Affordablehousingaction.org has been following one of the few currently active ‘social housing’ projects in the USA. With a touch of good old American self-interest, activists have decided that a new form of government-financed rent-geared-to-income housing will go by a ‘new’ name. That’s notwithstanding the fact that a good deal of the rest of the world largely uses the term ‘social housing’ to describe the same old ‘public housing’ that American politicians and the general public love to hate. (Not necessarily the tenants, though.)
Oh well, American social housing will try to be different. And better. That’s something of a perennial national ambition, regardless of the subject at hand.
We’ve been monitoring an ambition-rich, cash-poor new-American-style social housing experiment in Seattle, where its new executives can currently pay their salaries or rent themselves an office, but not both. Try: Washington State Funds Two Knights To Tilt With Seattle’s Social Housing Windmills
Meanwhile California is girding its loins to begin a long march towards the pot of housing gold at the end of the rainbow for the penniless, the minimum wagers, and the middle classes. There, they will all live together in economic harmony maintained largely by the more substantial rents charged to the better-off tenants. (Two fabled international success stories — Vienna and Singapore — give credence to the chances of creating such successful American-style social housing.)
Now California is getting into the act with three bills before the legislature, with differing ideas of how initial construction funding might be taxed or otherwise brought into existence to kickstart the social housing. Read more in The Sacramento Bee: California wants to increase affordable housing. A bill would tax AirBnb, Vrbo to pay for it
