Book dossier

Housing Associations and Housing Policy

by Peter Malpass

"Housing Associations and Housing Policy is a contribution to the housing studies literature, providing the first detailed account of the growth of voluntary housing in Britain from its earliest origins through to the present day. Drawing on extensive original research, Peter Malpass fills in much previously missing history, questioning, exploring and making explicit the extent of links between modern housing associations and medieval almshouses and Victorian model dwellings organisations. The book reveals the rich diversity of voluntary housing in the past, but exposes its critical weakness, the failure to raise sufficient capital to make a measurable contribution to tackling housing shortages. Only when governments decided, in the 1960s, to use housing associations as instruments of housing policy were they able to make significant progress. It is shown that the modern housing association sector is largely the creation of successive governments, mainly in the last quarter of the century."--Jacket.