It’s a time when cities everywhere are waking up to the cold, hard reality of the affordable housing crisis. Helped by subsidies, the private construction industry has focused its attention on affordable (for some) middle class homes for purchase.
But city managers are facing the rising unaffordability of limited rental housing stocks. The plight of the poorest who cannot manage rising rents? Homelessness. It threatens from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands low income renters in cities around North America.
In this climate, cities and countries are realizing that neglected, dilapidated, social and public housing is not just a long-resented burden upon a city. It is a rapidly weakening dam against homelessness that, if ruptured, will spill a waterfall of human misery out onto city streets.
What can be done? Canada’s National Housing Strategy has earmarked funds for the repair and refurbishment of existing public and social housing.
In the United States, public housing has been badly wounded by an attitude prevalent for decades which has infected all levels of government. That attitude: public housing is a failed idea caused by, and leading to, all manner of human depravity.
Trouble is, no effective replacement has been discovered for massive numbers of low-rent housing units that keep the country’s poorest citizens from becoming homeless. Meanwhile, existing stock has been allowed to decline. Oops.
Oops indeed. With no replacement anywhere on the horizon in spite of a growing demand for affordable rental housing, existing public housing stocks suddenly appear to be a vital backstop against a homelessness disaster. Alas, these housing stocks have been quite deliberately allowed to fall into disrepair.
Nowhere is this problem more apparent than in New York City, some 400,000 public housing units are still in use. Half a year ago, the estimated cost of refurbishing that housing was 25 billion dollars. Try: NYCHA 25 Billion Repair Estimate: Bad Management Or Weird Flaw Of Human Nature?
Today, that estimate has grown to 32 billion dollars, and the federal government, currently a bastion of affordable housing crisis indifference at best and antipathy at worst, is threatening to take action in New York City.
Thank goodness.
So, can we stop blaming whichever level of government is most responsible for decades of bad attitude towards public housing? Actually the free housing market, which is subject to rampant speculation (aided and abetted by public policy, speculators and every homeowner) is driving the cost of human shelter into the stratosphere.
For the latest on New York City’s public housing dilemma, and the method which the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plans to assist, or simply intervene, or both, read more in the New York Times: New York City’s Public Housing Is In Crisis. Will Washington Take Control?
Dare we hope that any HUD intervention will be more substantial than finger pointing or trustee management committed to the tired idea that public housing woes are entirely the fault of depraved and defective tenants who really do deserve to be turfed onto the streets?
