If you’ve been following our posts, you’ll know that we’ve behaved a little like breathless enthusiasts about an emerging activist housing philosophy. North America is seeing currently fashionable proposals that national housing crises can be resolved by a new dawn for public (built by the government) housing.
It is to be separated from traditional American public housing, by renaming it ‘social housing.’ Social housing will offer a standard of quality that will attract both lower and middle classes. According to the theory, it could be self-sustaining thanks to the financial wallop of rent-geared-to-income of the middle class tenants.
Here’s a headline from Canada that suggests the philosophy has filtered north of the border, too, from THE GLOBE AND MAIL: To solve Canada’s housing crisis, learn how Singapore nationalized real estate
In the U.S., citizens of Seattle Washington are moving from thought to action. A referendum has recently indicated that such a housing crisis solution is worthy of thought backed by investment1.
A popular model for this brave new social housing is the supposedly unending success of Singapore’s public housing, an initiative which evolved in 1965 when the city-state separated from Malaysia.
Managed by the Housing Development Board (HDB), a government agency, Singapore’s public housing is quite different from much of the rest of the world. Homes were built on government land and occupied on a 99-year lease. Its heavily subsidized support for the poorest meant that all citizens could afford to live in housing designed to provide suitable standards and desirability for the middle classes.
Singapore boasts that since its inception, leases for HDB-leased homes have kept pace with inflation, effectively branding them a never-ending ‘affordable’ success story.
But are activists and media publications in other countries (including affordablehousingaction.org) over-hyping the potential benefits of Singapore style housing success?
The following article addresses claims that Singapore housing has maintained its affordability since the mid-1900’s. Technically, this boast may be true, but Kimberly Lim and Joy Lai make the case that the impact of housing upon a family or individual budget must also take into account the affordability of all else that drains the purse — many items of which have not been cost-controlled, and have risen steadily.
Read more in RICE: Times Have Changed. Maybe the Idea of ‘Affordable’ Public Housing Should Change Too.
