Social housing: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
Tmccormick1 (talk | contribs) |
Tmccormick1 (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
Line 125:
"The Model Houses for Families are now re-erected in Kennington Park Road."
The design was further developed on by Sir Sydney Waterlow and his Improved Dwellings Company for their
</div>
=== Investment vs philanthropy: The Metropolitan Association vs the SICLC ===
In 1844 the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labourer's_Friend_Society '''Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes''']
see discussion in <div style="clear: both"></div>
== Early public housing in England==
Line 133 ⟶ 140:
<br />
=== Corporation Houses on Farringdon Road (1865) ===
"The City of London Corporation built tenements in Farringdon Road in 1865, but this was an isolated instance. The first council to build housing as an integrated policy was Liverpool Corporation, starting with St Martin's Cottages in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall, completed in 1869. The Corporation then built Victoria Square Dwellings, opened by Home Secretary Sir Richard Cross in 1885." -Wikipedia. ▼
"In some respects an archetypal Victorian improvement, Farringdon Road was nevertheless the final stage in a piece of town planning begun in the mid-eighteenth century, while in general terms it had been conceived of even earlier. A road through the Fleet valley linking the City with western Clerkenwell was part of Wren's thinking for his projected reconstruction of London after the Great Fire."
"For years, Farringdon Road was characterized by the wasteland of cleared sites and shored-up houses through which it passed. Building development, mostly for manufacturing and warehousing, but with some block dwellings, terrace-houses and pubs, did not begin until the mid-1860s."
Line 161 ⟶ 168:
▲Farringdon Road Buildings, built by Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Poor in mid-1870s opposite Corporation Buildings.
Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 [UK]<br /> ▼
(an image of it was included in Mumford, ''The Culture of Cities,''1938, p.212.. ▼
▲"The City of London Corporation built tenements in Farringdon Road in 1865, but this was an isolated instance. The first council to build housing as an integrated policy was Liverpool Corporation, starting with St Martin's Cottages in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall, completed in 1869. The Corporation then built Victoria Square Dwellings, opened by Home Secretary Sir Richard Cross in 1885." -Wikipedia.
"The [1846] Liverpool Sanitary Act – ‘the first piece of comprehensive health legislation passed in England’ – made the Council responsible for drainage, paving, sewerage and cleaning. It also appointed a Council Medical Officer of Health – another first." It was strengthened by a further Act in 1864." [Stoughton 2013 - "Municipal Housing in Liverpool before 1914: the ‘first council houses in Europe’". ''Municipal Dreams'' blog, 8 Oct 2013. https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/liverpool-first-council-houses-in-europe/]. ▼
[[File:St-Martins-Cottages Liverpool completed-1869 1944-photo2.jpg|alt=St Martin’s Cottages, completed 1869 in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall, Liverpool. |thumb|600x600px|St Martin’s Cottages, completed 1869 in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall, Liverpool. ]]
"The St Martin’s Cottages, completed in 1869 in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall [were] the first council housing to be built in England. The ‘cottages’ were tenements – 146 flats and maisonettes in two four-storey blocks, brick-built with open staircases and separate WCs placed on the half-landings. The result was so bleak that even the trade magazine ''The Builder'' concluded that those who built for the poor should ‘mix a little philanthropy with their per-centage calculations’." [Stoughton 2013].
The cottages are discussed by Colin Pooley of Lancaster in "Living in Liverpool", an essay in J. Belchem (Ed.), ''Liverpool 800 : Character, Culture, History : Culture, Character and History'' (Liverpool University Press, 2006), here noted by a commenter at [https://streetsofliverpool.co.uk/st-martins-cottages/ Streets of Liverpool]: <blockquote>
▲Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 [UK]<br />
''"St Martin's Cottages comprised six blocks of three-and five-story tenements that provided 124 dwellings. He doesn?t say how many blocks of each type there were. I assume the extra storey he mentions was the cellars shown sealed off in the 1973 view.''
''Professor Pooley makes some interesting points about the extent to which St Martin's Cottages failed to fulfil the Council's target of 'providing housing for the poorest poor'. He shows that the rents were too expensive for most displaced by the slum clearance scheme and he backs this up with an analysis of the 1871 census that indicates a clear bias to the upper end of the working class spectrum. He concludes that council housing before 1918 accounted for only 6.5% of all new building in Liverpool and rarely provided homes for those most in need."''</blockquote>
▲=== Liverpool: St Martin's Cottages, 1869; Victoria Square, 1885 ===
[[File:St-Martins-Cottages-1954 StreetsofLiverpool.jpg|alt=St Martin's Cottages, completed 1869 in Vauxhall, Liverpool. 1954 photograph. |thumb|700x700px|St Martin's Cottages, completed 1869 in Vauxhall, Liverpool. 1954 photograph. ]]
['''Dockerill 2016''']: "Liverpool Corporation and the origins of municipal social housing, 1842–1890." ''Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 165, 39–56:''
"The Liverpool Sanitary Amendment Act 1864 ‘effected an enormous increase in the powers of the Corporation at the time unparalleled’ in England,<sup>33</sup> ‘confer[ring] upon the Corporation completely new powers to repair or demolish houses which it considered … to be unfit for human habitation’,<sup>34</sup> and prohibiting the construction of back-to-back houses within the town. The 1864 Act also sounded the effective death knell of court building."
▲"The [1846] Liverpool Sanitary Act – ‘the first piece of comprehensive health legislation passed in England’ – made the Council responsible for drainage, paving, sewerage and cleaning. It also appointed a Council Medical Officer of Health – another first." It was strengthened by a further Act in 1864.
"Faced with chronic pauperism, an increasing death rate, and a depleting stock of affordable working-class housing, the Corporation agreed the purchase of ‘five pieces of land belonging to Alderman Houghton in the vicinity of St Martin’s Church, with a view to secure the erection thereon of Labourers’ Dwellings’ on 9 May 1866.'"
"However, this action should not be interpreted as evidence of a municipal desire to become a tenant landlord for the town’s poorest. Councillor Robinson, the seconder of the resolution, assured Council members that there was ‘no idea of suggesting that the Corporation should undertake the erection of the dwellings themselves’. Rather, it was motivated by a shrewd understanding of realpolitik based upon three core contentions. First, there was a civic and humanitarian desire to address the death rate; as Councillor J.R. Jeffrey proclaimed, councillors ‘could no longer stand still and see their fellow creatures die around them without … making the experiment and seeing whether the course … suggested would succeed’. Second, and typical of the competitive spirit of the Victorian period, councillors worried whether a failure to motivate the private sector to build working-class housing would result in Liverpool falling behind urban rivals such as Glasgow, London, and Leeds. Finally, in motivating the working class to strive for better accommodation, the Corporation hoped that increased business opportunities would ultimately arise for private builders." [Dockerill 2016].
▲"The St Martin’s Cottages, completed in 1869 in Ashfield Street, Vauxhall [were] the first council housing to be built in England. The ‘cottages’ were tenements – 146 flats and maisonettes in two four-storey blocks, brick-built with open staircases and separate WCs placed on the half-landings. The result was so bleak that even the trade magazine ''The Builder'' concluded that those who built for the poor should ‘mix a little philanthropy with their per-centage calculations’." [Stoughton 2013].
[[File:St-Martins-Cottages completed-1869 1973-photo-StreetsofLiverpool.jpg|alt=St Martin's Cottages, completed 1869 in Vauxhall, Liverpool. 1973 photograph. |thumb|611x611px|St Martin's Cottages, completed 1869 in Vauxhall, Liverpool. 1973 photograph. ]]
"Those engaged as casual labourers were effectively barred from tenancy. Therefore, although the Corporation had provided the country’s first purpose-built municipal houses for the working classes, such was the limited scope of both their construction and the sum of rent charged that ''The Porcupine'' declared that the cottages ‘had failed … in any form or degree [to] accomplish any practical solution of the great question of how best to house the poor’.
''"Only when there was either a change in the political willingness to offer rent subsidies to the very poorest and to sanction greater municipal and/or national intervention in housing issues (including rent), or a willingness on the part of the poor themselves to take control of their own ‘sanitary, social, and moral elevation’, would substantial progress would be made.'' [italics added -tm].
"The 1871 Report of Drs Parkes and Sanderson on the Sanitary Condition of Liverpool noted, however, that the former course of action was politically impossible, for it would mean that the Corporation ‘would be simply offering a premium to pauperism’, while with regard to the latter, progress seemed unlikely. As Trench lamented, without education to the contrary the poorest saw no ‘necessity of taking decent houses’, with many instead choosing to squat rather than pay rent and, in fact, systematically destroying the property in which they were living. This was a class of potential tenant that the Corporation was not prepared to accept.
"The Insanitary Property Committee, established in 1883, gave teeth to the 1864 Act and cleared a notorious area of slum housing in Nash Grove but what to do with those displaced? The Council still hoped that private enterprise might step up to the challenge but speculative building profits lay in the suburbs. Once more, the Council undertook to build itself on a plan devised by then City Engineer, Clement Dunscombe." This produced the Victoria Square Dwellings, completed in 1885. ▼
"Though St Martin’s Cottages were the nation’s first municipally-built houses for the working class, not only were they an experiment—a model for private builders to emulate—but the provisions of the Liverpool Sanitary Amendment Act 1864 under which they were constructed were not intended to enable the authority to purchase swathes of insanitary houses in order to create building plots of a suitable size to undertake rebuilding. Neither did it place any requirement upon the Corporation to rehouse those whom it displaced." [Dockerill 2016]
=== 1875 Farringdon Road Buildings, by Metropolitan Association ===
Farringdon Road Buildings, built by Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Poor in mid-1870s opposite Corporation Buildings.
▲(an image of it was included in Mumford, ''The Culture of Cities,''1938, p.212..
described in Gissing, George. ''The Nether World'' (1889).
