The Hurricane Is Over But The Emergency Has Just Begun
We're all familiar with the damage that a hurricane can leave in its wake. People with damaged properties scramble to get temporary accommodation. Repairing and cleaning a property can...
Why Are Housing Starts Falling Short Of Public Targets?
Continuing with the theme of cross-subsidy funding for affordable housing, here is another article from the United Kingdom. This one is about greenfield development, which refers to building new...
Australia’s Housing Crisis: How It Happened And A Path Forward
Reading the news these days informs us that we are facing multiple crises: climate change, housing and political discord are three examples. The level of political discord makes it...
Australian Human Right To Adequate Housing? Been There, Done That
A pressing question for Australia comes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): "if housing was considered a human right, would it fix our housing crisis?"
One disturbing possible answer may...
UK: Empty Land, Empty Houses, Empty Right To Adequate Housing
There is a major impediment to the United Nations Right to Adequate Housing. It is a common occurrence everywhere, and a familiar sight to a more mobile segment of...
Housing Costs For Citizens In Spain Dragged Through The Roof By Tourists
In 2017, the Spanish anarchist group, Arran, undertook a series of actions against tourists. These added up to some frightening encounters in which international visitors imagined themselves on the...
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:
...
City Of Featherweight Affordable Housing Action Fumbles Coins Back Into Profiteering Pockets
When it comes to getting real action on building much needed affordable housing, momentary activist victories are no match for relentless pressure from financialization obsessed homeowners guarding their investments....
What Does A Commercial Real Estate Crash Tell Us About Residential Landlords?
Buried in the bad news about the state of commercial real estate in America is a hint of why 'landlordism' will fight tooth and nail to maintain healthy profits...
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...
Chariots Of The VanLords: New Gods Happy To Take The Homeless For A Ride In LA
You have to hand it to capitalists! They are indeed the gods of profit, and can find the narrowest niche market in which to make a few bucks. But...
Up Against The Wiles of Free Enterprise: Who Suffers? The Vulnerable, Along With Everybody Else
Neoliberal politicans took the trouble to convince their constituents that governments (all good politicians, bureaucrats and assorted fellow-travellers) were utterly hopeless at just about anything. But the private sector,...
Build A House Yourself: Unearthing The History Of Sears’ Home Kits
"Order for overnight delivery," says a contemporary on-line shopping site. It's a popular way to make purchases these days. It's also a revival, at least in the United States.
One...
UK Youth In Care + Private Care Homes = Toxic Combo: The Dregs of Failed Neolibralism
What is it about the attraction of governments to the almost guaranteed predation caused by funding private-enterprise care homes? The title above reflects a United Kingdom report on dreadfully...
Been Homeless? No? A Property Guardian Maybe — Not Quite Homeless, But Usefully Close
Late in life, I'm pleased to learn a little about property guardianship. Seems I was a property guardian and never knew it. So was my daughter, at least in...
Private Rental Housing: Pipelines To Homelessness That Spirit Rent Away From Communities
Padraic Kenna and Mark Jordan, writing in The Conversation, argue that the responsibility for homelessness rests squarely with the private rental sector, which has a penchant for evicting its...
Documenting Barriers Between Black People And Adequate Housing In Canada
How do Canada's housing policies affect Black people? The legal framework includes the National Right to Adequate Housing. A variety of provincial human rights legislation prohibits discrimination against specific...
Ethical Business Runs Headlong Into An Ethical Dilemma – Tenant Wellbeing
Shelby R. King, writing in Shelterforce, asks whether an investment firm that owns residential property and regularly evicts its tenants should be eligible for the coveted B CorpB Corp is a...
Why Not Hand Landlords Billions To Improve Properties, Stimulate Rent Increases?
Many are concerned about the impact on human lives of scarce truly affordable housing.
Those same folks are well aware that in the face of growing affordable housing crises, neoliberal...
Absolute Freedom For The Housing Free Market: A New Way To Protect Renters
Those of you who follow Scottish politics will have noted the departure of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon from the political stage. The reason for her departure is largely due...
How Australia’s Housing Became ‘A Closed Shop’ Favouring ‘Already-Owners’
Currently around the world, country after country allows and/or actively encourages a gambler's haven — the use of housing ownership, not (or only incidentally) as shelter, but as chips...
