The ever-growing low-income housing crisis is largely due to the uncontrolled free-market commodification of housing that raises rents and purchase prices beyond the reach of those with small, or no, incomes.
The severity of this crisis has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In many nations, calls are increasing for a return to social housing with stable, affordable rents that can be insulated from free market housing speculators.
Any return to social housing must address the ‘old chestnuts’ such as crime and drug use in social housing projects. The chestnuts may be old, but they are, alas, still lurking!1
In modern cities, it’s possible to find brand new high rise condos right next door to social housing. Why does one have clean, safe hallways while tenants in the other put up with drug dealers lurking in the stairwells? The obvious answer: condo boards simply will not permit a depraved living environment and will take whatever security steps, however expensive, to eradicate such a problem.
Most social housing tenants have no such powerful board of peers to make decisions, let alone the budget resources to make those actions happen.
In fact, complaining about carpets strewn with drug needles in a social housing building can in most cases only be made to the very source of the problem — housing management. The response will all too frequently be no response, or ‘sorry, we haven’t the money to provide the security you feel you need and deserve.’
Which in turn, passes the buck back to the government entity that underfunds the social housing project and which has literally thousands of years of tried and true municipal excuses to fall back on.
So what is a concerned tenant to do? Wish for the advent of a powerful housing board on which tenants sit, and where they have a meaningful say? Not the world’s worst idea by any stretch of the imagination, but not a consideration for this post.
Instead, we’d like to follow the lead of a number of Australian tenants who have begun to agitate for the creation of a public housing ombudsman. Read more in The Age: ‘Issues Not Addressed’: Push For Public Housing Ombudsman
Assumptions are fairly made about the role of an ombudsman — they run to such ideas as careful and compassionate listening to even the lowliest, as well as a meaningful influence to press their impartial judgements upon those who have transgressed. But ombudsmen, like social housing managers, have government masters.
For an object lesson in how ombudsmen can engender hope, achieve improvements, and yet still disappoint, consider the life and times of a Canadian Ombudsman for Veteran’s Affairs, one covering a somewhat broader territory than housing alone. Read more in the CBC: Veterans Advocates Lament Sudden Departure Of Ombudsman Craig Dalton
Yes, ombudsmen can do an important job in advocating for tenants, but ultimately their actions are limited by their own masters. And those masters might see the role of ombudsman as a sympathetic ear to tenant worries designed to defuse anger and frustration before consigning those worries to a black hole of government inaction.
Because of this, it may well be as effective, or more so, for activists to address their campaigns directly towards changing the attitudes of those directly responsible — the housing managers.
Ombudsmen or Housing managers? Who can most effectively help clean up and make safe the lives of social housing tenants? The jury is well and truly out on this question.
Footnotes
- For just one of many examples, try: No Easy Solution To Drug Issues Frustrating Social Housing Tenants
