In some western democracies the social housing experiment has been hampered by cold war attitudes, particularly in America. The national mindset: anything smacking in some way of big government and socialist enterprises could only be fatally flawed, deserving only of a slow and painful death.
Meanwhile, over the last few decades, a surge of conservative thinking has encouraged the replacement of social housing with a pie-in-the-sky sweetheart marriage between private enterprise and government money that was supposed to deliver a new and better kind of affordable housing aligned with the speculative free enterprise housing marketplace. It hasn’t.
The UK has been one of the biggest losers in this vainglorious public/private enterprise. So certain of its free-enterprise based success, the country sabotaged its own substantial (as well as by and large successful) public housing legacy by selling off rental housing for cash that was largely diverted away from the renewal of public housing stock.
Australia, never a huge investor in social housing, has seen its stocks decline by half over the last fifty years, while it faces the same kind of affordable housing crisis that is sweeping around the world.
Recently, Australia has been exploring a new approach to encouraging social housing residents into home ownership — a model that does not come at the expense of selling off limited social housing resources as Britain has been doing. It’s an understandable caution, based on a multi-year waiting list for social housing of over 200,000 people.
Australia’s public/not-for-profit enterprise is based in part on conventional free market private sector financing, together with innovative wrinkles which allow social housing clients to buy new houses of their own.
For more details on how this hopeful new model is to prove itself, read more in The Mandarin: Affordable Home-Ownership Scheme Offers A Pathway Out Of Social Housing
