Public Funding

Some while back, the American agency responsible for government-guaranteed affordable housing launched a housing 'demonstration' program. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) proposed that deteriorating public housing...

Mighty America, and to a minor degree, 'Us-Too' Canada, stumbled off the social housing rails roughly a century ago. During the 1930's depression, social housing in the United States...

Kristen Hackett is someone you may identify with. Looking around the United States, she sees systems that systematically support segregation, even though it's officially illegal. She doesn't want to...

House Our Neighbors is an advocacy group that is based in Seattle. House Our Neighbors' mission is to build social housing — non-market housing that will rent at affordable...

What is the Wohngemeinnützigkeit, or common good housing, law? Germany is planning to follow in earlier footsteps and attempting to entice the private sector into operating non-profit housing. Internationally,...

A three-post series explores how we as humans come to grips with social issues. The setting is Australia, where cost-benefit analysis has been applied to two different issues. This...

With a limited number of builders in a local housing market, it is possible to build enough homes to sustain high profit levelsTry: Why Are Housing Starts Falling Short...

Richard Blakeway, Housing Ombudsman for England, has issued a report chronicling the poor service meted out to social tenants by their landlords. Blakeway is making a case for retooling...

Over-hyped? Under-Delivered? There's no question that factory-built, road-transported modules delivered to the construction field provide a significant challenge. Conventional builders struggle with the new pressures of just-in-time mega-parts delivery....

To hear America talk about it, that nation is in a contest for top dog of the world. Maintaining its influence, it remains firmly committed to a capitalist, free-enterprise...

The whopper: 1.3 billion dollars. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears to be committed to telling homelessness like it is. For example, in a recent speech aimed partly at the...

The State of California recently put its local governments on notice when it rejected virtually all of their housing plans. Faced with growing numbers of people experiencing homelessness, the...

Perhaps you've heard of the Homeless Industrial Complex? At the very least it seems to be a phenomenon on North America's west coast. It's hardly as financially fattening as...

Los Angeles has a large and growing number of people experiencing homelessness. To its credit, the city took steps in 2016 to increase the supply of housing that would...

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...

The Canada Mortgage And Housing Corporation (CMHC) is the country's federal housing agency. In the roughest sense it is the equivalent of the US Department of Housing and Urban...

Canada is officially rolling out the welcome mat for refugees from the Ukraine and Afghanistan. How do they fare when they get here? Quite well, thanks to local community...

Canada's National Housing Council has just released a report with a title that is hardly a headline grabber: Analysis of Affordable Housing Supply Created by Unilateral National Housing Strategy...

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...

A story from Next City reports on two pieces of legislation recently passed in California. They are intended to assist community based non-profit agencies buy housing. The first requires...

If you're not American, the country's social insurance complex of programs will most likely not touch you at all. But this post, and the following article/report from the Brookings Institute,...

Post-pandemic turmoil in the housing market of America's largest city? Laissez-faire. Leave it be. Let the private sector, master of all housing matters, perform any needed recovery. . . ....

The Tyee has published a five part series about a green new deal for housing. The Tyee is based in Vancouver, where housing prices are beyond the reach of...

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...

A local article from a Welsh newspaper paints in one corner of an enormous issue: 'decarbonization' of United Kingdom's social housing. Viewed from America, decarbonization or greening, or energy efficiency,...

A recent article in Mother Jones recounts a story from Los Angeles about 10,000 units of public housing that were never built. The article is about Frank Wilkinson, who worked...

Local Housing Solutions is a web site designed to help people who want to take action to help make housing more affordable to people with very low incomes. It...

Quoting from an excellent, detailed article on the implementation of Low Income Housing Tax Credits in West Oakland, Pittsburg, PA: "With 9% LIHTC alone, the city would need...

In a time of growing housing crises, what possesses a state legislature to use its housing trust fund as a reserve to tackle other urgent matters, not once but...

Governments, for all their supposed powers, are clearly at a disadvantage when it comes to competing with private enterprise that has sniffed profit in the wind. Sandy Springs, a newish...

A slightly more fast and loose post, ranting completely understated

Okay, we were as aghast as everybody else that "poor" doors had been installed in a publicly subsidized New York City building so that rich folks didn't need to...

