
With growing numbers of low income residents in North America paying more than half their income in rent, there’s a pressing need for scalable housing solutions that do not just stem the tide of unaffordable housing, but reverse it.
Is there a bright future for social housing in North America? Maybe yes, given its historic success, for a time at least. Today, in spite of endless efforts to kill it, social housing stubbornly clings to life as a testament to its effectiveness in supporting the housing needs of low/no income citizens. The same effectiveness is more easily and widely found in healthy social housing programs in other countries around the world.
But if successful public housing is to return to North America, it will mean a profound change in lingering management bully behaviour that seems to be based on assumptions of social superiority at best and racism at worst. Such bullying still goes unchecked. The bullies can carry on, reinforced by the almost-certain knowledge that the recipients have neither the resources or the influence to sue or otherwise rain justice upon their tormentors.
For a fine recent example of social housing management still trampling roughshod over residents, read more at CBS Chicago: Management Hauls Off CHA Tenants’ Urban Garden, Calling It A Hazard; ‘I Feel Like They Stole My Things’
. . . and a rental management initiative in Halifax hints that the leopard, which needs to change its spots, is not tenants as much as badly behaved management that sets the social housing mood. Try: Public Housing Revisited: Just Who Was Disrespecting Who?