Social Housing, newly minted for America! What is it? How does it offer to mitigate and, hopefully one day, end a current national housing crisis? This post introduces an article that points to experiments in ‘new wave’ social housing that are currently under way in America.
Affordablehousingaction.org has been following social housing developments in Seattle. They began as an activist initiative, found their way onto a public ballot and were approved. Since then, there have been some crucial, albeit tiny, steps forward. Lack of funding is a critical impediment, a problem that is featured in the following article.
The authors outline some of the ‘new generation’ thinking, and its origins in non-American examples, principally Vienna, Austria.
In this ‘lay of the land’ survey document, there is one omission that stands out as a head-scratcher. America’s own social housing experiment goes virtually unmentioned. It has evolved for almost a century of actual government-financed, rent-geared-to income project completion. Search the following article for the term ‘public’ and you will find it 21 times. Only one can be even obliquely linked to thousands of existing social housing units that are still occupied by hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
What’s going on here? Have ‘new wave’ activists, following the lead of disdainful national, state, and and local governments, together with the public at large, simply abandoned this uniquely American form of social housing as not fit for purpose?
If so, those activists are acting against their own formula for the evolution of exciting new forms of social housing. According to the following article, one of three criteria of ‘new wave’ public housing is that it be democratically run. That means that residents have meaningful say over their living conditions.
And yet here we have hundreds of thousands of people who have actively experienced social housing. They have much to say about the experience, including feedback about what for many of them has been for them a positive life experience. This is in spite of incessant calls to tear down their homes for a variety of economic reasons near and dear to politicians and free market land developers.
With some semantic trickery — ‘social housing’ is not ‘public housing’ — it almost seems public housing tenants and their experience is being conveniently written out of any ‘new’ social housing equation. There is ample evidence that public housing residents have positive, even useful, things to say about a century of social housing experimentation. Not prepared to listen to them as usual? Then welcome to déjà vue all over again.
Leaving aside this puzzler, the following article opens doors to a number of possible social housing experiments. Hopefully one or more of them will lead to social housing developments that can make a real dent in America’s national affordable housing crisis.
Read more in NPQ: Social Housing: How a New Generation of Activists Are Reinventing Housing
