Social Housing Poverty: Whodunnit? Did You Guess Accountants?
Sure. We all know the poor decisions and poor choices that dump the unworthy into social housing. Let's spell some out, shall we?
carelessness
health issues
illegal drugs
...
Inquiry Of The Grenfell Tower Fire Wraps Up
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry has issued its final report about the fire which took place in June 2017. Over 1000 pages in length, there's a lot to take in....
Raising The Flag For Public Housing Tenants And Their Homes
In the article linked below, Nasteho Said brings to life the experience of living in public housing in the US, UK and Australia. Said weaves three events together:
...
Evictions In Public Housing: No Good Guy Landlord Here
We'll take a running jump at a predominantly American post, beginning on the east side of the Atlantic. Over the last few years, social housing tenants in the British...
Highest Ever Fine Handed Out To Big UK Social Landlord. What’s Going On Here?
L&Q Housing is a social housing landlord that rents out some 105,000 homes in Britain. The United Kingdom's Housing Ombudsman, newly armed with the recently passed Social Housing Act, slapped...
Will The ‘Poor Door’ Ever Open For American Social Housing Activists?
Over the last couple of years, a new vision of 'European Style' social housing has titillated the imagination of hopeful American affordable housing activists. In with the new, out...
Irish Gobsmacked! Social Housing Wannabes So Self-Entitled They Turn Down Free Homes!
A recent story from the Independent.ie reports that as many as one in five Irish individuals/families who are offered a social housing home find reasons to turn it down....
Why Do UK Housing Associations Hoard Billions While Their Tenants Suffer Poor Housing?
Actually, the devil made them do it. That is, if you are prepared to recognize the UK's national government as the devil in question.
Housing Associations began over the last...
YIMBY Triumphs! But Will More YIMBY Housing Add Up To More AFFORDABLE Housing?
The YIMBY breakthrough that everybody is buzzed about has delivered results to the City of Aukland, New Zealand. Unlike other major New Zealand cities, Aukland bit the YIMBY bullet...
Standing Up To Common, Semi-Fraudulent, Public Housing Promises — All Spelled ‘Eviction’
Faced with a conspiracy to cheat you out of your home, what can one individual do? For example, consider an impoverished resident of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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"...
New Housing? Listless in Queensland . . . In Every Sense Of The Word
Let's be clear off the top. This a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Affordablehousingaction.org's home town, Toronto, Canada has getting on for more than three times...
Red Herring Blimp Distracts From Needed Housing Construction
According to Canada's Federal Housing Big Brother — the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) — the country needs millions more new homesFrom the CBC: Canada needs 5.8 million...
Aussie Mixed Development Will Build Bare Minimum Of Social Housing
Is it time to abandon the neoliberal religion? The coming of its messiahs were prophesied some 40 or so years ago. These saviours of society would be the financier-angels,...
What Can Privatized Public Housing Contribute? World-Class Rebuff
Private enterprise has to be good for something, otherwise nobody would bother with it. For shareholders, think and believe tasty profits. For public housing management, think and apparently expect...
Refurbishing Refuseniks: Public Housing Tenant Self-Defence
Those dratted American public housing tenants who won't drink the Kool-Aid! With the Race-To-Replace currently under starter's orders, big bucks and bulldozers poised and ready, who are these selfish...
Government Broken Relocation Promises: Death Warrants?
Nursing homes have no desire to become custodians of tatty old furniture, near and dear to nobody's hearts but the owner's. But far from discouraging such an intake along...
Mixed Income Buildings: Bogus Community Benefit?
An article in The Age serves up a commentary on questionable social housing community affairs in the Australian state of Victoria. The article's authors react to remarks by Victoria...
Grow Legal Dope In The Projects: NYC Politician Brain-Fart?
Never mind the practicality, what about the optics? Marijuana magnates have apparently been blowing befuddling smoke into the face of New York's rookie Mayor Eric Adams.
Public Housing is America's...
US, UK: Public Housing Fire Disasters, How Do They Happen?
The world woke up to the horror of high rise building fires in 2017, when substandard cladding on London's Grenfell social housing tower turned it into a flaming torch...
Developer Outs RADical Neglect Of Public Housing Tenants
The Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD) has been touting the win/win value of its RAD (Rental Assistance Demonstration) program. By converting public housing to various forms of...
