Truly Affordable Social Housing, Paid For By The Free Market? Dream On
Why go to Australia via Canada in order to understand the USA's RAD (Rental Assistance Demonstration program) — the social housing rescue initiative of Department of Housing and Urban...
Report: How Non-Market Housing Contributes To Economic Growth
If you accept that non-profit and co-operative housing are a drag on your country’s economy, the following report is here to make you think again. It tackles the question:...
Taking Another Look At Regenerating Social Housing
In North America, the idea of regenerating 'public housing' is pretty much a dead duckPublic housing is not to be confused with 'social housing' in the United States. Social...
NYCHA Public Housing 78 Billion Repair Bill: Is “Less Is More” The Only Hope?
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) seems much like the person at the coffee shop counter, endlessly recalculating a handful of small change in hopes that sooner or...
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...
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...
Victoria, AU Sinks $800m Social Housing Hook Into Developers
The Australian State of Victoria appears to be bucking international trends by not only announcing a massive social housing (rent geared to income) build, but actually taking the necessary...
Evaluating HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration
This post is about an evaluation of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, which was commissioned by HUD (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). It was released...
UK Social Landlords: How May I Love Thee? Let Me Discount The Ways
The UK last year published a white paper that outlined more "tenant-friendly" policies, which badly needed implementation on behalf of those who live in the nation's social housing. The...
Good News For New York City’s Public Housing – A Long Time In The Making
The New York City Housing Authority, including its arms-length owner, New York City, have been caught between a rock and a hard place for many years now.
The rock: an estimated...
Update – San Francisco Considers Paying The Price For New Public Housing
A lot of attention following the U.S. elections has been focussed at the national level, where counting continues slowly and painstakingly. Not so in San Francisco, where some of...
UK Pandemic Home Buyers Compete With Councils For Housing Deals
It is difficult to avoid shaking the head in disbelief. Some reports peg housing demand and housing prices as either stable or rising in the face of COVID-19.Here's a...
San Francisco Considers Paying The Price For New Public Housing
“The vision is that you can be a working class person who lives in San Francisco and pays a reasonable percentage of your income to rent.”
It's déjà vu all...
Green Matters: No Single Colour Of Paint Covers AU Tenant Energy Hardship
Energy hardship is a natural outcome of treating rental housing as a commodity, rather than sheltering it under a human rights umbrella. In many modern countries, the owner of...
UK Housing Associations Are Teaming Up To Reduce Repair And Building Costs
Social housing providers have been teaming up to reduce costs by making bulk purchases for years. It's a tested method to reduce insurance, utility and financing costs for individual...
A COVID-19 Recovery Plan To End Homelessness
The mission of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness is pretty self evident. These days, it’s making the case that ending homelessness should be part of Canada’s COVID-19 recovery...
Can The Private Sector Build Social Housing For Profit? No.
Can the private sector ever cost-effectively AND the profitably build social housing? A simple economics-101-multiplied-over-time argument might be that if they could, they would. But they haven't so they...
The Police Defund Refund. Not Enough, If Black Lives Matter
Only the wildest-eyed optimists imagine that defunding the police means abolishing crime prevention by creating a magical world in which the disappearance of police somehow creates an end to...
Financing Social Housing
In the years following WWII, national governments directly funded and built social housing that was affordable for people with very low incomes. The policies, programs and funding that enabled...
NYCHA Needs 6 Billion, Asks 2 Billion, Gets Nothing New From NY State
When governments mortgage the future to pay for the present, sooner or later the bill comes due. It arrived last year for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)...
NYC Mission Impossible? PPP That Builds True Affordable Housing. . . In Volume
Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have been a darling of neo-conservative "leave it to the private sector," thinking. Alas, when it comes to affordable housing in mixed income projects, they've...
Public Housing Failure: Who Is To Blame? A Seattle Microcosm Of That Question
While public (a.k.a social) housing has been extremely successful in some European nations, it survives and prospers against a small 'c' conservative attitude that financially poor tenants are both...
