Park Hill: administrative evil and the scandal that keeps on giving #ParkHill #Sheffield #Milgrams37

A year or two ago, a friend posted a comment on Facebook that she was going to be interviewed on local radio and did anyone have suggested answers to the question “What would you do if you won the Lottery?”. I replied “I’d buy Park Hill and convert it into social housing”. She chose suggestions a bit more warm and fuzzy, but that is what I would have said, had I been asked.
But no-one would ask me that question because no-one wants to hear that answer. I have already been quite outspoken about Sheffield City Council’s and Urban Splash’s failure to complete the redevelopment of Park Hill, its gentrification and also the inappropriateness of the proposed change of use of part of it to artists’ spaces when there are people sleeping in tents and doorways within its own curtilage. You can read my original post here:
https://votepleb.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/everything-of-value-has-been-removed-from-this-property-the-scandal-that-is-park-hill-parkhill-sheffield/

On Saturday 30th September 2017, I attended the opening of an art exhibition in a recently reclaimed car park, overlooked by the Duke Street wing of Park Hill that is earmarked to be converted into artists’ spaces for S1 Artspace.
http://www.s1artspace.org/

I spoke at some length with Mark Latham, the Development Manager for Urban Splash, and he was very polite to me, as I was to him, but I tried to press him on certain issues about the development, including the change-of-use of part of the site, the lack of completion of the housing units and the effective social-cleansing caused by the pricing of the new units.
http://www.urbansplash.co.uk/about-us/people/directors/mark-latham

I am sure he has had a lot of stick over the years and is used to it, and he handled me pretty well, but much of what he said amounted to “we don’t have the money”, “ooh yes, neoliberalism is a bad thing” and “ but what can we do?”. It was like punching bag of feathers and, being an admirer of Gandhi (although I am not strictly a pacifist), that is the only punching I approve of these days.

One question Latham didn’t answer was when I asked him will the rest of the dwelling units really be finished by 2022 (the current predicted finish date, confirmed by him). I’m no developer of property but there looks like a lot to be achieved in only another five years.
However, the failure of this redevelopment is written large across the skyline of Sheffield city centre, and this is an example of what Guy Adams referred to as “administrative evil”. Sound excessive, I know, but Adams, and Philip Zimbardo (the designer of the Harvard Prison Experiment) have written and spoken widely about “technical rationalism”, that is, the retreat from ethical decision-making to rule-based abdication of responsibility.

An early version of Guy Adams’ book is available online as a PDF:
The book is here:
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?bsi=0&ds=20&sortby=17&tn=Unmasking+Administrative+Evil&prevpage=2

Also look up Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment where he found that 37 out of 40 people will continue to follow instructions, even if they believe it to be causing genuine, physical distress to another person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

There is a lot more to say about this and I will elaborate more on administrative evil in subsequent posts.

I also asked Latham if he had seen the recent documentary “Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle” (2017 Velvet Joy Productions & 215 Productions) but he had not heard of it.
https://www.dispossessionfilm.com/
https://www.showroomworkstation.org.uk/dispossession-the-great-social-housing-swindle

I was at the screening of this film at the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield on 25th July 2017 and, although it is not featured in the film, Park Hill got a mention during the Q&A. I did not get the impression that Latham is a dishonest person, and I’m sure he would have acknowledged the documentary if he had heard of it, but I left feeling deeply unsatisfied with his brushing off and his nothing-we-can-do attitude.

I’m afraid it’s not good enough and it’s not true either.

If Urban Splash wanted to do something about the 600-or-so housing units that have been rendered uninhabitable (in order to prevent them being squatted), they could do something. Maybe they could could temporarily convert 20 or 30 of them into basic living units for nothing more than getting those unsightly rough sleepers out of Primark’s doorway, or those pesky people sleeping in tents and spoiling the hipsters’ view from their bijou flats. If they have no money (which I don’t believe), maybe Latham and the other employees of Urban Splash could take a pay cut to fund it? Or maybe they could borrow money? With the Bank of England’s base rate at 0.25%, surely they could get a pretty cheap loan? But maybe their business is not sound enough to be a good risk, remember what happened last time the banks lent money to the sub-prime sector.

Or maybe the City Council could borrow the money, like they did to build a new office block for HSBC.