New Brunswick & The ‘Deserving Human’ Right To Housing
Canada is so enamoured with the importance of human rights as embodied in United Nations declarations, that it has built a museum to showcase the lofty heights of its...
Denver Official Tent Communities: Admirable But Ephemeral
It's hard to picture (the following article allows that) one of Denver, Colorado's official homeless tent communities without noticing how ephemeral it is. A strong puff of wind might...
Are Tenants Subsidizing Home Ownership In The U.S.?
Don Layton is a Senior Industry Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. He has just published two papers about housing policy in the United States. His...
What Next? Homeless Mass Dumpings To & Fro Between Warring City Clans?
There was a period in the 18th century Highlands in Scotland when the entire economy pursued by its men — warriors all — was to raid neighbouring clans. Half...
Investors Toddle To Play In A Public Housing Playpen. Who’s Going To Get Hurt?
Recent American news has featured a growing catalogue of consequences that stem from a certainty disguised as an experiment by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). That...
Irish Govt Strengthens Voice of Housing-Poor. How? Adding More Voices
Neoliberal 'small governments' see housing subsidies as the ticket to ride, allowing all — even the poorest — to climb aboard the housing train. No income? No problem. Government...
A Statistical Excursion Into Housing Experience In Canada
This post is about a new series from Statistics Canada, which is responsible for gathering and analysing data about residents. The agency regularly collects data about housing. When Canada...
A Building Burns In The Bronx: Who Is At Fault? Investors, Not Residents
The night and following day of the latest Bronx child-killer fire on January 8, 2022, there was already little mystery about those responsible for the disaster. It was possible...
The UK Invented Zombie Housing 11 Years Ago. Nobody Really Noticed Until Now.
State Housing, Council Housing, Social Housing, Public Housing, what's in a name? Underlying them all is a social compact between a nation and its most vulnerable low- and no-...
Australian Capital Territory’s Housing Policies Don’t Stand Up To Scrutiny
Jon Stanhope is perplexed. He led the government in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) from 2001 to 2011. Since retiring from the scene, housing in the ACT has become...
The Life And Death Cabrini-Green Public Housing Projects, 25 Years On
In the late twentieth century, prior to its demolition, the Cabrini Green public housing buildings in Chicago had become the poster child of all that was supposedly wrong with...
Anything But Funding: Welcome To A National Housing Strategy A.K.A Idiot’s Delight
Here's a short and depressing story that features a need for truly affordable housing viewed via costing alternatives.
Like everywhere else in Canada, the District of Nipissing has its homeless. What...
Enough Already with Ex-HUD Privatized Tenant-And-Rat Stories
Anyone browsing the nation's media outlets these days may notice increasing numbers of reports that combine a poisonous combination of the following words: tenants, lawsuit, rats, mould, sewage, lead...
Profitable Social Housing? Free Enterprise Sure Knows How!
Supposedly, the free housing market spawns developers who can do it cheaper, faster and more efficiently to produce a superior product. These are glories sung by the choir in...
The Predictable Failure Of The Public Housing “Fantasy Fix”
Here's a mashup of the public/social housing "Fantasy Fix." In the United Kingdom, so poorly have local councils and housing authorities been responding to tenant problems that the national...
Do Not Learn From Experience: The Rotten Core Of Neoliberalism
Suppose that 30 years ago, your government adopted a plan that, unbeknownst to everyone, works in theory but not in practice.
Thirty years pass, and today we have practical evidence...
Shelter Misuse Of Public Funds & Reliance On Private Sector “Fixes”
A affordablehousingaction.org, we've already expended a certain amount of ink on the notion that the "private sector does it better," a favourite theme of neoliberal politics which has had...
Progress On The UK 2020 Social Housing White . . . Paper? . . . Wash?
In 2020, the UK Government was moved to take action on the poor, and still deteriorating, conditions in the country's social housing. A further cause for distress was what...
Mobile Unhoused: A Roof Overhead But No Fixed Address
Mobile Homes, from bus-sized RVs to the back seat of a car, offer another vision of homelessness, one which can be useful to both the homeless themselves and well...
Public Housing Authority Powered By Profit: Recipe For Train Wreck?
Traditionally, the U.S. as well as other countries have depended upon non-profit organizational status to protect arm's length government housing agencies that oversee and maintain public housing for low...
Upzoning That Suits Housing Affordability: Off The Rack Or Made To Measure?
