The title of this article pays homage to a much more impressive one which we’ll get to in a moment. It’s partially entitled ” . . from Stalin to Mr. Bean via Orwell.”
A casual definition of a bandied-about term — social rent — is fairly easy to present, and as well we hope, to understand. If you want more information, try our article: Social Rent: What Is It? How Does It Help Us Understand Affordable Housing?
Understanding the nature of social rent is one thing. Implementing social rent is another story all together. We’re therefore introducing an article that breaks down the many steps taken by the United Kingdom over decades to implement social housing, and in support of that objective, a fair and workable system of social rent.
Why would this be of interest to any other country? The question applies particularly to the United States, whose public (a.k.a social) housing experiment over the last three quarters of a century has quasi-officially been declared an unworkable concept leading to housing disaster.
Ever since the scales fell from American eyes and social housing was seen to be a form of dreaded cold war socialism, it has been ignored, disparaged and over the past few decades, brutally dismantled.
Over those same decades other countries have fallen under the spell of small-c conservative worship of private enterprise as the best solution for building any kind of housing. And they too have suffered varying degrees of degradation to public and social housing stock.
Canada, with its very welcome new National Housing Initiative, has recognized and belatedly addressed the degradation, with promises to refurbish what’s still standing. As for building new social housing? So far, the plan seems to provide rent subsidies rather than build new units. Without rent controls, injecting more money for private rental housing will simply be pure oxygen to the blast furnace of unaffordability.
And yet even conservative, small government thinking has recently opined that social/public housing was not intrinsically evil or unworkable, but merely sabotaged by government that simply would not get social occupancy or social rent ‘right.’ For more on this, read in the National Review: An Improvement to Ben Carson’s Public-Housing Proposal
Meanwhile, we are in the midst of another housing experiment. Instead of government built housing, public need is being paired with private expertise through public/private partnerships to build affordable housing of any and every stripe (including social housing).
Which brings us to the last half of this article’s title: Social Rent: From Socialism to Slapstick . . . and back again.
Back again, because public private partnerships are proving incapable of building a reasonable amount of social housing. Public/private partnerships are able to manage ‘affordable’ housing — if you accept the premise that all housing is affordable to somebody.
When it comes to social housing, it must be constructed on a far greater scale to address the acute housing needs of large populations which currently teeter on the edge of homelessness.
And if social housing must be nurtured and built anew, the following article is worth some study. It explores the perils of creating a workable UK social rent system through eras that ranged from utopian ambition through social pragmatism to neoconservative dismissive disdain and wholesale dismantling.
This in a country that once firmly embraced the importance of social housing, then lost faith. Now however, the UK is beginning to turn away from public/private development models which have failed to provide more than inadequate handfuls of social housing within ‘affordable’ housing projects. The new trend is towards the old: larger numbers of true social rent housing, under the development supervision of non-profits such as housing authorities, or of local government.
Read more at Redbrickblog: Rent roulette: from Stalin to Mr Bean via Orwell
