Housing Market Renewal revisited: a defence of place-based policy in austere times

This paper revisits an assessment, published ten years ago in PPP, of the then-flagship regeneration programme Housing Market Renewal. It finds that the emergent concerns in 2007 with affordability, which partly underscored a justification for the programme’s cancellation, remain while suggesting that HMR’s key regeneration objectives have gone unaddressed. The paper briefly reviews some ways that the landscape now is similar and different to 2007. The key difference is in the government’s overall approach to regeneration, which now relies more on attempts to foster regional economic growth through people-based strategies. By looking at HMR through the lens of competing logics of economic geography at a time of ‘austerity urbanism’, the paper tentatively concludes that government needs to rediscover a more obviously place-based approach to regeneration.