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Ours have always been a mixed bag. There are nice estates, and not so nice estates. Estates in areas where there' s lots of work, and easy access to services and where the atmosphere is not materially different to any private estate, and there are sink estates on the bitter edge of nowhere, with few transport links, fewer jobs and a pervading sense of violence and hopelessness. And inner-city collections of estates that live cheek by jowl with some of the wealthiest communities in the world.
And there are slighgtly downtrodden but scraping by estates where some of the families are in crisis and some of the kids are running amok, but most are just living a 'normal' life, with a job they quite like, and their kids doing well at the local school.
What made housing estates worse, in my opinion, was the change to social housing laws under the Thatcher government. Council tenants were given the right to buy their houses from the council, and encouraged to do so with easy to get mortgages, partial equity schemes, and the fact that they were valued at considerably less than a house which had started out private.
So lots of people bought their council houses and flats, and then eagle eyed developers started buying them up for a low price (which was still mad profit for the seller). Where the bought properties were flats, they usually ended up as developed executive apartments, walled and fenced with security gates and guards (I lived in one such at the edges of a Salford estate in the early 90s). Where they were houses, many ended up as private sector rentals competing with the council for tenants and often resulting in a transient and troubled populationg moving through the estates.
Councils were barred by law from investing the money from the sale of council houses back into the social housing stock. It sat, cordoned off and unable to be spent for years. So, housing stock began to shrink. At the same time, the constant message being put out in government and in the media, was that being a proper adult citizen effectively meant being a home owner. Renting a council house became highly stigmatised and working families who'd once been quite happy to rent a house in an estate, because it was the next best thing to buying in terms of security, were suddenly taking up any assistance scheme they could to get out of social housing and buy a house.
When I was a kid, one of the first things you did when you came of age was get your name on the council house waiting list. It was just a part of becoming an adult if you were from a working-class background. And by the far the majority of us were. Now, it comes with a bunch of baggage and most of it has been farmed out to the private sector, or to arms length not for profits.
It was a deliberate strategy to reduce social housing in this country and turn us into a nation of home owners.
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