Retrospective

When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965 it had aspirations to become a regional and world-beating economy.  In 50-odd years it has achieved that goal. From the word go, Singapore...

Have you got a cigarette card of John Wheatley like the one above? Collecting cigarette cards of British politicians probably never had the the attraction of owning baseball cards...

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky is not a household name. And yet, she was a vital presence in housing design for most of the 20th century. Following World War I, Schütte-Lihotzky was commissioned...

When affordablehousingaction.org was just starting to blog, we began searching (as we still are) for ideas that seemed to promise easing national homelessness crises. Five years ago there was...

David Robinson, Jenny Preece and Glyn Robbins set out to study equality in housing in England, Scotland and Wales. They planned to include examples of best practices. The idea...

"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...

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...

The COVID pandemic resulted in a profound change — temporarily at least — in the way that homeless citizens were treated world-wide. Was it because communities were overwhelmed by...

When this writer was growing up, there was a ridiculous ad for packaged mints. It featured two people arguing about whether the mint was a breath freshener or a...

Sometimes, it seems like things are simply stuck. Take the Fair Housing Act, which was signed in to United States law by President Johnson in 1968. The law officially...

How did the reputation of public servants gurgle down the drain? In America today, teachers are included in this question. "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." Clever little...

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...

Gregory Ain wanted to build social housing in Los Angeles. During a lengthy, illustrious career he won a Guggenheim grant to research small, inexpensive, single family homes. Ultimately, the...

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,...

In the United States, there are homeowners with very low incomes. Their housing costs are high when compared with those incomes. Even for someone who owns their home without...

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...

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...

St. John's, the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador, is Canada's easternmost province. There, The Canadian Homebuilders Association — Newfoundland and Labrador teamed up with the City of St....

This post is hardly good news for citizens of the United Kingdom. Other nationalities may view it with a sigh of relief together with head-scratching curiosity. As far as...

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"...

Nothing on a world-wide basis quite matches American hubris. America even does 'bad' better than anyone else. That would seem to be the relentless message around US public/social housing...

Tim Richter is one of the leaders behind Vote Housing, a Canadian campaign to draw attention to the affordable housing crisis. He frequently reminds us that we have created...

Affordablehousingaction.org frequently trots out Singapore and Vienna as examples of 'how social housing could be done better.' Nor is this some unique trend. Governments support fact finding missions. As...

You are a young person who has done all the right things. You've got a good education and a job that pays well. You're living with your parents to...

Ipek Türeli is based at the School of Architecture at McGill University in Montréal. She has recently written an article in The Conversation about the housing crisis in Canada...

The 1930's were a desperate time in the U.S. Years of drought meant repeated crop failures. Work sites were shuttered. Hundreds of thousands of people lost work and their...

Did you know that Hawaii initiated an affirmative action program to protect Native Hawaiians from extinction and promote their culture in 1922? Would this program and the experience of...

Jan Grue has Muscular Dystrophy. He is a professor at the University of Oslo in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography. Grue was born in 1981, the International Year...

Post-world war II, there was an explosion of home building. The destruction of war necessitated the replacement of destroyed housing in countries that were active theatres of hostilities. The...

It seems that more and more people writing aboutt how housing is woven into racism and discrimination in the United States. Here are two recent examples, one from the...

There are some perennially familiar annual record breakers: World's most expensive city in which to live: Hong Kong World's most crowded city in which to live: Hong Kong . . ....

Candyman 1 and 2 are horror movies that fit into university curriculum on the subjects of . . . American racism The history of national hatred targeting Public Housing The...

Necessity the mother of indifference? A far cry from the period following World War II, when necessity was very much the mother of amazing invention as countries rebuilt housing...

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...

Fine to suggest killing it, but both left-wing leaning and right-wing leaning political parties in westernized nations have been enamoured with neoliberalism for the past thirty or forty years. Is...

The American Dream as it is generally imagined is still principally a land of tiny castles on barely larger kingdoms, with notional moats nothing more than grassy drainage ditches...

Under the bed? You know. That uniquely American hangout of Reds, Commies, Socialists, Cold War Boogymen, World Domination Ambitions, Nuclear Holocaust Dreams, Back Garden Bomb Shelters. And Bernie Sanders. Having...

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

Warning: this is a socialist article in a socialist publication. However, gun-shy conservative readers with red-under-the-bed phobia will miss out on historic ways that Australian conservative politics turned housing support for...

From Liverpool UK, here's a modest little "good news" post about public housing — if you're prepared to head back to the Victorian era in the 19th century for...

Much of what affordablehousingaction.org publishes about social/public/council housing could in the US be considered palliative care for a dying industry and its long-suffering tenants. American public housing has been...

People with very low incomes face big hurdles when it comes to affording housing. With minimal resources, they have limited housing options and little control over their housing in...

Apartment List, a private sector web-based rental housing listing service in the United States, has just released its report tracking trends in income and housing costs from 2008 to...

February 1, 2019. Homes for Canadians. The Canadian Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) 'THERE has long been an urgent demand in Canada for new, attractive designs of low or moderate-cost...

Institutional racism at the highest level is not at all distant in America's past. Earlier this month (February 2019) Virginia's governor admitted to a youthful yearbook appearance in blackface....

The government in the Republic of Ireland will shortly unveil new plans for affordable housing. While waiting, The Irish Times offers a review of the state's role in housing over...

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...

MAIDIC came into being in 1841 to build affordable housing for the working classes. By 1900 it owned and rented more than 6000 dwellings in the London, England area....

A nice little easy-read history of Social Housing in Britain from the BBC: A history of social housing