Public housing
Public housing or project homes is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Although the common goal is to maintain affordable housing, the details of the arrangements differ between countries, and so does the terminology.
[edit] Australia
In Australia, public housing is provided by departments of the various state and territory governments. These departments are usually known as the Housing Commission (such as the Housing Commission (NSW) or Victorian Housing Commission), the Department of Housing or the Housing Trust (such as the South Australian Housing Trust), and known colloquially in some parts of the country as the 'houso' or 'commission flats'. Public housing generally consists of low-density detached bungalows on master-planned estates located on the suburban fringes of cities and towns, though some inner-city high-rise public housing stock can be found in Melbourne and Sydney. Most public housing in Australia was built between 1945 and 1980, with governments in recent decades less willing to build and provide for new public housing estates. The majority of Australia's public housing programs were originally initiated to house returned soldiers and their new families after World War II; a period of chronic housing shortages across the country. However the construction of high-rise estates in Melbourne and Sydney during the 1950's and 1960's was aimed more at improving the living conditions of inner-suburban residents living in sub-standard housing. Today public housing in Australia is generally seen as a welfare provision for low income earners and social security recipients. There are issues of high crime and decay which mirror those found in North America, the UK and to a certain extent France, but not as extreme.
Some areas of Australian cities known for a high concentration of public housing include:
- Elizabeth, South Australia
- Inala, Queensland
- Mount Druitt, New South Wales
- Richmond, Victoria
- Geelong, Victoria
[edit] France
In France, a quarter of the population lives in government-subsidised housing complexes, known as HLM (habitation à loyer modéré). The nature of public housing in France has caused major civil unrest as subsidised housing complexes are regarded as the cause of high crime and urban decay in its major cities. French police now consider many housing estates "no man zones" and must be heavily armed and vigilant when entering them.
[edit] Germany
Between 1925 and 1930 Germany was the site of innovative and extensive municipal public housing projects, mostly in Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt am Main. These Siedlungen (settlements), were made necessary by the dreadful living conditions of pre-war urban tenements. The right to a healthy dwelling was written into the 1919 Weimar Constitution, but few dwellings were built until economic stability in 1925.
These settlements were low-rise, no more than 5 stories, and in suburban settings. Residents were provided access to light, air, and sun. The size, shape, orientation and architectural style of Germany's public housing were informed by the recent experience of the Vienese and the Dutch, the anti-urban Garden City Movement in Britain, by new industrialized mass-production and pre-fabrication building techniques, by the novel use of steel and glass, and by the progressive-liberal policies of the Social Democrats.
Architect Martin Wagner (with Bruno Taut) was responsible for the thousands of dwellings built in and around Berlin, including the Horseshoe Siedlung (named for its shape), and Uncle Tom's Cabin Siedlung (named for a local restaurant). But Wagner was second to the city planner Ernst May in Frankfurt. May was responsible for the construction of 23 separate settlements, 15,000 total units, in five years. He ran his own sizable research facility to investigate, for instance, air-flow in various floorplan configurations, construction techniques, etc. The Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky applied the principles of Taylorism to the kitchen workspace and developed the Frankfurt kitchen while working for Ernst May.
Beyond technical research May also published two magazines and embarked on a significant public-relations project, with films and classes and public exhibitions, to make Neues Bauen acceptable to the public. In the late 1920s the principles of equal access to "Licht, Luft und Sonne" and the social effects of a guaranteed ""Existenzminimum" became a matter of lively popular debate all over Germany. One indirect result of this publicity was the American housing movement: a young Catherine Bauer attended one of May's conferences in 1930, and wrote her seminal "Modern Housing" based on research done in Frankfurt and with Dutch architect JJP Oud.
Increasing pressure from the rising Nazis brought this era to an end in 1933. A majority of the German public housing experts had Social Democrat or Communist sympathies and were forced out of the country.
[edit] Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the rent for the cheaper rental homes is kept low. As such, non-profit (but non-governmental) housing societies are the only ones venturing into that market segment. The vast majority of the low-rent apartments in the Netherlands are owned by such agencies.
