
If you’re interested in affordable housing, we’d like to “water” down your experience for a few moments in service of one large word: remunicipalization. (You may need a sip of water just to swallow it!)
Remunicipalization has emerged as a term to describe returning privatized municipal services to public management. It initially focused on water management and reflected growing public concern, then action, to rescue clean water and waste water management — vital to healthy communities — from public private partnerships (PPPs) and other forms of government handoff to privatization.
The need for rescue has become evident in many countries. The supposed efficiencies of private enterprise have worked to generate profits for shareholders at the expense of safe water management for citizens.
Remunicipalization now casts a wider net. It is being used to describe the return of municipal energy resources such as electricity and gas supply to a safer harbour of public management.
Remunicipalization’ is anchored by “municipal,” a village/town/city reference. Nevertheless, with different jurisdictions involving one or more levels of government in the delivery of services to citizens, the term is does not exclude the idea of removing services from private management and returning them to regions or states.
The remunicipalization concept is being widened to embrace other essential services that have fallen victim to the ‘small government’ ideal that private sector bureaucracies are effectively more efficient than public sector bureaucracies.
What has remunicipalization got to do with affordable housing?
Particularly influenced by “Thatcherite” small government theories over the last three decades, municipal government responsibilities for housing that is affordable to low income households has been in many countries offloaded to the private sector. One way this has happened is through housing allowances1 that allow low income residents to access private market housing. As the cost of housing rises, so too are allowances and vouchers a continually rising expense to governments.
Alternatively, new affordable housing for low income citizens has been created by way of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). Day by day, affordable housing PPPs, while they are undoubtedly profitable for private enterprise, are proving completely inadequate when it comes to delivering meaningful quantities of sorely needed affordable housing.
We are certainly not yet facing a wholesale flight of affordable housing construction away from PPPs. However, there are certainly indications, particularly in the UK, that municipalities are fed up with the unfulfilling promise of PPPs and are remunicipalizing it — taking housing responsibilities back into public hands2.
Much detailed discussion around remunicipalization is taking place in the academic press rather than public media, so good explanations of purpose and progress are often locked behind academic press pay walls. Here’s one that’s not, from the Transnational Institute: Here To Stay: Water Remunicipalisation As A Global Trend
Footnotes
- Referred to as Section 8 and Housing Choice vouchers in the US and Housing Benefit in the UK.
- Try: The PPP Era? Lost In Translation. Edinburgh Refocuses On Social Housing