Public and Social Housing

Posts concerning housing for people with very low or no income.  The housing is provided separately from the speculative private housing market on a permanent basis.

Washington State Funds Two Knights To Tilt With Seattle’s Social Housing Windmills

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 Roll Out The Housing Carpet

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...

Where Public Housing Residents Can Become Millionaires, Most Of You Might Want To Live There

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...

How A Needy Family’s Future May Be Assured By Broadband

"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...

Spain Tackles Affordable Housing Crisis With 50,000 Foreclosed Homes And Properties

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...

Canada’s Capital City: Advancing An Affordable Housing Agenda With A New Mayor

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...

Spreading The Word About Housing Co-operatives

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...

Years Pass Before A Death Discovered: A Public Housing Association Too Business-y To Notice?

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...

So There Was A Fire. Sorry For The Damage & Injuries, But We’re Underfunded. Not Our Fault.

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...

What Can History Offer Today’s Public Housing Advocates In The U.S.?

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...

Conservatives & Social Housing: Never The Twain Shall Meet? Not So

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...

Unravelling The Mystery Of Government Housing Expenditures

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...

New York City Suburbs To Become A Hotbed Of New Public Housing?

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...

Singapore’s World Class Public Housing Faces A Shrinkage Problem

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...

Crown Jewels: HUD Picks Out The Heady Heights of Housing Authority Heros

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...

Any Teeth To ‘Adequate’ In Human Right To Housing? Australian High Court Will Decide

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...

Why Are Babies Sleeping With Their Parents? Sorry, Your Answer Is Wrong

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’s Imaginary ‘Don Quixote’ Set To Tilt At Public Housing Windmills?

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...

UK IKEA Shopping Reflected In The Poverty Of The Near-Homeless

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...

Foghorns Necessary To Avoid Federal Roadblocks To End Homelessness In US

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...

Public Housing Thwarts, Not Supports, The Human Right To Housing After Incarceration

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...

Seduce Middle Class Into Reimagined Social Housing With a Green Lung?

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...

A Self-Funding Form of Truly Affordable Housing? Seattle Says Yes Please

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...

How The Chicago Housing Authority Plays Fast And Loose With Its Land

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,...

Hong Kong: A View of Chinese-Funded Affordable Housing On Steroids

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...

Converting Private Rental Housing To Social Housing – The Whys And The Hows

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...

American Music: Legacy of Hollywood Composers? Not For Its Soul. Think Again.

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...

Social Housing Naming And Shaming: UK Government Snarls, But Doesn’t Bite

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...

Can Government Break The Mould In UK Social Housing?

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...

Yukon Considers: Who Deserves Social Housing When There’s Never Enough?

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...

Scotland’s Disabled: There Are Lies, Damned Lies, And . . . Shocking Truths!

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...

UK Social Housing Rights Activist Kwajo Tweneboa: Time For A Twofer

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...

Canadian Bank Speaks Up In Favour Of Social Housing

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...

A Once-Homeless Socialist Who Wants More Upscale Housing Built?

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...

A Seattle Quickie For 10,000 Public Housing Folks — 35mph & More — Free Transit!

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...

Affordable-> Unaffordable. Temporary-> Permanent. UK Plays Name Change Game

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...

Bee in Your Bonnet About Doing Social Housing Better, Cheaper? Take It To SHED

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...

Social Housing Mould Killed Awaab Ishak. Will Institutional Apathy Kill Others?

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...

Public Housing: NYC Engages In A Pact With the Devil

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...

Can Live-In ‘Mr. Fixits’ Fix Public Housing Better? Victoria, AU Aims To Find Out

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...

Some Ideas To Fix England’s Social Rent Housing Deficit

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...

Rebooting U.S. Public Housing: Hard Aground, Can It Be Refloated?

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...

Vienna Social Housing Is A Form Of Wealth Available To Be Shared By All

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...

UK Ghostly Service Charges May Sink Social Housing Tenancies

"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')...

The Role Of Tea When Facing Up To Renovations In Social Rent Housing

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...

America IS World Class. But Could It Ever Create World Class Social Housing?

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...

Calling Non-Profit Housing Providers To Account

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...

Revisiting Public Investment In Non-Market Housing

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,...

Katrina’s New Orleans Legacy: The Death of Public Housing. Good? Bad?