Wealthy Incomers: Economy Boosters? Or Trojan Horses Bent On Plunder?
Countries, states, and cities, be careful what you wish for! Wealthy foreigners may boost your economy by dropping a trail of cash across companies linked to tourism. Ask Portugal,...
Old, Tired, Sick? “There is no medicine as powerful as housing.”
The headline comment above comes from Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the University of California's San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. There's more:
"By the time homeless people are...
The National Dream Parade of Housing Emperors: Becoming A Truly Naked Ambition
With the advent of the 50 year housing mortgage in the United Kingdom, housing wealth can be 'rented' from a bank or mortgage company, costing for many a lifetime...
Coming To Grips With The Financialization Of Housing
Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, more people have become aware of the financialization of housing. Housing has shifted from being a place where you live to become partially or...
‘Why Should Londoners (Canada) Fret About Financialization in London, UK?
Is London, UK and its environs the largest housing drain in the world — the leader of rapidly growing worldwide shortage?
Might be. It's certainly a candidate for that dubious...
‘Missing Middle’ Housing Morphs Into An ‘Affordable Housing’ Fraud
Four or five years ago, U.S. 'Big Builder' scammers were on the mooch (as always) for government handouts. To do so, they were promoting the concept of 'Missing Middle'...
Corporate Landlords And The Fight To Protect Tenants
ShelterforceShelterforce is a U.S. based non-profit dedicated to community development, affordable housing, and neighbourhood stabilization. recently convened a discussion about corporate investment in rental housing and tenant protections in...
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...
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...
Affordable Housing: Thoughtful, Important Words About It. Only . . . What Is it?
Pardon us while we parse a truly useful way of thinking about 'affordable housing' proposed by the mayor of Edmonton, Alberta.
Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said, in relation to a political...
Can An Architectural Tail-Tip Wag A Housing Financialization Dog?
AAHA!
Fooled us with that name, didn't they? We were expecting a rabbit pulled from a hat and have instead latched on to a group of Canadian architects, designers and...
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...
Bankers In The Boonies, Goat Farms In The City: A New Topsy-Turvy World?
Bankers in the Boonies? This writer first encountered it as a marry-in to the poor relations of a cottage-owning family. We got a snippet of holiday this year in...
Financialization Of Housing In Canada Exposed
Canada's National Housing Advocate has just released a study about the financialization of housing. Financialization of housing is about treating housing as a commodity for profitIt includes the structures...
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...
UK Taxpayers Scammed! Overpaying For Services Supporting The Poor
Where does the gravy go that the scammers skim off the top of United Kingdom services to the poor? As a matter of fact, it can go to you,...
Housing Speculators May Run But Can’t Hide From Canada’s New Taxes
In 2018, Canada began taking the gloves off to deal with speculators who are buying and selling housing as casino chips, rather than homes. With some of the highest...
TV Made Us Do It: Obscene Housing Practices That Make It Unaffordable
A good way to think of property porn . . . property porn? Yes, property porn, known more formally as property pornography . . . is not to imagine...
Social Housing After A 13 Year Fizzle: Private Landlords To Blame?
Is the private housing rental market a fall guy for blame-game government failure to live up to its social responsibilities?
There's seems to be an argument, based on number crunching...
Financialization of Housing In Canada – Getting A Handle On The Issue
Until 2017, 'financialization of housing' had a low profile. In that year Leilani Farha brought it to the international stage. In her role of UN Special Rapporteur on Housing,...
China Walks The Walk When It Comes To Curbing Housing Financialization
With inflation soaring in many countries, looming bank rate increases are threatening to leave mortgage holders under water. Meanwhile, investors are gobbling up suitable properties to buy and then...
Housing Financialization —> Individual and Community Ill-Heath
In some jurisdictions, laws are beginning to restrict the financialization of housing — buying and selling it principally for profit, not shelter. Financialization is not only a local game,...
Wales: Torching Unaffordable Homes: Impotent Mutterings Or Real Threat?
The world's populations are more and more denied access to adequate affordable housing. The primary — and growing — barrier to renting or owning a home is 'financialization' —...
Community-Integrated Jailing For The Homeless Criminal Class?
Visit 'Ground Zero' in the world's homeless crisis, The City of Los Angeles (LA) in California. It's an encounter that every city with a homelessness problem should consider undertaking...
