Public housing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
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[edit] Australia
In Australia, public housing is provided by departments of the various state and territory governments. These departments are known as the Housing Commission, the Department of Housing or the Housing Trust, depending on the state or territory, and known colloquially in some parts of the country as the 'houso'.
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 1950s and 1960s 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. Subsequently there are issues of crime and decay which mirror those of public housing estates found in other developed nations.
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] Canada and United States
In the United States and Canada, public housing is usually a block of purpose-built government subsidized housing operated by a government agency, often simply referred to as housing projects. In American cities, many high rise developments have been torn down and replaced with easier to manage town houses. Numerous federal, state and local enactments have greatly diminished criminal activity inside projects and altered who is 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 into disfavor in both the UK and US. In Toronto, large projects house largely immigrants and refugees, and lower-income Canadian-born.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, government involvement in housing for the poor was chiefly in the introduction of buildings standards. 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. 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.
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.
Public housing in the US has been overhauled in recent years after criticism that neglect and concentrated poverty have contributed to increased crime. HUD's 1993 HOPE VI program addresses these issues by funding renewal of public housing to decrease its density and allow for tenants with mixed income levels. Projects continue to have a reputation for violence, drug use, and prostitution, leading to the passage of a 1996 federal "one strike you're out" law, enabling the eviction of tenants convicted of crimes, especially drug-related, or merely as a result of being tried for some crimes. Other attempts to solve these problems include the 1978 Section 8 Housing Program, which encourages the private sector to construct affordable homes, and subsidises public housing. This assistance can be "project based," subsidising properties, or "tenant based," which provides tenants with a voucher, accepted by some landlords.
In Canada, following the decentralisation of public housing to local municipalities, Social Housing Services Corporation (SHSC) was created in the Province of Ontario in 2002 to provide group services for social housing providers (public housing, non-profit housing and co-operative housing). It is a non-profit corporation which provides Ontario housing providers and service managers with bulk purchasing, insurance, investment and information services that add significant value to their operations.
[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 (toegelaten instellingen) 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 undesirable 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 public housing through flats which are rented at a lower price than the markets, and through the Home Ownership Scheme, which are sold at a lower price. These are built and administered by the Hong Kong Housing Authority and the Hong Kong Housing Society.
[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).
Since most of Singaporeans reside in public housing, 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 terms of cost per square metre. Property prices for the smallest public housing can often be higher than privately owned and developed standalone properties (Townhouse, apartment unit etc.) in other countries after currency correlation.
[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
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. Despite being not-for-profit, they charge generally higher rents than council properties. 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. Yet this social housing is still so expensive that 77 per cent of all tenants need to claim housing benefit in order to live in it. This accounts for another £700m of Government funding each year for tenants in part of the United Kingdom.
Governments since the early 1990s 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.
[edit] Spain
The aversive mentality of the Spaniards to rental houses and the power of construction companies (like FCC) have dropped "viviendas de protección pública" to minimum. They were common in the Francisco Franco (1936-75) era. Now that lack of housing is a social problem, especially with the high rise of house prices, many sectors are currently asking for more public houses to rent.
[edit] See also
- Affordable housing
- HUD USER
- Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse
- Social Housing Services Corporation (SHSC)
- Subsidized housing