Before getting into The Guardian Housing and Public Service Awards, an affordablehousingaction.org Top Affordable Housing Newspaper award to The Guardian itself. The Guardian is right up there in quality with the top handful...

From the Right: eliminate onerous government regulations and the free market will build us all out of affordable housing crises, providing the necessary housing for ownership by the "workforce,"...

Following World War II, the United States committed 12 billion dollars over 4 years to rebuild Europe. It was then quite a chunk of the country's annual budget and...

At affordablehousingaction.org we've expressed some concern that climate change activists may find themselves competing for limited funding with affordable housing activistsTry: Saving The World One Tree? Affordable House? At...

In April of this year, we featured a post on the City of Los Angeles's flirtation with the idea of a public bankPublic Banks: What Are They? What Might They...

Bamboozled by dodgy definitions of affordable housing, the City of London somehow has recently managed to slither away from building any truly affordable housing at all. But that was...

This isn't a question of what President Trump would like to do, more the issue of what any President at this moment of time is actually able to do. Democratic...

A recent and superficially very generous offer to boost low-income South Carolina residents onto the housing ladder has been described as “One Of The Best Deals We’ve Ever Had."...

When Canada's sleeping giant (in this case, its federal government) finally awoke to a variety of housing crises in 2017, it did so with a 10 year, 40 billion...

Following the landslide re-election for India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, how is his hugely ambitious "Housing For All By 2022" plan coming along? Not a slam dunk yet, but it...

Finally! Over the past few decades it has seemed that when it comes to housing, the Canadian federal government was hiding in bed with the covers over their head. Then...

An unprecedented coalition of charities and activist groups are challenging the next UK Prime Minister to face up to reality. They are labelling as a total failure the public/private...

Nice little business you've got going for yourselves there, Australia. The Federal Government bankrolls a state — Tasmania — to build public housing. Too bad the state can't pay...

Affordable housing? It's déja vu all over again in Kingston, Ontario, as the local paper compares the current affordable housing crisis to the one the city was suffering in...

It's an old story which still holds. You have to spend money to make money. A consortium of non-profit, government and industry groups found this out after they commissioned study...

A recent pledge of $500 million to help build affordable housing in Seattle led to excited buzz about private enterprise stepping up the the plate for affordable housing, when...

Way back when, remember Big Government? Oh. You think Big Government is still with us, a bloated zombie from a failed twentieth century socialist experiment, still hard at work draining tax...

Federal Government interest in affordable housing for Canadians peaked after World War II and then steadily declined into indifference and neglect that has characterized that government's attitude over the...

Population aging in a number of countries has shone a nasty new light on the limitations of public/private partnerships in fulfilling the promise of affordable housing. Why? Because the affordable...

Public private partnerships (PPP) for developing and managing affordable housing have demonstrated a powerful allegiance to profit before public good in several western countries. Indeed, everywhere you look these...

Any citizen of a modern democracy who has weathered a change in government will be familiar with the sudden evaporation of campaign promises made by the victors. The incoming government...

Affordable housing financed by tax credits doesn't really become unaffordable when the tax credits expire. That's because the housing never was affordable in the first place. Tax credits help...

Windsor, Ontario believes that it has become a magnet for homeless people because newspaper reports either accurately or inaccurately rate the city as one of the most affordable in...

The warnings to watch out have been echoing within North America's conventional housing industry. Take the idea expressed in an industry magazine Builder article earlier this year: that successful construction industry...

The shoemaker is sticking to his last. For 'shoemaker' read 'the conventional housing construction industry.' Their 'last'? Market rate and luxury housing. Hard to blame them. That's where they're...

Like a majority of American States, Arkansas has created a Low Income Trust Fund to help it build affordable housing for those most in need. Unlike a majority of American...

The Charleston, SC, author of an opinion piece on the need for imaginative housing solutions waxes nostalgic about his upbringing in a neighbourhood of purpose-built affordable housing. In the midst...

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...

Public banks — those are the ones that are open to the public, right? Yes . . . and no. Although people may casually refer to a "public banking system,"...

Public transit takes the fall in an awkward, defensive article about the housing market in Toronto by one of Canada's top business newspapers. Toronto, for many years overly-conscious of becoming a...