[edit] Ireland
In Ireland, public housing and halting sites (sites used by semi-nomadic Traveller communities) have been built by Local Authorities and are known as Local Authority Accommodation. Dublin Corporation and the former Dublin County Council provided the lion's share of Irish Local Authority Housing, with County Longford having the largest ratio of Local Authority to private housing in the state. Public housing in Ireland, as in North America and the UK, is a magnet for high crime and surrounding neighbourhood decay and are looked upon as very undesirible by middle class and upper middle class citizens.
[edit] Israel
During the 2005 pullout of Israeli citizens from the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government constructed many temporary homes in small neighborhoods close to the borders to be used for those displaced by the event.
[edit] Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, the government provides homes through public housing estates which are rented at a lower price than the markets, and through the Home Ownership Scheme, which are sold at a lower price.
[edit] New Zealand
In New Zealand, public housing, known as state housing, was introduced in 1937 for citizens unable to afford private rents.
[edit] Singapore
In Singapore, public housing is managed by the Housing and Development Board.
Most of the residential housing developments in Singapore are publicly governed and developed. Most of the residents in public housing are owners rather than tenants (as it originally was in the 60s).
Public housing in Singapore as such is not generally considered as a sign of poverty or lower standards of living as compared to public housing in other countries (Australia, England etc. where land constraint is a non-issue and property pricing is significantly cheaper in the cost to size ratio). Property prices for the smallest public housing can often be higher than privately owned and developed standalone properties (Townhouse, apartment unit etc.) in other developed countries after currency correlation. Poverty for the population on a whole is considerably rare in Singapore.
[edit] Sweden
The Million Programme (Miljonprogrammet) is the familiar term for an ambitious housing programme implemented in Sweden between 1965 and 1974 with the aim of building one million new dwellings in 10 years; in the beginning strongly influenced by the "Garden City" developments in England during the 40's - 50's, but towards the end the developments were mostly built as single family homes along curving streets and cul-de-sacs and/or as immense tower blocks, similar to many residential districts built in Eastern Europe. Most were built detached from pre-existing neighbourhoods, often some distance from the existing urban areas and connected via mass transit to the older developments and city centre.
[edit] United Kingdom
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In the United Kingdom public housing is often referred to by the British public as "council housing" and "council estate", based on the historical role of district and borough councils in running public housing. Local semi-independent not-for-profit housing associations have begun to operate some of the older council housing estates in the United Kingdom. More recently the government refers to both as 'Social Housing', and Housing Associations are now referred to as 'Registered Social Landlords' (RSLs). Additionally local planning departments may require private-sector developers to offer "affordable housing" as a condition of planning permission.
Governments since the late 1950s have also encouraged "mixed tenure" in regeneration areas and on "new-build" housing estates, offering a range of ownership and rental options, with a view to engineering social harmony through including "social housing" and "affordable housing" options. Recent research by Dr. Rebecca Tunstall[1] has argued that the evidence base for tenure mixing remains thin.
Council Estates are located in working class neighbourhoods and are magnets for high crime (evidenced by easily available crime statistics) and urban decay due to their negative effect on surrounding property values. They are looked upon as very undesirible by middle class and upper middle class Britons to have located in their neighbourhoods. Many elderly and/or disabled tenants suffer greatly due to the inability of responsible government agencies to clamp down on rampant crime. So-called activists will often fight any legislation that would throw out undesirable tenants claiming civil rights violations. Britain by and large has not instituted the kind of reforms that have occurred in the United States, which have greatly improved the quality and stability of their public housing projects. But it has done more than Canada, whose massive high rise projects in Toronto and other cities continues to decay.
[edit] Spain
Low mentality of the spaniards for rental houses and power of construction companies (like FCC) have dropped "viviendas de protección pública" to minimun. They were common in the Franco (1936-75) era. Now that lack is a social problem, more with the high rise of house prices. Even some labels in the remaining are dropped by politic fanatists.
[edit] United States and Canada
In the United States and Canada, public housing is usually a block of purpose-built taxpayer subsidized public housing operated by a government agency, often simply referred to as "The Projects". They have been found to have a direct negative impact on real estate property values in their surrounding neighborhoods, leading to urban decay and high crime. Most of the high crime areas of Toronto where the cities notorious multiple shootings occur are in or around massive public housing projects. This is mirrored in American cities, although many American projects have greatly improved since the 1970's and 80's; many high rise developments have been torn down and replaced with well kept town houses. Numerous federal, state and local enactments have greatly diminished criminal activity inside projects and altered whose entitled to live in them. Canada, especially Toronto, still maintains primarily large high rise clustered developments in working class neighborhoods, a system that has fallen in disfavor in both the UK and U.S. The Toronto system is greatly affected by the fact that Toronto is a multi-cultural mosaic, and other cities and towns may object to having several immigrants in one community.
In Toronto, large projects like Regent Park, St. James Town, Jane and Finch and Lawrence Heights, house largely immigrants and refugees, and lower-income Canadian-born. These high rise neighborhoods are a magnet for a high level of street crime in their surrounding neighborhoods. In that city, public housing consists of usually massive 15-30 floor apartment buildings and is spread in many parts of the city, unlike the US where these projects form in only a few areas, and create 'ghettos' (in the United States' case, racism is an issue). There are no massive housing projects located in either urban or suburban middle-class or upper middle-class towns or cities in either Canada or the United States due to their undesirability in the eyes of local property owners.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, government involvement in housing for the poor was chiefly in the area of requiring new buildings to meet certain standards - like having airshafts - for decent livability. Most housing communities were developed from the 1930s onward and initial public housing was largely slum regeneration, with no nationwide expansion of public housing. This helped ease the concerns of a health-conscious public by eliminating or altering neighborhoods commonly considered dangerous, and reflected progressive-era sanitation initiatives. However, the advent of make-shift tent communities during the Great Depression caused concern in the Administration. Public housing in its earliest decades was usually much more working-class and middle-class and white than it was by the 1960s and after. Many Americans associate large, multi-story towers with public housing, but early projects were actually low-rise, though Le Corbusier superblocks caught on before World War II, as seen in the (union built) Penn South houses in New York.
What Kenneth T. Jackson and other historians have called the "ghettofication" of public housing occurred for several reasons. One reason was the general weakening of the urban working classes. By the late 1950s the reservoir of needy working class urban dwellers was simply smaller than it had been previously. Additionally, federal law required that no person could pay more than a quarter of his or her income for rent in public housing. Since middle class people would pay as much, or more, for rent in public housing as they would in superior private housing they had no incentive to live in public housing at all. Another public policy factor that led to the decline in public housing was that, in general, city housing agencies ceased to screen tenants (New York City was an exception). In the 1940s, some public housing agencies would only accept married tenants and gave special benefits to war veterans.
Public housing was only built with the blessing of the local government, and projects were almost never built on suburban greenfields, but through regeneration of older neighborhoods. The destruction of tenements and eviction of their low-income residents consistently created problems in nearby neighborhoods with "soft" real estate markets. Houses, apartments or other residential units are usually subsidized on a rent-geared-to-income (RGI) basis. Some communities have now embraced a mixed income, with both assisted and market rents, when allocating homes as they become available.
In recent years, many such projects have been torn down, renovated or replaced after criticism that the concentration of poverty in economically depressed areas, inadequate management of the buildings, and government indifference have contributed to increased crime. HUD's HOPE VI program was created in 1993 to address these issues, by funding renovation, demolition, and new construction of public housing to decrease its density and allow for tenants with mixed income levels.
U.S. and Canadian public housing continues to have a reputation for violence, drug use, and prostitution, leading to the passage in the U.S., in 1996, of a federal "one strike you're out" law, calling for the eviction of tenants convicted of crimes, especially drug-related. Such a loss can also occur merely as a result of being tried for some crimes, which is a subset of the collateral consequences of criminal charges.
In reaction to the problems surrounding public housing, the US Congress passed legislation enacting the Section 8 Housing Program in 1974 to encourage the private sector to construct affordable homes. This assists low-income tenants by paying the difference between the rent and 30% of the tenant's income with a monthly subsidy paid to the landlords. This assistance can be 'project based,' which applies to specific properties, or 'tenant based,' which provides tenants with a voucher they can use anywhere vouchers are accepted. In 1999 existing tenant based voucher programs were controversially merged into the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program, which is today the primary means of providing subsidies to low income renters. The Bush Administration has recently proposed controversial changes to the Housing Choice Voucher Program.[citation needed]