Upzoning! Brought to you by those developer-folks who once facilitated the American Suburban Dream! Now they want suburbanites to change their living spots, or at least nudge over a...
Cold Facts: While The Govts Snooze, The REITs Abuse And The Tenants Lose
Any governments with housing responsibilities or any national housing activists with housing concerns should give a look to a CBC News four-part series on housing in the Canadian North....
Internationals Scammed By Thatcherism? Go Local For Details
Ireland, The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and more: international victims of a Whiz-bang Goddess of Conservatism — Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979...
Should America’s RAD Be Renamed SLIT — Slum Lords In Training?
America's latest supposed solution to their embarrassing public housing problemEmbarassing public housing problem? Indeed, how did a program with its roots in the eradication of city slums in 19th...
Exercises in Public Housing Futility: Australian List Fiddling
Lineups to nowhere? Are they a sick joke? The "West" not long ago found reason to mock lineups in the "East" a.k.a. the Soviet Bloc. And fair enough, the...
HUD To Choose Safety Of Investors Over Public Housing Tenants
Not all that long ago, private landlords were to be the new caretakers of America's low and no income residents who could not survive in the free rental housing...
Grand Theft Auto: Authorities Steal Mobile Shelter & Job Access
It is disheartening to watch local governments warily circling an imagined threat like a dog sizing up an opponent, then pounce suddenly and brutally. This is particularly true when...
Poor Grades For UK Machine “Intelligence” Serving Council Needs
It seems a reasonable enough question: can some form of computer program be designed to serve, say social housing residents, better and more fairly than humans?
Recently, the United Kingdom...
Housing & Infrastructure: Big Democrat Cities All Hat And No Cattle?
However strong the several-decade influence of neoliberal "small government" philosophy, major societal needs — e.g. clean water, national road networks, housing for all — have historically been delivered by...
What is RAD? Is It A Brave New Future For American Public Housing?
The U.S. Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program is a hopeful attempt to combine a failing national housing voucher program with the profound failure of American public housing management and...
A Price Of Mixed Income Neighbourhoods: Soulless Density
What's a budget-conscious local government council to do? Spending on social housing is to be avoided at all costs, even when the locality already owns the land. It's too...
The U.S. Housing Crisis: Democrat Rot? Republican Rot? Both!
Conservative rot, or Labour rot in the U.K.? Conservative rot or Liberal rot in Canada? And so on. The question bears repeating with a change of political party names...
Public or Private landlords: Which Do Rental Housing Most Efficiently?
An article in Sydney, Australia turns conventional wisdom upside down to consider where Australian governments might look to best support housing for tenants.
In doing so, the article overturns some...
ITV In UK Catches Too Many Social Housers With Their Pants Down
When it comes to enduring poverty in disgusting, dangerous, unhealthy conditions, grovelling apologies to sufferers don't quite cut it. But at the moment in England, that's what's being served...
Didn’t Want To Be Evicted? (So Many Do.) Why Didn’t You Submit A Form?
A "shake of the head" series of posts entitled "who dreams up these crazy rules anyway?"
The CDC eviction ban (challenged in the courts) will end July 31, and the...
More Aging NZ Homeowners Looking Towards Public Housing. Why?
One in three New Zealand councils are looking to pry elusive rent subsidies dollars from the federal government in order to build social housing. The demand for social (or...
Impeccably Balanced Communities: Practical Solutions Or Pipe Dreams?
Imagine a community with just the right number of Blacks, the right number of Whites, Hispanics, Asians, LTBQ2S, Transexuals, Low/Moderate/High Incomes, Fully Vaccinated, Unvaccinated, Sports Heroes, Bookworms, Social Media...
Leased Social Housing Shell Game: It Takes Years To Sniff Out How It Works
American Great Idea — Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC).
Advantage: Guaranteed reasonably priced affordable housing for 30 years at an indirect cost to the government (Taxes never collected).
Disadvantage:...
Can A Corporate “Person” Treat The Homeless As Kin?
This post is part of a series about ways that people provide support to those who experience homelessness. The idea that "we treat everyone as kin" resonates through the...
After 11 Years Of UK Tory Rule, Where Goes Public Housing?
The recent record of the Conservative Party in the UK has seen rejuvenation of public housing policies inherited decades earlier from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (To be fair, a...
Robots In NYC Public Housing: “Big Brother Dog Is Watching You”
The use of a robot surveillance 'dog' during a police intervention in New York Public Housing seems to have a human 'creepy' value of 100% with complaints flying thick...
