulgaria x Canada x x Chile x Colombia x x Costa Rica x x Czech Republic x x Denmark x x Estonia x x Finland x France x x Germany x x Iceland x Ireland x x Israel x Japan x NA Latvia x Luxembourg x Malta x Mexico x NA Netherlands x x New Zealand x Norway x x Poland x x Portugal x x Russian Federation x NA Slovak Republic x Spain x x Sweden x x Switzerland x x United Kingdom (England) x United States x x

Table F.2: Rent Controls in the Private Rental Sector. Based on the 2019 OECD Ques- tionnaire on Social and Aﬀordable Housing (QuASH). Source: http://www.oecd.org/social/ affordable-housing-database/housing-policies.

20 G Data Sources and Variable Deﬁnitions

Variable Source URL OECD House Prices OECD Aﬀordable Housing Database tinyurl.com/sfw2lk8 OECD Housing Public Investments† OECD Aﬀordable Housing Database tinyurl.com/y2exsw2q † Ecludes Australia, Canada, Chile, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Turkey and the United States. Table G.1: Sources for Figure 1.

Variable Source URL Average rents charged by social landlords London Datastore tinyurl.com/y5xpdkuc Average rents charged by local authorities London Datastore tinyurl.com/y2cjneq9 Average weekly wages for individual earners London Datastore tinyurl.com/y3dv7sj4 Stock of dwellings London Datastore tinyurl.com/y63jq4ql Landlord repossession actions UK National Statistics tinyurl.com/y2w7rthu Local authority housing stock MHCLG† tinyurl.com/y5e3vlo7 † Ministry of Housing, Communities, & Local Government Table G.2: Sources for Variables in Figure 2.

Variable Source URL Political control of boroughs London Boroughs Political Almanac tinyurl.com/y2387u4j Local authority housing stock MHCLG† tinyurl.com/y5e3vlo7 † Ministry of Housing, Communities, & Local Government Table G.3: Sources for Variables in Figure 3.

21 Variable Source URL % of households living in council housing 2001/2011 Census tinyurl.com/y2387u4j/tinyurl.com/y56yge4r Political representation of wards London Datastore tinyurl.com/y5jnhzuo Log households 2001 Census tinyurl.com/y2387u4j % of households renting from private landlords 2001 Census tinyurl.com/y2387u4j % of council tenants living in homes with central heat 2001 Census tinyurl.com/yysn4a25 % of council tenants living in homes with own shower 2001 Census tinyurl.com/yysn4a25 % of council tenants living in apartments 2001 Census tinyurl.com/yysn4a25 % of private renters living in overcrowded homes 2001 Census tinyurl.com/yysn4a25 % Black/Black British 2001 Census tinyurl.com/yysn4a25 % South Asian/South Asian British 2001 Census tinyurl.com/yysn4a25 Population density London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee Log median household income London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee Unemployment rate London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee % of residents receiving income support London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee Number of dwellings sold London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee Median house price London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee % of dwellings in lowest tax band London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee Number of crimes per 1,000 residents London Ward Atlas tinyurl.com/y2yzowee

Table G.4: Sources for Variables in Tables 3 and 4.