When finished, 41 households in Patterson, California, will move into affordable homes that they will help to build. Self-Help Enterprises is the sponsor of the project. The US Department...

However 'winning' the Cold War benefited America, reflections on the history of this period are gradually exposing costs incurred by the stoking of public fear. Today, a new generation of...

In an era when a global housing crisis demands leadership from national government, it seems reasonable to expect that local government would be one hundred and ten percent onside,...

Community activists in New York City are pushing for the establishment of community-oriented banks that can be counted on the reinvest a community's financial resources into local endeavours, such...

So the brilliant Margaret Thatcher era scheme to buy your UK council rental home is unravelling. Really, it only ever could unravel. With only a third of the sale price...

On one hand, we have a world-wide casino that uses the basic need for shelter for gambling chips — housing. The result in America?  According to an admittedly self-interested...

Shelter, a UK based charity, published New Civic Housebuilding 2017 to present an approach to building affordable housing using successful strategies from the past. The report argues that developing...

In the spirit of promising all things to all people, The New Zealand Labour Parliament's Kiwibuild initiative is progressing from an election promise to a government program. It began...

A nationally respected housing developer has decided to tell it like it is: the huge financial burden of affordable social housing cannot be born alone by one business sector...

In America, public housing history helps to bridge the gap between 'don't be cruel to the very poorest' (accompanied by conservative eye rolling) and 'help the poor lift themselves...

From the left: The United Kingdom At least some people in Britain, including those who vote labour, are looking forward to leader Jeremy Corbyn's regular promises of 1,000,000 new units of...

With American conservatives pouring poison down the social housing well at a fearsome rate, the world — or at very least the North American continent — has been brainwashed...

Central Florida, once an inexpensive to place to live, has seen a dramatic drop in housing affordability. Fortunately in 1992, a bipartisan bill was passed in the Florida Legislature:...

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...

In 2014, when the Australian government sold 293 properties of public housing in Sydney’s harbour area, it promised to build 1,500 new affordable housing units. At the time, there...

According to free market conservatives, American public housing is dead. It was the victim of its socialist anti-free-enterprise roots and of the lower class inhabitants who, in fits of...

Why does Lawford Village, Essex, need a housing trust? The answer begins with a proposed Labour government policy in 1959, one that would enshrine local council tenants the Right...

Financial assistance for home buyers can come in several forms. On the surface, government cash handouts or tax relief strongly appear to make housing more affordable. But those with...

Many private/public partnerships to build affordable housing do not pass the smell test with their handfuls of affordable houses or apartments in projects numbering hundreds of market rate or...

In a recent speech committing to more British affordable housing, Prime Minister Theresa May was quick to find culprits everywhere, but not so much on her own doorstep. The...

In a recent article, the Mayor of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island echoed a funding frustration that many lower level governments and non-governmental organizations face. Governments at all levels tend...

New Jersey towns and cities have had a long history of trying very hard to wriggle out of affordable housing responsibilities, so hard in fact that the courts have...

During recent Progressive Revenue Task Force public testimony, a homeless participant stopped breathing. Following many tense moments and an ambulance to hospital, his replacement explained that the recovering victim suffered...

Everyone knows you can't bail out a sea. And yet, when it comes to homelessness, city councils behave like children on a beach staring at the water with a...

The recent great tax giveaway by President Trump and the Republican Party has provided long term delight for the wealthy. An insubstantial windfall will  blow very gently in the...

The great American public housing projects have failed. They became lawless, violent, unliveable. The great unanswered question: did the needy, with their brutish, immoral, uncivilized and criminal ways, cause...

What happens when the brave new affordable world of public/private partnerships meets only half the annual demand for affordable housing? What happens? It's obvious. The demand for affordable housing just...

Municipal handwringing would appear to be the sole, and all-too-frequent, response to privately-developed affordable housing that doesn't quite deliver on its promise. One example: a widespread tendency under new...

For all of its physically attractive qualities, gentrification of inner cities is becoming a barrier to affordable housing world-wide. In North America, government action is limited by 'hands off...

A recent development by Singapore's public Housing and Development Board suggests an alarming future for public/private partnerships in countries who may be helping the needy to find affordable housing...