This chapter examines what happens once regeneration-as-demolition begins in earnest. In stark contrast to the official regeneration rationale – creating better places and lives – it argues that residents experience physical, social, symbolic and psychosocial degeneration. If regeneration involves spatially targeted reinvestment in and revitalisation of physically rundown and socially deprived areas, degeneration is regeneration's demonic alter ego in the form of financial disinvestment in those areas and their accelerated physical, social and symbolic deterioration over and above any original problems they might have. Such degeneration encompasses multiple overlapping strands: enhanced landlord neglect, loss of valued estate facilities, boarded-up properties, increased population transience, living on a building site and heightened stigmatisation. As degeneration takes hold, estate residents’ support for and engagement with regeneration dissipates, and trust breaks down. Degeneration/regeneration elongates into the distant future and creates a psychosocial limbo-land in which residents put their lives on indefinite hold.

Enhanced neglect and managed decline

Regeneration ushers in degeneration via heightened landlord disinvestment which is experienced as ‘enhanced neglect’. Such enhanced neglect involves ‘managed decline’, which refers to the notion that ‘the area's problems could be solved by allowing the neighbourhood to get worse and worse until it was no longer viable and had to be pulled down’ (Davidson et al, 2013: 62). Residents thought managed decline was occurring via the actions and inactions of the official regeneration partners, initially to soften them up for major redevelopment, and then later to pressurise them out of their homes. An exhibition held at a ‘Northumberland Park Decides’ meeting included photographs of rundown areas and asked, ‘Is this managed decline?’ (Photograph 9.1) at Northumberland Park estate.

Managed decline was a prominent theme raised by Cressingham Gardens residents (Local Dialogue, 2016; Cooper, 2017). Steve was a Cressingham Gardens tenant and he linked managed decline with the potential redevelopment value that the estate could have – that is, a state-induced rent gap: