Refugees Making The Best Of A Bad Situation

Thirty years is a long time to wait while ownership of your property is in limboFor another story on this theme, try: Life In The Land Of Nebulous Ownership Status...

Plugging The Ever-Deepening American Housing Sinkhole

Skip back a century and a quarter at least for the housing crises that plagued growing American cities in that era. These were manifest in the form of immigrant...

A Handbook For Restoring Housing Sanity To Canadian Residents

If you were looking for organizations in Canada that promote social housing, a mortgage industry magazine is not the first place you would look. Looking for social housing providers?...

Co-op Housing In Ontario: How Did It Start, Why Did It Stop? Could It Go Again?

If you were asked to imagine what class/group of people were clever enough to create a new concept of housing, who would you choose? A class of arrogant, self-important...

America’s HUD Demonstrates How To. . . ? Kiss Free Enterprise Ass . . .?

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...

U.S. Social Housing: Been There, Done That. Do It Again, Better?

There's a new kid on the U.S. social housing block. Don't apologize if you find yourself frowning while noting that there are grey hairs trailing out from under its...

Back To The Future: Social Housing Yesterday And Tomorrow

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...

Now That Homeless Are ‘Unhoused’, A Retrospective On Scientific Study

Before widespread use of the term 'homeless' as a subject for scientific study, there were other names, for example, 'tramp,' 'hobo,' 'vagrant' and many others. As for the word 'homeless,'...

A Look At “New” Housing Options In The United States

In the aftermath of the Great Recession (2007-2009), there was a big government spend in the United States. Media stories at the time reported that banks benefitted from government...

Inclusionary Zoning In New Jersey: A Long Time Coming

When it comes to building affordable housing, People at New Jersey's Fair Share Housing Center (the Center) are feeling fairly confident that New Jersey is a state to emulate. The...

How To Grow A Housing Crisis – Netherlands Edition

When the UN's special rapporteur on housing published a report about housing in the Netherlands, he was clear that problems facing the country were the result of policy choices...

Retrospective: How Australia Decided To Make New Buildings Accessible

The second in three-post series explores how we as humans come to grips with social issues. The series starts in Australia, where cost-benefit analysis has been applied to two...

History Brings A Human Face To Homelessness In Santa Monica

Here's a story that begins in Santa Monica, California. It could possibly end closer to where you live . . . just about anywhere in the world. It's titled...

Hong Kong : World Wide Social Housing Possibilities From An Inspired Past

Needs must. The needs for affordable housing worldwide has triggered a world of different results, much of it inspired by capitalist free enterprise necessity, not as an oft-derided 'entitlement'...

Unable To Afford Housing? Easy And Cheap To Brand Them Loonies On The Loose

The year 1984 has come and gone. The novel of the same name lives on as a possible expression of a variety of repugnant futures. Currently, we are looking...

High Housing Prices And The Conundrums Of Real Life

A recent essay by Mario Polèse provides an opportunity to consider the usefulness of making comparisons of housing costs in different jurisdictions. Polèse is professeur émérite at the Institut...

Getting The Best From The U.S. Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program

The Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC by common usage, pronounced Lie-tek) has become the major source of affordable housing supply in the United States. With commitments to community...

Will American Social Housing Die A Neoliberal Death Of A Thousand Cuts?

Neoliberal thought has changed the world for several decades of application by governments and industries. That change has ultimately not fulfilled its dreams, although many still continue to adhere...

Looking To The Past In Order To Guide Action In Today’s Housing Market

Can history help guide actions in the housing market today? A 2023 report by Thomas Shay Hill gives us a fine opportunity to find out.  Hill’s report is called...

South Africa: Women’s Experience Of Post-Apartheid Development

This is part of a series that looks at housing and homelessness in South Africa and Canada. It might be a source of inspiration/direction for housing efforts in either...

UK Social Housing & Communities: Time Again For All Hands On Deck?

There is currently some discussion of the idea — nay, even importance — of the value of 'community' within UK housing. This post ultimately targets a discussion about the...

Affordable Housing: Whodunnit Differently? Singapore. Here’s How

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...

John Wheatley Cigarette Card: Never Hit A Home Run, Only Created Social Housing

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...

The Origins Of The Modern Kitchen

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...

Tiny Home Retrospective: When Portland Enticed Landowners To Welcome Aboard The Homeless

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...

Getting To The Heart Of Unequal Housing Experiences In The United Kingdom

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...

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...

What Can History Offer Today’s Public Housing Advocates In The U.S.?

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...

Asleep Near My Doorstep? The Matter Has Long Been Settled. Your Need For Slumber Is A Crime

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...

Report: The UK Needs Four Million New Homes

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...

Housing Discrimination And The Difference Between No Change And Slow Change

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...

Worldwide Events Have Trashed The Honour Of Public Service. Time For A Change!

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...

Rebooting U.S. Public Housing: Hard Aground, Can It Be Refloated?

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, FBI-Hounded Architect With The Fairest Visions Of America

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...

Revisiting Public Investment In Non-Market Housing

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,...

Helping Homeowners With Low Incomes To Avoid Homelessness

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...

Public Housing: Beauty Or The Beast? An Architectural Viewpoint Up-Ends Assumptions

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...

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...

Challenging NIMBY To Create Housing For All

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....

Men’s Nipples Visible Through Shirt? Time For New Housing Standards!

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...

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"...

South Australia Revisit: Affordable Housing Once Done Better

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...

The Plague Of High Housing Prices Spreads Across British Columbia

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...

Social Housing Development – Thorough Research Pays Off

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...

The Rise Of The Land Economy. It’s Shaping Your Future

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...

Reviving Housing Forms That Have Stood The Test Of Time

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...

Reflections On The U.S. Housing Crisis In The Great Depression

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...

Learning From A Housing Experiment In Hawaii

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...

Human Rights And Disabilities – 40 Years of Action

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...

Can We Find The Spirit To Create Post-Pandemic Veterans Housing?

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...

Historic Housing Practices And Discrimination: The Case For Reflection

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...

A Year For Celebrating Historic Social Housing Firsts?

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 . . ....

American Horror Story: Public Housing As Black Suffering And Pain

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...

US Public Housing Today: Necessity Is The Mother of Indifference

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...

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...

National Housing Crises Everywhere? Fix Them By Killing Neoliberalism

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...

Was The American Dream After All A Second Class Utopia?

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...

Will Buffalo, N.Y. Find Its Next Mayor Under Its Bed?

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...

Strengthening Community: A Tenant’s Story

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....

AU Housing: How Capitalists Used Socialism To Help Workers AND Owners

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...

Public Housing Homes As Worker Castles: Way Back When

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...

Flicking A Broken Switch to Turn Off US Public Housing? Doesn’t Work

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...

Non-Market Permanent Affordable Housing: Practical Solution Or Pipe Dream?

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...

Housing Just Gets More Expensive For Low Income Renters

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...

Back To The Future: CMHC’s Award Winning Floor Plans For Small Houses

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...

A Constitutional Barrier To Public Housing Approvals In California

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....

National Irish Success At Building Social Housing Matched With History Middle Class Housing Support

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...

Need Affordable Housing? What ‘Big Government’ Could Do For You.

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...

Helping To Repeat UK History: Meet MAIDIC

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....

Social Housing In Britain: History

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