Public and Social Housing

Arguably, Seattle is getting too much of our attention these days. Yes, we're perhaps over-emphasizing the 'social housing' events that are currently occurring thereTry: A Self-Funding Form of Truly...

Churches have a history of speaking up for people who are oppressed in society. Faith based organizations have charitable arms that provide services and supports. Religious instruction also directs...

Some housing activists in North America are hoping to rekindle the importance of public housing as a solution to their local version of a world's ever-deepening affordable housing crisis. Philosophizing...

"Broadband is no longer a luxury that only a few people need; it is a critical service that supports . . . economic opportunity, health, education, recreation, and well-being." We...

The average age of young people leaving home in Spain? Nearing 30. Many, if not most, simply cannot afford to leave home, given the impossibly high cost of both...

The City of Ottawa has a new mayor, who naturally wants to make an impression on his city. To that end, he's put together a task force to review...

The post features stories about housing co-operatives. First up is a workers' cooperative in Chicago, which was founded in 2020 to provide employment for people who had been incarcerated. ChiFresh...

How can a nonprofit or a charity become significantly profitable? Answer: it can't. But non-profits can create a comfortable living for a group of employees. Some of them, with...

What's the most likely way to prevent public housing fire disasters? Consider the infamous 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, England, and two fires in January 2022, one in...

For anyone who is interested in the history of housing policy in the United States, Gail Radford is a treasure. Radford is an academic historian who is based at...

Struggling to get more truly affordable housing built? Why might you despair over the future of adequate housing for those with the lowest incomes? It's the bad attitude of conservative...

Any time someone digs into public accounts, they deserve a medal in the estimation of this writer. Following the money is slow work. In the case of the report linked...

The financialization of housing is raising the cost of human shelter worldwide, leading to similar problems in many countries, with growing populations being priced out of housing altogether and...

Somewhere in many housing activist minds there are secure thoughts of assurance for their interests: in one or two locations in the world truly successful public housing projects exist! Wall...

This is a post that ignores the American public housing hellholes that developers and supporting local governments are at pains to discover everywhere — find them, fail them, flatten...

Here's an update about the government of Australia's Northern Territory and the housing it provides to its tenants. Last year, tenants brought a court case over the definition of adequate...

Tenants at the Clinton-Peabody Public Housing Project in St. Louis, Missouri were called to a meeting to talk about premature deaths among infants. The people who organized the meeting...

Seattle, Washington's newly approved 'Social Housing' nobility may or may not be ruled by a Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Still imaginary, such a creature will also have a faithful...

IKEA is a commercial home furnishing company known by vast numbers of people in many countries, offering attractive living at bargain prices. In the UK recently it has taken...

One advantage of reading an unabashedly lefty publication such as Jacobin is its relentless weeding of high-bush vegetation thrown up by earnest-sounding politicians that hint at meaningful policy flowerings...

Encouraging as it might superficially seem, America's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) actually stood up in 2022 to allow Americans with criminal convictions to have access to...

A Seattle referendum on 'social housing' has recently recently received a 'thumbs up' from local citizenryFor background, try: As The World Reconsiders Social Housing Need, Faint USA Cries of...

With its eye firmly fixed outside of America, Seattle, Washington has recently voted to explore a new form of government-supported housing. The models for Seattle's newly initiated government supported...

In 2022, the Better Government Association (BGA) reported on activities of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). The BGA looked at the number of homes that the CHA had demolished,...

When it comes to affordable housing, centrally planned governments have one big advantage over the dispersed powers and inter-govermental squabbles of more democratic political structures. The advantage: centrally planned economies...

Here is another call to purchase existing housing to accomplish social objectives, this time from EnglandFor an example from Canada try: Canadian Bank Speaks Up In Favour Of Social...

So, why is an affordable housing blog with a home in Canada so enamoured with the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago? Millions of Americans were given the opportunity to...

Imagine, say, a dozen policemen hiding behind a bus shelter, just beyond a stop-signed intersection. A car drifts through without stopping. A single policeman, hand held imperiously up in...

Parents Faisal Abdullah and Aisha Amin repeatedly complained about the mould in their social housing flat. Their landlord, a housing association in Rochdale, a city in Greater Manchester, was...

The following problem is a conundrum for all social housing suppliers virtually everywhere in the world. We're going to examine that problem in Canada's Yukon Territory, where the homeless...

When it comes to understanding the plight of disabled Scots, how would you like your learning about the deteriorating availability of suitable affordable housing? A buried-in-math abstraction? 150% increase to...

It's not often our blog can piece together social housing activism on two continents, same timeframe (more or less), and same activist. In this case, it's the respected young UK...

Canada has five big private banks. Each one is enormously profitable. Part of that profit comes from lending money to people to buy homes. When one of the big...

