Introduction

Violent youth gangs are almost invariably located in economically distressed urban neighbourhoods. Innumerable US studies and recent experience in Europe and the UK mainland indicate that poor housing, material poverty and the absence of primary sector employment contribute significantly to the presence of violent youth gangs (Hagedorn, 1998; Sassen, 2007; Pitts, 2008). This suggests that neighbourhood-level interventions that endeavour to address both the problems afflicting these neighbourhoods and their broader socioeconomic and cultural determinants might serve to stem the flow of young people becoming involved in gang violence as victims and as perpetrators.

Why here? Why now?

From 1979, the post-war tendency towards a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor was reversed, resulting in the growth of both absolute and relative poverty. This income polarisation was mirrored in the housing market. The Right to Buy and Tenant Incentive schemes precipitated a ‘secession of the successful’ as the economically active vacated ‘social housing’ to be replaced by the socially disadvantaged (Hope and Foster, 1992). Whereas at the beginning of the 1980s the average household income of council house residents was 73% of the national average, at the beginning of the 1990s this had fallen to 48%. By 1995, over 50% of these households had no breadwinner (Power and Tunstall, 1995). By 1997, 25% of the children and young people under 16 years old in the UK were living in these neighbourhoods. In its report, Bringing Britain together (SEU, 1998), the Social Exclusion Unit identified 1,370 housing estates in Britain, which it characterised as ‘poor neighbourhoods which have poverty, unemployment, and poor health in common, and crime usually comes high on any list of residents’ concerns’ (SEU, 1998, p 4).