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...

How NYPD & NYCHA Together Hyper-Police Public Housing Residents Into Jail

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...

Major UK Housing Associations Struggle With Shaky Finances

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...

A Century Late And A Squillion Short, Washington D. C. Considers Public Housing For All

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...

Working From Home For Survival? Forbidden In Canada’s Arctic

"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...

How HUD Can Zap Public Housing Units Into Oblivion One At A Time

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),...

Killing The Profiteering Beast: The Inhuman Right to Inadequate Housing

" . . .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...

Co-Design – What Is It And Why Does It Help Build More Deeply Affordable Homes?

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...

A ‘Right’ To Get Rich Clashes With The Right To Adequate Housing

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...

Approaching A Human Right to Housing Beyond Life In A Cold, Leaky Tent

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...

Realizing The Right To Adequate Housing In South Africa

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...

An Internet Light Illuminates The Dark Art Of Ignoring Public Housing Tenants

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...

Adding On To Point-In-Time Count Data To Understand Homelessness Better

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,...

Tomorrow’s Chest Pains Might Lead You To Nearby Public Housing

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...

Social Housing Conquers NIMBY Via The Spirit of A Tree Falling In A Forest

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...

Lived Experience Tenants Say: ‘One Size Fits All’ Is A Public Housing Bad Idea

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'...

Punishment For UK Public Housing Death: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

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...

Pardons Begin To Open Doors To Public Housing In The U.S.

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...

Listless In Seattle: In Search Of A Better Form of Social Housing Without Lists

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...

Linking Social Rent To Landlord Responsibility: Two Competing Crises

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...

As The World Reconsiders Social Housing Need, Faint USA Cries of ‘Us, Too!’

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...

Post-Covid, Can Vital Internet Access Continue to Support Low Income Folks?

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...

Santa Barbara Architecture Gives Life to US ‘Social’ Housing Ambitions

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...

Public Housing: Beauty Or The Beast? An Architectural Viewpoint Up-Ends Assumptions

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...

Refurbishing Derelict Housing: UK Gov? Or Blokes (Him/Her) With Hammers?

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...

Building More U.S. Deeply Affordable Housing . . . Without Ongoing Support?

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...

Assessing The Potential Of Co-operatives To Expand The Supply Of Non-Market Housing

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...

A Plan To Lift Canadians Out Of Poverty

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...

Public Housing: You Can Fool Some Of the People All Of The Time

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...

West Australia Report: Non-Profits Can Do Social Housing Better

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...

Museum Names Artist To Help Elevate Lives Lived In US Public Housing

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...

COVID Responses Deepen Our Understanding Of The Housing-Health Connection

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...

Public Housing Musical Chairs With CryptoBucks? Sit This One Out?

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!...

Developers + Political Buddies Build A Public Housing Pipeline To Jail

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....

Dawn Of The Living Dead? How Neoliberal Promise Serves Housing In Georgia, USA

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...

UK Cost Of Living No Longer A Brake On Rising Social Housing Rents

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? What Might Fix It?

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,...

Right to Buy: A Dream That Even The Poorest Can Be Become Home Owners

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...

Public Housing Authorities, Please Justify Your Pernicious Stock Shrinkage

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,...

Neoliberal Piglets In Straw Houses Self-Butcher For Wall Street Wolves

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,...

Toying With Wrong Builders And Wrong Models For ‘New’ Social Housing

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...

Warning About Social Housing ‘Separate-But-Equal’ Plans That Aren’t

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...

US National Public Housing Museum’s Home Finally Ready For Takeoff

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....

Canada Needs 2 Million Deeply Affordable Homes

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...

Public Housing May Be Healthier For Your Brain Than Free-Market Palaces

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...

Substance Use With Homeless Buddies: Better Than Housing First?

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...

Defining A ‘Housing Emergency’: Should Governments Wield The Power?

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...

Squelching Impermissible Attitudes Towards Social Housing Development

"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...

Singapore: Millionaire Trouble In Public/Social Housing Paradise

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...

How An Architect Stands Accused Of Trashing US Public Housing Tenants

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"...

Housing And Support – Foundations For Mental Health

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...

Non-Profit Chicken Little Concern: Public Housing Sky Is Falling

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...
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