Last but not least, maybe Urban Splash could sell one of their assets, rather like our local authorities are required to do, in order to fund the completion of the Park Hill redevelopment? Silly me, in a neoliberal world, as Noam Chomsky put it, profit is privatised and risk socialised, so why should a business that bought an asset for a song, subsidise the undeserving poor? It is easy to forget that private businesses get the benefit of socially-funded infrastructure all the time. Healthy, educated workers are the product of the publicly funded National Health Service, and publicly-funded schools and their goods are transported on publicly-funded roads.

However, in Thatcher’s Britain “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Or, these days, it might be more accurate to paraphrase – “there is no such thing as society. There are individual shareholders and vice-chancellors, and there are corporations”.

But what can we do? I have asked myself that question over and over for years and the answer became obvious, eventually – do something. However, this immediately leads to a further question – do what?

My income halved in 2008 but I can still find a few pounds a month to donate to Sheffield’s Cathedral Archer Project, a non-religious charity supporting homeless and vulnerable people. I also volunteer for them, and in the past have volunteered for Sheffield HARC (homeless and rootless at Christmas) and contributed to the Sheffield Homeless Shoebox Appeal.

Maybe Urban Splash could volunteer staff for the Archer Project’s breakfast club, where local businesses help cook and serve food for the clients. Maybe they already have and I have no doubt that the staff of Urban Splash, their executives and their shareholders do lots of good things that I am unaware of. But they have still failed to achieve the really important thing that needs achieving.

Tonight, Friday 13th October 2017, I will be sleeping out in the streets of Sheffield as part a fundraising and awareness-raising event for the Cathedral Archer Project, organised by the Academy of Chief Executives. Maybe the chief executive of Urban Splash will be there. Maybe the chief executive of Sheffield City Council. As Mark Latham can tell them, they probably don’t want to sleep next to me.
https://chiefexecutive.com/sheffieldcityregion/
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/overnight-sleep-out-raising-money-for-cathedral-archer-project-tickets-33614510907?aff=ebdsorderfblightbox

But this event is not going to get anyone off the street, is it? Maybe not directly, and neither is the venting of my self-righteous, middle-class spleen, but it is doing something. And if I do a little bit, and another person does a little bit, and lots of other people do a little bit, then it can add up to a lot. But I’m a nobody. I can give a little bit of money and wash up in the Archer Project’s kitchen, but I don’t have enough influence to make a big enough difference, and this is where institutions, corporations and the wealthy need to break out of their apathetic moral torpor, and put their money where the hungry mouths are.

I know it all sounds very melodramatic but I grew up in this area and have been coming to Sheffield my whole life I have never witnessed this widespread homelessness and rough-sleeping in Sheffield until the last few years. Something is very rotten in the state of England and Mark Latham and the other decision makers, executives and shareholders at Urban Splash, along with the councillors and council officers at Sheffield City Council, need to examine their consciences and ask themselves are they one of thirty-seven or one of three?

“Everything of value has been removed from this property.” The scandal that is Park Hill #ParkHill #Sheffield

Dear Sheffield, Park Hill is a scandal so please stop celebrating it. It’s sacrilege to say it, I know, and I am one of the few people that would have happily seen the place razed to the ground rather than converted into ”new homes to buy from £100,000”. Park Hill was built as what we now call social housing, but what we used to call council housing, which were available to rent at reasonable rates for those whose financial situation would not enable them to buy a house. Yes, that’s right, this was one those evil socialist schemes that rebuilt the country and replaced slums after the Second World War.

However, Park Hill was a monumental fuck up because it was designed without including many of the amenities required within easy reach in order to sustain a community:- shops, schools, medical centres, entertainment, pubs etc. There were all of those things, but not accessible enough for anyone other than those fully physically able, which is what led to the isolation of many people living in those estates.
I am no stranger to drinking, but when I lived in Park Hill, I never visited either of the pubs that were compressed like a fist in a vice at the ground level of the flats. Not because I am a snob, but because they both looked more like a threat than a promise.

Park Hill was a scandal when it was first built, due to the failure of those who specified it, and it was a scandal again, a generation later, when it was used a sink-estate for poor people and problem families.

I lived in Park Hill for 18 months in 2003/4 and had to move out due to the pressure of the imminent reposession & redevelopment of the flats. Internally, the flats were really good, although your doormat was only one step away from a dystopia convincing enough to feature as a ready-built set in several movies.