No, this isn't about an influential person who experienced homelessness, saw the light, and embarked on a fight for the Human Right To Adequate Housing via the power of...

There's a kind of deliberate blindness when it comes to understanding the meaning of "living in comfort — poor," versus "living in comfort — middle class and up." Accommodation may...

The United Kingdom National charity, Shelter, laments something affordablehousingaction.org has moaned about for a long time: Canada's federal government, like the UK national government, has conspired with builders. They...

The UK government is looking for a few disruptors: those prepared to tackle social housing from new perspectives, using new technology. It's hard to avoid a bit of a giggle...

In the wake of a two-year-old boy's mould-related death, what most struck the Manchester Evening News and the UK Charity Shelter, which shared a now internationally known investigation, was...

We need to remember: there is the devil we know, and the devil we don't know. This post is about the devil we don't know. That devil is in...

The Labour Government in the Australian State of Victoria is sharing some of its 'labour' ideology with workers who live in Public housing. Isn't it most efficient and economical to...

In 2010 about 37,000 new social rent homes were built in England: in 2021, just 1,500 were builtThis reflects the number of social rent homes that received a government...

As things now stand, public housing in America is being hung by the neck until dead. Some last minute reprieves are being granted to Housing Authorities prepared to sell their...

America has a unique take on the terms 'social housing'  and 'public housing.' In most of the rest of the world, they are used pretty-much interchangeably for the same...

"Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a cost that wasn't there!" A poem by William Hughes Mearns, written at the turn of the twentieth century (slightly modified with the word 'cost')...

Does anyone brew tea in a pot any longer? And what about tea cozies, the padded and fitted covers that go over the pot to keep tea warm? With...

For the past two or three years there have been activist rumblings in America about the possibility of successfully creating world class social housingTry: West Coast U.S. Activists Struggle...

Non-profit housing providers are often held up as good landlords. However, as the article attached to this post demonstrates, it isn't always the case. Bathrooms that don't function in...

This post is about a report that revisits a housing policy debate in Canada from the 1990's. The results will be of interest to decision makers, policy makers, advocates,...

Everything went wrong for New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, except for those private and public interests that extolled mixed income build-anew as a way of 'de-ghettoizing' social...

Even within the crime levels expected from a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, the incarcerations contributed by a public housing building in that neighbourhood are far greater, creating pipeline from public housing...

In 2021, the United Kingdom government published The Social Housing White Paper serving notice that tenants deserved to be on the same page as their landlords. While not expecting...

This is a two-for-one story, based on a two-for-one political initiative. 'Green New Deals' are becoming a very sensible initiative in America, and one of the articles in this post...

"You can’t run a business from NWT public housing. Is that fair?" The question is asked in an article featured below about the rights of public housing renters in...

Home ownership is a founding (or possibly foundering) tenet of countries still strongly influenced by Reaganism/Thatcherism/Neoliberal thought. That includes North America, The British Isles (Including the Republic of Ireland),...

" . . .Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” was the way U.S. President Abraham Lincoln honoured Civil War...

Local Councils and Housing Associations are taking the heat in England these days for failing to listen to the concerns of their residents. Some housing managers aren't doing a...

Is there any agreed-upon human right for people to get rich? It's certainly an underlying premise of unfettered capitalism. Many, if not most who live in capitalist societies see...

In the words quoted from an article below by Morris Copeland, the Miami-made county administrator who oversees housing: “ should be a right, not an amenity.” Alas for Americans, the...

When it comes to housing rights, it is good to keep South Africa in mind. The right to adequate housing is part of its Constitution. In 1994, the official...

Ignoring deplorable conditions in housing for low and no income citizens has become a worldwide technique for trimming local government budgets. In North America, it goes hand in hand...

At affordablehousingaction.org, we have pointed out some of the limitations of point-in-time (PIT) counts of people who are homelessTry: Fatal Flaw In Point-in-time Homeless Counts?. And earlier this year,...

At affordablehousingaction.org, our posts are replete with the 'yes-no-maybe' issues surrounding existing social/public housing as it exists today. As well as being admittedly much-maligned, it offers potential benefits for...

If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? It's a philosophical/scientific puzzler good for a discussion on reality...

Ask movers and shakers among North American public housing activists about their thinking on the grandest scale: what's new? The top of the pops these days is a 'retro'...

Written in 1962, Sung by Bob Dylan without lyrics relating to a Vietnam-linked future ever expressly stated, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall nevertheless became a prophecy of the horrors...

A small, but significant piece of good news from the United States: a crack has opened in the zero-tolerance wall that continues to seal off public housing from those...

Activists in the U.S. are exploring the idea of a public housing 'reboot' under another name, 'social housing' — one little-used in America, where 'public housing' is used more...