Should Private Investment In Public Services Replace Public Spending?
A recent article in Forbes asked whether value capture could be used to fund intensive case management and other supports as a way to speed up initiatives to end...
Australia Ponders How Community Housing Benefits All, Not Just The Poorest
A recent article in Australia's Fifth Estate explores two important benefits that may accrue in the future from a more active program of building community housing.There's literally a whole world...
Public Housing: Love It Or Leave It? America Can’t Make Up Its Mind
The new Democrat administration is proposing to broaden American infrastructure to include public housing. With such an act, is the country accepting that public housing is an essential public...
Repairing US Existing Public Housing: A Pact With A Toothless Devil?
Recently, America has been forced to confront two inconvenient truths that have nullified each other. First, it needs public housing — not to house all citizens, but at least...
New York City Requires Housing Broadband: Spirit Willing, But Flesh is Weak
Recent good news for rural America: billions of federal dollars have been promised to provide high speed broadband internet access that is currently as spotty as the rural housing...
Why Canada And New Zealand (At Least) Need Public Housing For All
Imagine! A gambling chip you can plonk down on the casino table that is no gamble at all. Guaranteed to make money!
Canada is close to perfecting that chip, with...
Do Public Housing Tenants Really Need Continuous Ass-Kicking On Their Way Out The Door?
Just recently, we published a post questioning the (very old) wisdom of "up and out" policies, which impose work requirements on people who are living in public housing, with...
Options To Avoid Watching A Loved One Fade Away Behind Glass
Aging Americans without a great deal of money might be curious to know whether Canada's medicare-for-all system helps out those whose futures include nursing home care.
Canada's nursing home system is...
Elderly Need Care? Home Support is Better. Are Private Nursing Homes A Rip-Off?
The harsh realities of COVID-19 have besmirched a number of nations that have followed "small-government" policies to either starve essential social programs to death, or to pass them off...
Housing Financialization And Homelessness Taints The Far Side Of The World
New Zealand's housing crisis received some mixed attention a couple of years ago, with the announcement of a national scheme to address the issue with the catchy title of...
People Bins: The Heartbreaking Betrayal In A Helping Hand For The Homeless
What's to be said about "temporarily permanent" measures such as the "people bins" being deployed in the German city of Ulm? Unlike trash, the bin occupants will be able...
Top-Down Promoted “Affordability” Definitions Run Aground in P.E.I.
When it comes to housing, what to make of the term "affordable" these days? Aided and abetted by the housing industry in search of funding, as well as national...
Truly Affordable Housing? Public Sector Can Do it Better . . . Or Maybe Not.
Who can best build truly affordable housing for low- and no- income citizens? The private sector? That's been a popular government assumption, tried and tested in Public Private Partnerships...
Can Two Lame US Public Housing Substitutes Limp Effectively Together?
Neoliberal "small" governments over the last 50 years have developed low- and no- income housing support that was designed to replace "big government" hands-on public housing.
These solutions have, by...
Gary, Indiana Turns Out Public Housing Lights, Prays For Landlord Candles
U.S. President George H.W. Bush's description of charities as "a thousand tiny points of light" has taken a rightful place in history and literature as a truly hopeful and...
While Waiting For Econ 101 Solutions, Welcome To The 1890 Slums
When it comes to the creation of affordable housing, particularly truly affordable social housing, neoliberal government thinking still prevails after 50 years of questionable results. The tried but not-so-true...
Irish Government Heavy Breathing Into Vacant Housing Owner Ears
Small-c government (or neo-liberal government, if you like) is a public entity that is infatuated with private enterprise. That goes particularly for the provision of truly affordable housing, for...
Birmingham Private Housing Authorities Abandon Special Needs Tenants
The U.K. government has over the past few years created loopholes for housing developers normally restricted by numerous by-laws. This extra freedom was created in order to encourage the...
Reasons To Be Wary Of Home Ownership
Yes, there are people who wonder whether home ownership is all it's cracked up to be. This intriguing point of view diverges substantially from the idea that everyone should...
Housing Rental Assistance Stalls Out In Hot Markets. Even Warm Ones
In countries influenced by neo-liberalism, governments are dedicated to self-shrinking. Rather than constructing and "owning" public/social housing, rental assistance programs have become the order of the day for supporting...