Evidence Public Housing Can Be Done Better, The Next Time Around

With a graveyard in foreground, a high-rise being demolished is half-hidden in a cloud of dust
Thanks to shoddy construction, modern public housing has lasted a few decades at best. Room for improvement? A German project has managed to hang on a few years longer.

This post features a “good news” public housing story. It comes from Germany. We’ll admit it right up front, part of the story is a little stale. It’s about a project started some while ago. It is celebrating an anniversary. Sure, most readers would be willing to accept the inauguration of project that began three years ago in 2017. But how about one a little older . . . okay, a whole century older, which began in 1917? Stretching it, would readers consider an event beginning in say, 1817?? 1717??? 1617????

So we’ll come right out an admit it, this is a good news public housing story which began in 1517 and was completed in 1520. Happy 500th Birthday Fuggerei, Augsberg, Germany!

Fuggerei photo by Fran Castiñeira is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

This is a view of Fuggerei, in Augsberg, Germany — which is arguably the world’s oldest social housing project.

It is still going strong. Rent, which is currently pegged at less than one euro a year, continues at 1520 levels.

It’s critical to hold truly affordable public housing away from the free market. Fuggerei provides proof that it can be done, not just for decades, but for centuries.

In North America, tenants have been blamed for the failures of public housing. Rather than bad planning, lack of funding and poor management, it is the residents who have been judged to be irredeemably degenerate.

From Fuggerei, evidence that there is another reality: Mozart’s grandfather was a tenant. The world has prospered mightily from his degenerate genes! Read more about Fuggerei in Atlas Obscura: Fuggerei

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