
Two years ago, Homes For All published a report entitled Communities Over Commodities: People-Driven Alternatives to an Unjust Housing System. At the time American politics, particularly at the federal level, battled onward without much if any indication that a national housing crisis was even on the radar.
Over the last year, however, the situation has changed. In the seemingly endless run up to the 2020 elections, Democratic candidates of all stripes are signalling an awareness of the problem, as well as proposing willingness (if not solutions) to tackle there deepening housing crisis.
There is now some possibility that 2021 may be greeted by a new federal administration bent on building, rather than dismantling, a housing safety net for those in need of truly affordable housing. That in turn brings more immediate relevance to ‘people-driven’ alternatives in the study mentioned above.
Shelterforce has published a useful article summarizing the report’s four ways in which new affordable housing can be held away from the speculative housing investment market.
One notable absence in both the Shelterforce article and the Communities over Commodities Report itself is the possibility of social housing as a means of avoiding ‘tinkering at the margins’ of the housing crisis.
We sympathize completely with suspicions that governments ‘for and by the people’ are these days ‘for and by special interests,’ particularly business and investor interests. That has not always been the case, and it may well be that the immediate future could bring about the creation of needed large quantities of affordable housing ‘for the people’, just as they were created in the age of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930’s.
Social/public housing, for all its well-known funding and management failures, might well be the most effect ‘non-tinkering framework for consideration when imagining the scaling up of ideas such as those summarized in the article from Shelterforce: Solutions To An Unjust Housing System