Australia’s Housing Crisis: When Housing Is An Asset, Not A Need
You can't really camp out and expect to be protected from the elements under a multi-million dollar Andy Warhol painting. It is an asset pure and simple, to be...
Literature Reviews – Why Do Them? What Do They Have To Offer?
Researchers from the UK Collaborative on Housing Evidence have just published a literature review about public participation in the planning process in the UK. Based on the evidence, the...
Lisbon, Portugal Searches For Ways To Benefit From 48,000 Empty Homes
One of the most distressing features of the financialization of housing is the disdain that investors hold for housing as anything other than a potential investment bonanza. How do...
Developer Wet Dream: Housing That Fails The Test Of Time
New York City is blessed with an enormous amount of public housing that has so far withstood the test of time. Yes, it needs 40+ billion dollars for repairs....
Everybody’s Housing Crisis: One Way Out Of No Way Out
Dan Darrah, writing in Jacobin, takes us yet again along the North American housing superhighway which is speeding us towards an untunneled cliff face — the point where there...
Getting A Grip On Profit In Rental Housing
Imagine for a moment that you own a home and you've lived there for 10 years. In that time, the value of your home has gone up. Depending on...
30 Year LIHTC Wallpaper Bubble Bursts 15 Years Early!
Sure, LIHTC has always been a successful government housing policy, allowing officials to 'brag now because we'll all be dead by the time the shit hits the fan.'
There's a...
Idaho In The Twenty-First Century: Wither The Bourgeoisie?
If the great social economist Karl Marx correctly identified the economic underpinnings of a 19th century world, the 21st century has surely morphed into an entirely new framework that...
Facing The Facts About Renting A Home In Canada – Part II
Affordablehousingaction.org is featuring two posts about housing for renters in Canada. The first post is about is a remarkable production by students from Ryerson University.
This one is remarkable in...
Canada: How Many Angels Can Study On The Head Of A Pin?
Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that all university students are angelic and deserving of rescue from a current fate: unaffordable student housing.
So you're delighted you've been...
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...
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...
Strategies That Erode Housing Security: Part II – Corporate Ownership
This is the second of two posts that report on a conversation with Martine August, who teaches in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. Her research...
Driving Back A Pandemic More Pernicious Than COVID
The Monitor has just published a piece by Ricardo Tranjan, who is a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives. Tranjan frames neoliberalism as a global pandemic.
The...
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...
Housing Activists Vs. Mega-Landlords: How To Be More German About It
In the war of attrition against hostile housing forces, the city state of Berlin, Germany recently gave housing activists world-wide something to cheer about.
The hostile forces were (and still...
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....
Banks Backed Foreign Students To Inflate Canada’s Housing Costs Forever
Superficially at least, Canadians are justified in their pride of their banking system. Following the 2008 mortgage meltdown, as American banks were collapsing everywhere under the weight of their...
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...
Kill Housing Codes & ByLaws To Create Affordability? Not Likely.
A detailed article in The Guardian unpacks the issue of relaxing building codes and neighbourhood bylaws in the United Kingdom. Removing this unnecessary "government interference" will allow the private building industry...
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...
Social Housing “Asset Recycling”: Privatization In Thin Disguise
There has been a hopeful inclusion of new kinds of "infrastructure" in Democratic proposals to shore up 21st century necessities. Beyond 19th and 20th century physical requirements for a...
Sydney AU Exposes Developers’ “Decayed Public Housing” Lie
Two important lies have been heavily pushed by developers eager for new work over the last decade or two. Lie number one: Public/social housing is a fundamentally flawed social...
Montréal Threatens: Developers, Mix Your New Build Housing! Or Else!
Developers feast on free market housing. Why not make them fix Montréal's housing crisis while they're at it? That seems to be the thinking of the mayor and city...
Housing Support Payments: Landlords😄, Tenants😄, Taxpayers😖
The headline on this post could go further, reflecting winners and losers in the free- market housing support program game: Developers😄, Speculators😄, and those needy and waiting for support...
Cuckoo Funds: Why YOU May Be Making Housing Unaffordable
There's a new term on the block, folks: Cuckoo Funds. Let's begin to describe it using a more mature and widely known "ugliness" — Vulture Capitalism. Vulture Capitalists are...