The following article is a useful look at the two pips that squeak in the social housing game when a nation's rate of inflation climbs into the stratosphere. That...

Let's hear it for the activists calling for a brave new world of American social housing. A special election will be held in Seattle, to consider a proposal to hire...

With the COVID-19 pandemic, home internet connectivity became not just desirable, but essential to allow safe distancing from infection. At the heart of this essential connectivity was education, which...

Over the last couple of years, there have been whispers of hope for a reboot of government built, deeply affordable housing in America. Nobody will miss the face of American...

Production, Preservation, Protection (3Ps): A post-NIMBY, post-YIMBY framework for suburban neighbourhood development... "Architects should fill the suburbs with new public housing?": what former President Barak Obama clearly did...

The UK is currently celebrating/bemoaning a sky-is-falling introduction to the new Prime Minister's Trussonomics.  That would be 'small government' neoliberalism shrunk to a squabbling anti-intellectual dot. Under Liz Truss, government...

North America, like so many corners of the world, is facing a critical lack of deeply affordable housing. Much more needs to be built, but building costs are rising, and...

What is the potential for limited equity housing co-operatives to add to the supply of the non-market housing stock? The two kinds of housing co-operatives that get aired in...

Autumn in Canada is filled with coloured leaves, cooler temperatures and harvests. It's also the time of year when the Federal Government starts preparing its budget for the next...

You can fool 'some of the people all of the time' is part of a common sayingYou can fool some of the people all of the time, and all...

The current trajectory of almost all deeply affordable housing was decided towards the end of the last century, with the triumph of neoliberal 'small government' politics in influential modern...

The National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) has taken on a massive challenge: to interpret the history of life in American public housing. Over decades now, developers hungry for building room...

The connection between housing and health came late to the table when researchers began studying the social determinants of healthTry: Connecting The Housing And Health Dots . Researchers have...

Gather round, public housing poor folks with toothpaste money to invest. Skip the rinse and spit and put those hard working cavity-prevention pennies into the black magic of cryptocurrency!...

How to justify tearing down aging, but initially well-built, housing? Of course there are economic reasons for doing so. For example, there are developer profits from rebuilding to consider....

It may seem overly ambitious to begin an Atlanta, Georgia post by taking a peek at United Kingdom politics. The action serves, however, to indicate how sticky neoliberal ideas...

For some years now, there has been an informal world-wide agreement that 30% of family income is a reasonable upper limit for 'truly affordable' rent. Above this, an individual...

The Housing Crisis? What is it? These days pretty much every nation has one. Every region, city, town, village has one, too. Even still-communist countries such as China have one,...

United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher popularized a political philosophy of small government, together with a free market for all manner of goods and services. The political theories that...

In 2019, a group of mothers, together with children and supported by activists, occupied an empty home in Oakland, California. At affordablehousingaction.org, we wrote a post about their invasion,...

Neoliberalism? After 45 years, political parties of all stripes are still influenced by the heady siren call of 'small government' and 'private enterprise can do it better.' As a result,...

Activists in the United States would like their country to play nearly a century of social housing catch-up. When the federal government set out in the 1930's to build...

Public Private Partnership 'mixed income' construction projects have been generally considered a success. Their biggest drawback is often that they lack enough units of truly affordable social housing in...

Pride is a strong foundation of community. NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) popup defences appear spontaneously in neighbourhoods that have an awareness and belief in their local culture....

Can Canada create 2 million homes that are affordable for the people in greatest need? Carolyn Whitzman says, "sure!" Whitzman is an Expert Advisor to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools...

Hey, North American! How would you like to take a tour of a public housing building, get to view the playgrounds, the corridors, and even take a peek inside...

How to best rehabilitate people who are chronically homelessThe folks who sleep rough for lengthy and/or repeated periods of time are considered to be chronically homeless. into functioning citizens...

Not every post affordablehousingaction.org publishes, but surely every second post, reflects a concern about 'a' or 'the' housing crisis. For any media publication, as well as every concerned city...

"Glad you could all make it to hear me out. Here's the problem. All three of you couples would like to buy this house, but you are from South...

With new 'social' housing prayers currently a-murmur across America, we report, with great regret, that an important patron saint of that movement is, if far from dead, doing poorly. That...

Fifty years ago, could one ego-driven man have seriously damaged the health and integrity of America's public housing tenants by accusing them all of being driven "mad" or "bad"...

The UK government is at work revamping its mental health strategy. Organizations are offering up studies and advice. There are calls to strengthen the connection between mental health care...

For some reason we humans are initially inclined to think the best of each other as individuals. It seems a reasonable and understandable 'human' reaction. However, there are reasons to...