I’ve heard people blame Le Corbusier for the dehumanising brutalism of the 60s and 70s, but his vision was of “streets in the sky”, not “featureless & disorientating, unnaturally long prison blocks in the sky with no nearby amenities”.

Before the newly refurbished units were actually for sale, I attended a talk by employees of Urban Splash about the redevelopments and was genuinely impressed (at the time) by the amount of thought that had gone into ameliorating the physical and social problems of the site. But given the enormous delay in completion, and the “from £100,000” business, I now see Park Hill as nothing more than a land-grab by a rapacious corporate organisation that has deprived Sheffield’s people of a huge amount of affordable housing.

Ironically, the “Scottish Queen” pub (presumably named after Mary Queen of Scots who was for a time imprisoned at Manor Lodge, the source of the name of another historically infamous sink estate in Sheffield) has been gutted and turned into a demographically-opposed art exhibition space.

It gets worse. Today, I read a short, online article by Artists’ Newsletter (AN) about how Sheffield-based S1 Artspace has attracted £1 million towards a redevelopment of the Duke Street wing of Park Hill for “artist studios, creative workspace, live/work flats, production workshops and an education space”. The article is factually inaccurate so I don’t know how much of that cool million is actually at the disposal of S1 or whether their bit is part of a larger project.
https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/s1-artspace-1m-move-to-park-hill-the-first-major-step-to-realising-our-ambition

AN refer to Park Hill as being “derelict”, but it was not derelict before Urban Splash took ownership. There were nearly a thousand habitable dwellings in 2004, but now there are at least 700 of those dwellings empty, and not just empty, uninhabitable. During my previous visit to Park Hill, on 24th October 2015, there was debris and litter showing the remains of people sleeping rough.

Homeless people sleeping rough in an empty housing estate?

Today, I revisited the site in order to get my own photograph of the evidence, but the developers have now closed off that area.

I am told that Urban Splash ensure that all the properties they take over are rendered un-squattable by removing all the internal infrastructure. How thoughtful.

Urban Splash has been sitting on these properties for 10 years and a quick look around the site suggests that it will not be finished for at least another 10 years. In the meantime, homelessness increases and people continue to die due to the punitive policies of our fascist government when they could be easily afforded modest, temporary accommodation in un-let units in a financially non-viable housing development.

Here are the 22 photos I took of empty units (with no overlaps), showing just how much housing has been removed from the market. I tweeted one photo a day to Urban Splash and Prime Fuckwit Cameron just before the election in 2015.

According to AN, the redevelopment by S1 Artspace will not be complete until 2020 and they do not mention any social housing, but there will be “an archive, auditorium and a gallery”. Oh yes, and a sculpture park.

‘Lord Bob Kerslake, a champion of the project, said: ”This is an exciting project for Sheffield that will provide a fantastic new home for arts and culture at Park Hill. I am delighted to be championing it.”’

Bob Kerslake, Sorry, Sir / Kaiser / Tzar / Shah Bob used to be the CEO of Sheffield Council and should know better. But nowadays he’s in the London Bubble and I’m sure that the idea of “derelict” buildings being turned into artists’ studios, 150 miles away, sounds very positive. But Sheffield is not short of  artists’ studios, what Sheffield is short of is employment and housing for ordinary people, and that £1 million could have been better spent investing in local manufacturing (not retail) and refurbishing Park Hill as modest dwellings for people other than fucking hipsters.

Park Hill is a scandal, yet again, and Urban Splash should be ashamed of their failure. What’s more, S1 Artspace should reconsider their plans and whoever has committed this quoted £1 million should go and visit Sheffield’s Archer Project and ask their clients if they would rather sleep rough in a disused housing estate, or a sculpture park.
http://www.archerproject.org.uk/

Austerity for Dummies Part 2 – An Illustration of Student Debt – FYI @George_Osborne @David_Cameron

Imagine there is a job vacancy and ten people apply for it. One person gets the job and the other nine people do not get the job, but the remaining nine are no worse off.

Now, send all ten people to university, and once they graduate, get them apply for the same job vacancy. Like before, one person gets the job and the other nine people do not get the job. But this time, all ten of them have debt.

Simples!