Blakenall Heath, Walsall, West Midlands
“When I aired my thoughts about public housing to a British architect—to whom, in my heart, I ascribed some of the collective blame for the calamitous situation—he at once shot back, "Yes, but do sties make pigs, or do pigs make sties?"
A profound question, perhaps the profoundest that can be asked. After all, you can lead a mugger to a victim, but you can't make him rob.
In the midst of one particularly grim housing project to which I once was called—a single mother was threatening to immolate her infant—stood an apartment block conspicuously less disgusting than the rest. It was inhabited entirely by old-age pensioners: either they no longer had the energy for vandalism, or they had not the inclination for it. If the Parker Morris standards were not a sufficient condition of decent living, neither were they a sufficient condition of its opposite.
What really made the difference, I concluded, was the policy by which public housing, of which there was a limited supply despite the building boom of three decades, was allocated. In conditions of shortage, justice demanded that such housing as existed should be allocated according to need: and what greater proof of need could there be than social pathology?
An unemployed single woman with three children by three fathers, none of whom supported his offspring in any way, could be said to be in greater need than a fully employed married couple with one child, who might reasonably be expected to look after themselves. Mirabile dictu, there was soon more than enough social pathology to fill the space available for it. Indeed, a kind of arms race in social pathology developed: my violence towards others outguns your attempts to kill yourself.
The results of this policy have been truly bizarre. Because public housing is subsidized, many desire it. Traditionally, city councils as landlords have been reluctant to evict their tenants, no matter what their behavior is or if they fail to pay their rent, in part to draw attention to the ideological difference between the public and the private sectors, to the gain of the former. Unlike the hard-hearted, exploitative private landlord struggling for private advantage, the city council landlord benevolently provides a social service. Thus a public housing tenancy is to psychopaths what tenure is to academics: no better invitation to irresponsibility could possibly be imagined.
Oddly enough, this encouragement of what was hitherto considered anti-social behavior was given in the name of a supposedly tolerant refusal to make moral judgments. But since those who put themselves in a position of need by their own behavior were favored over those who failed to do so, an implicit judgment was in fact made: a judgment whose perversity is evident from the requests I receive from my patients for letters to the housing authorities to strengthen their case for receiving the tenancy of an apartment.
In these missives, my patients tell me, I should emphasize their alcoholism or drug addiction, their bad temper and tendency to assault those around them—the consequence, plainly, of a lack of proper accommodation. I should mention their repeated overdoses, the fact that they resort to tranquilizers obtained illegally, that they have had several abortions and are now pregnant for the fifth time, that they have had three violent and drunken boyfriends in succession, that they gamble their money uncontrollably (or uncontrolledly). In not a single case has anyone ever asked me to write that he is a decent, hard-working, honorable citizen who would make a good tenant. That would send him straight to the bottom of the waiting list.
Indeed, the perverse criteria by which public housing has been allocated during the past two or three decades has reinforced the inexorable rise in the proportion of the young adult population living alone, a tendency that many powerful currents in our culture have encouraged. In the Thatcher years, the number of nonelderly adults living alone or as single parents doubled in absolute terms and almost as a proportion of total households as well. Hardly a day passes when I do not meet an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old without a job, without financial resources, without skills or training, without family support, without mental accomplishments, who has been given an apartment at public expense. Housing is a right, and the government therefore has a duty to provide it. The possibility that it will do so if only one behaves badly or impulsively enough acts as an irritant in domestic relations: for if a move elsewhere is a real possibility, you can afford to let a minor disagreement escalate into an irreparable breakdown.
So do pigs make sties, or do sties make pigs? I suspect that there is, as my father used to say, a dialectical relationship.” - Theodore Dalrymple, ‘Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass’ (2001) [p. 151 - 154]
