Home ownership is a founding (or possibly foundering) tenet of countries still strongly influenced by Reaganism/Thatcherism/Neoliberal thought. That includes North America, The British Isles (Including the Republic of Ireland), and the Far Side Of The World — including Australia and New Zealand.
Part of a smug government certainty that exists to this day, there is a backbone of bureaucratic thought and action that relentlessly coddles the home-ownership belief1. The mindset remains oblivious even as more and more people will never be able to afford home ownership, thanks to rampant financialization. Truly affordable rental housing appears headed for unaffordable hell in a handbasket of bureaucratic indifference, or even active hostility.
A small but telling example in America can be found in an article with a headline of triumphantly bland obscurity, found below.
In it, we learn that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) maintains policies that fundamentally guarantee the failure of local initiatives to maintain existing affordable housing. Communities suffering from expansion of their homeless population in all of its rough sleeping, panhandling and ragged tent encampment sadness, need to be able to maintain their public housing.
HUD, now set on bribing the private sector to take over its parental relationship with public housing, is seemingly not just indifferent, but actively hostile to jurisdictions that are trying to mitigate the affordable rental housing crisis by preserving whatever they can. Specifically, HUD requires that a public housing unit that become vacant must be filled within 17 days. 17 Days to refurbish decades of deferred repairs? In many cases, it’s just not possible.
Does such a policy prevent the buildup of vacant affordable housing in a community? Or does it actually ensure that that such a 17+ days vacant unit rule is virtually guaranteed a trip to the public housing garbage heap?
Read more about a local housing authority struggling with this dilemma in yahoo!news: Carter visits Brunswick Housing Authority
Footnotes
- For some insight on this, try: Stop Squabbling, UK MPs! Tail-Wagging Homeowners Need Petting
