Need A Million Houses? UK Labour Party Wants To Revive Social Housing In A Big Way.

Becontree Estate photo by Chris Guy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Becontree Estate, London. Once the largest council house scheme in Europe. It is wearing well!

With American conservatives pouring poison down the social housing well at a fearsome rate, the world — or at very least the North American continent — has been brainwashed to believe that the failure of public housing has been caused by the irresponsibility of those who lived in it.

Not all Americans are convinced of this fact, no matter how often it has been repeated. And overseas, a healthy number of decision-makers have never believed the received wisdom that social housing tenants are all bad people. This number includes United Kingdom Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Historically, governments are the only entities which have ever successfully built massive amounts of affordable housing. As well, governments have the power to address land ownership with necessary tools to tackle the task of making it truly affordable.

Recently, the private sector housing industry in both the U.K. and the U.S. has been promoted to the front lines of the war on unaffordable housing. Compared to social housing, however, it is clearly not up to the task.

Yes, it has been willing to accept government assistance and take up the challenge of adding affordable housing to new mixed housing developments. Unfortunately, compared to the number market rate houses constructed in each project, the percentage of affordable housing being built is small, a drop in the bucket compared to the growing need for affordable housing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, the notion of “affordability” is migrating upmarket to include not only very low income households but also those in higher income brackets. This is creating a class of so-called “affordable” housing that may satisfy a government’s affordable housing construction targets, but is in reality unaffordable for those with the lowest incomes.

Now Jeremy Corbyn is proposing to seriously tackle the affordable housing crisis by building one million truly affordable homes using the much maligned but well proven social housing model. This proposal (dependent on Labour winning a parliamentary majority, naturally) is so ambitious that it has reduced at least one long-time affordable housing advocate to a confusion of scepticism and cautious joy.

Read his analysis in CityMetric: Jeremy Corbyn just proposed what looks suspiciously like a truly radical set of social housing policies

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