‘Manchester’ has been a metonym at least twice in the last two hundred years, escaping the orbit of a more generalised ‘North’. In the mid-19th century, the city’s name stood for a self-assured rising industrial bourgeoisie and its (classical) liberal politics, fictionalised in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and memorialised in the building of the Free Trade Hall. The second moment was around the turn of the 1990s, when deindustrialisation made cheap space available for new forms of nightlife and everything that came with them. The same process occurred elsewhere in the industrial west; Manchester was the archetypal British case.
One way to understand the right-wing faction of Labour that has run Manchester City Council since the 1980s is to see its project as an attempt to merge these two visions of the city (minus the cheap space): to leverage the cultural brand in support of economic growth at all costs. Isaac Rose, a tenant organiser, argues in his book The Rentier City that the Manchester model is a paradigmatic case of neoliberal urban governance, in which the state has actively facilitated the creation of a rentier economy underpinned by property redevelopment.
If the assumption was that increased wealth would trickle down, the experiment seems to have failed: during Richard Leese’s 21-year stint as leader of the council, during which the city’s population and economy grew substantially, Manchester remained among the six most deprived local authority districts. (Admittedly, national political dynamics beyond the council’s control meant that growth was always going to be easier to achieve than poverty reduction.)
Despite his coinage of ‘Manchesterism’, Andy Burnham’s time as mayor of Greater Manchester mostly represented a continuation of this recent history, rebadged and scaled up for the new metropolitan Combined Authority. Between 2015 and 2024, nearly a billion pounds of public money was lent on favourable terms to developers who built almost no affordable housing – almost two-thirds of it to one company.
The city’s recent headline successes are well known – the highest growth of any sub-region outside London, surging employment in sectors such as technology, and a hugely improved public transport system – as are the failures, particularly in housing. The level of homelessness in Manchester is among the highest in the country. Private sector rents have increased by about two-thirds in the last decade, and by around half in the last five years. The increases aren’t all down to the new ‘luxury’ flats in the city centre: rents in Manchester’s poorer neighbour Salford have increased even faster, as they have in outer boroughs such as Tameside and Oldham, though from a lower base. Rose has worked with the Greater Manchester Tenants Union since 2020: in 2022-23 he reports cases of landlords doubling rents overnight in inner city areas such as Moss Side.
Bev Craig, Leese’s successor as leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Burnham as mayor, has promised to build fifty thousand affordable homes over the next thirteen years. This would be a doubling of the rate at which they were built between 2016 and 2023, an impressive feat in the abstract, but not enough to address the scale of the problem, especially if few are offered for social rent. Craig has also said she’ll establish a ‘special commission on affordable rents’ and call for national powers to impose rent controls.
Assuming she wins again in 2028 after serving out Burnham’s term, which at the moment seems likely, Craig will be in office for at least six years. The economic growth will mostly continue to take care of itself, so far as national and international conditions allow. The mayor will be judged on the extent to which housing is affordable, and whether young Mancunians can access the new employment opportunities as readily as those moving to the city from elsewhere. As she put it in her victory speech on Friday night, ‘everyone has to feel the benefits and successes of growth’ and ‘everyone in our city region deserves a good quality home that they can afford.’
