Rattle a container of upper middle class citizens, and, like a basket of live clams, their shells will close to protect themselves. These are not paragons of social living, but the opposite — the reclusive snobs of the human animal kingdom.
Why then the fascination with the leadership that this class supposedly must provide in mixed income buildings? Such modern high-rises are the current and convenient darlings of the building industry. They snare government subsidies by advertising a socially jumbled hodgepodge as some form of more desirable class-integrated lifestyle.
The prejudice that reinforces this myth is easily traceable — systematic public attacks on social housing that have been energized for years by the absurd presumption that the people who live in social housing are so genetically malformed as to be incapable of forming a productive community.1
And so mixed income housing developments can be sold as kinds of perpetual learning machines, in which live-in ‘normal’ higher-class instructors are able to guide and mentor and police the handfuls of lower-class defectives — the Eliza Doolittles (a name quite artfully chosen) who cannot ascend the scales of humanity without suitable instruction from professor Henry Higgins.
The term “affordable” has been a casualty of these My Fair Lady housing projects. “Affordable” housing was once a pan-nation definition that hovered somewhere at a standard 30% of income spent on housing, whether as rent or mortgage payment. Now “affordable” housing means anything that the housing industry and its government co-conspirators decide it means.2
Pretzel-bending the definition of “affordable” is a means of funnelling housing dollars destined to support low and no-income citizens into more lucrative building projects for the middle classes (who are invariably more grateful voters for for government-approved largesse).
What about the future of “social housing” (or in some countries “public” or “council housing”)? Will these term(s) also fall victim to the joint demands of housing industry profits as well as the need for fruitful additions to a community tax base?
Alas, the future has arrived. Vancouver, British Columbia, has solved the critical need for more social housing in the city in the easiest possible way. The city has simply re-defined “social housing” to refer to the familiar and convenient affordable hodgepodge.
A Vancouver city councillor has recently called out this nonsense. Read more in the Georgia Straight: Vancouver definition of social housing contrary to English language, Pete Fry says in council motion
For a specific example of the absurd consequences of a redefinition of social housing read more, see also in The Georgia Straight: Renters earning less than $63,000 qualify at East Vancouver church’s social housing project
Footnotes
- For a rebuttal to this absurdity, try: Public Housing Residents Want It Just As It Is, Not ‘Improved’ By Developer
- Try: Here’s Where We Cry ‘Uncle’ On The Meaning of ‘Affordable’