COVID An Urgent Call To Arms for “Space Cadets”
Nearly all urban spaces on earth grew like topsy until the modern practice of zoning became common. Zoning then chased pig farms out of the downtown, lead smelters out...
EU Moves Towards Tackling Affordable Housing Crisis For All Its Member States
"Rather than a fundamental right to be guaranteed for all, housing has increasingly been considered a market to make profits through speculative acquisitions and the so-called financialization of the...
Oakland Carpe Diem: When “Seize The Day” Became “Seize The Empty House”
When affordablehousingaction.org opts to post about news events, we try to find those that showcase ideas and concepts that can provide encouragement about positive future change.
One news event that...
Tempest In An Unoccupied Teapot: Homeless-Ravaged UK Has Too Many Homes
Prior to and during the pandemic, United Kingdom builders have had the same attitude as North American Builders — "Build, Build, Build!" That attitude in the United States has...
Housing Speculation: Investment For Profit Without A Kinder, Gentler Side
There are some who believe that a useful distinction can be made between housing "speculation" and housing "investment."See at Huffington Post:Are You A Property Investor Or Speculator? A Quick...
Cold Multiplies The Danger Of Ontario Homeless “Living In The Rough”
2020 has brought more flurries than usual to the Canadian city of Hamilton. With the onset of the pandemic, commendable flurries of activity have removed people experiencing homelessness from...
Are Your Country’s Rents Ever-Increasing? Berlin Stops That Dead
Free market democracies offer little natural protection to their citizens when it comes to the "inalienable right" of gamblers to speculate for profit in life's essentials, such as food...
Silver Tsunami Greets Affordable Senior’s Housing That Isn’t There
Do you know that the writer of this article is a senior? You may not, but Google does. I read articles from around the world daily in publications from...
Ireland: Teeny Tiny Homes Are Not Dead, Just Smushed Into High Rise Towers
The pro's and con's of co-livingFor a discussion of co-living and the potential benefits, see: Co-living: What Is It? Who Does It? Why Bother? have been receiving considerable coverage...
How UK Housing Assistance Creates Ugly, Dodgy Investments
A recent article in The Guardian forms a basis for our headline. That article connects financial incentives for first time buyers to a plague of ugly, shoddy new build multi-unit...
Vancouver, BC: ‘Hiving’ As A Resilient Affordable Housing Strategy
Vancouver, BC is the least affordable city in North America, with a high proportion of households with low incomes compared to Canada as a whole. As well, it's a...
Occupier California Moms Evicted Quietly, Peacefully. (They Must Be Canadians!)
A far cry from the raucous civil disobedience housing occupations more than a year ago in Berlin, California's 2 moms + kids illegal occupation of an empty housing investment...
Housing Has Always Been A Commodity, So What’s The Big New Deal?
Currently there's a great deal of hand-wringing about the 'commodification' of housing, in particular its link to exploding housing prices and to blossoming housing crises everywhere. Some go so...
Repairs R Us: Habitat For Humanity Diversifies Onward
In the free markets of today's democracies, housing is an investment, not a human right. To build housing in this commodified environment is to pursue profit, not to reaffirm...
Urban Planning Trapped In The Zoning ‘Solution’
When it comes to building more affordable housing, zoning has a high profile. An article in the New Yorker argues that by focussing on zoning, we miss the importance...
Housing: Asset Or Necessity? Disobedience May Define It, Along With The Future of Capitalism
Two homeless mothers together with children have occupied an empty house in Oakland, California. Currently, there is more housing held empty by investors speculating in Oakland than there are...
Housing Racism: The Diseased Underbelly Of The American Dream
A new book written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surfaces how the American Dream of homeownership has played out for black people.
Early in her career, Taylor worked as a housing advocate....
US Affordable Housing Supply — Sabotaged!
A recent study by two U.S. economists demonstrates how national homebuilders can effectively sabotage the free market, building fewer homes to their great convenience and profit.
In response to cries...
Affordable Housing Activists Eye England’s 216,000 Empty Houses
A new study has emerged that indicates there are far more unsuitably housed people in the UK than previously thought. Read more in The Guardian: More Than 8 Million People...
Use It Or Lose It: Affordable Housing By Compulsory Purchase Order
Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) emerged from a British 17th century need to assemble land in order to create canals. In the 19th century they were used the same way...