=== Liverpool: 1885 Victoria Square Dwellings ===
▲"The Insanitary Property Committee, established in 1883, gave teeth to the 1864 Act and cleared a notorious area of slum housing in Nash Grove but what to do with those displaced? The Council still hoped that private enterprise might step up to the challenge but speculative building profits lay in the suburbs. Once more, the Council undertook to build itself on a plan devised by then City Engineer, Clement Dunscombe." This produced the Victoria Square Dwellings, completed in 1885." [Stoughton 2013].
"their construction was accompanied by a specific policy acknowledgement by the council that it had a duty of care with regards to the housing conditions of those displaced through slum clearance programmes."
Dockerill, Bertie (2015). "From St Martin's Cottages to Juvenal Dwellings: Liverpool's pioneering role in the provision of public housing." ''Liverpool History Journal'' 14 (2015). <nowiki>https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/131169926.pdf</nowiki>.
<br />
Line 222 ⟶ 247:
<div style="clear: both">
Line 316 ⟶ 341:
First Houses take their name from their distinction of being the first public housing units constructed in the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States United States], opening for the first tenants on December 3, 1935. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_architecture Victorian]-era [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenement tenements] existed on the site before they were cleared to build the project, which was also the very first project undertaken by the city's new [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authority Housing Authority]. The units opened in December 1935.
[note:
Line 331 ⟶ 356:
from: Congressional Research Service. "Overview of Federal Housing Assistance Programs and Policy." July 22, 2008 – March 27, 2019.
<blockquote>"The '''Housing Act of 1959''' (P.L. 86-372) ''was the first significant instance where government incentives were used to persuade private developers to build housing that would be affordable to low- and moderate-income households.'' As part of P.L. 86-372, Congress created the Section 202 Housing for the Elderly program. Through the Section 202 program, the federal government extended low-interest loans to private nonprofit organizations for the development of affordable housing for moderate-income residents age 62 and older. The low interest rates were meant to ensure that units would be affordable, with nonprofit developers being able to charge lower rents and still have adequate revenue to pay back the government loans.
<blockquote>"The '''Housing Act of 1959''' (P.L. 86-372) ''was the first significant instance where government incentives were used to persuade private developers to build housing that would be affordable to low- and moderate-income households.'' As part of P.L. 86-372, Congress created the Section 202 Housing for the Elderly program. Through the Section 202 program, the federal government extended low-interest loans to private nonprofit organizations for the development of affordable housing for moderate-income residents age 62 and older. The low interest rates were meant to ensure that units would be affordable, with nonprofit developers being able to charge lower rents and still have adequate revenue to pay back the government loans.</blockquote> <blockquote>"The Housing Act of 1961 (P.L. 87-70) further expanded the role of the private sector in providing housing to low- and moderate-income households. The act created the Section 221(d)(3) Below Market Interest Rate (BMIR) housing program, which both insured mortgages to private developers of multifamily housing and provided loans to developers at low interest rates. The BMIR program expanded the pool of eligible borrowers to private for-profit developers and government entities, as well as nonprofit developers. Eligible developers included cooperatives, limited-dividend corporations, and state or local government agencies. Like the Section 202 program, the low interest rates in the BMIR program were meant to ensure that building owners could offer affordable rents to tenants.</blockquote> <blockquote>"The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 (P.L. 89-117) added rental assistance to the list of incentives for private multifamily housing developers that participated in the Section 221(d)(3) BMIR program. The Rent Supplement Program, enacted as part of P.L. 89-117, capped the rents charged to participating tenants at 20% of their incomes and paid building owners the difference between 20% of a tenant's income and fair market rent. P.L. 89-117 also created the Section 23 leased housing program, which was the first program to provide rent subsidies for use with existing private rental market units.</blockquote> <blockquote>"'''The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 '''(P.L. 90-448) created the '''Section 236''' and '''Section 235''' programs. In the Section 236 program, the government subsidized private developers' mortgage interest payments so that they would not pay more than 1% toward interest. Some Section 236 units also received rent subsidies (referred to as Rental Assistance Payments [RAP]) to make them affordable to the lowest-income tenants. The Section 235 program instituted mortgage interest reduction payments similar to the Section 236 program, but for individual homeowners rather than multifamily housing developers. Through it, eligible borrowers could obtain FHA-insured mortgages with subsidized interest rates. As the program was originally enacted, HUD was to make subsidy payments to the lender in order to reduce the interest rate on the mortgage to as low as 1%.</blockquote> <blockquote>"By the end of the 1960s, subsidies to private developers had resulted in the creation of hundreds of thousands of rental housing units. ''Approximately 700,000 units of housing had been built through the Section 236 and Section 221(d)(3) programs'' alone.7 The Section 202 program had created more than 45,000 units for elderly households.8 The Section 235 program and Section 23 leased-housing program provided ownership and rental subsidies for thousands more. Through 1972, the Section 235 program subsidized nearly 400,000 homeowners,9 while the Section 23 leased-housing program provided rent subsidies for more than 38,000 private market rental units.10 Despite the growth in the role of private developers, public housing was still the largest housing subsidy program, with roughly 1 million units built and subsidized by the early 1970s.11</blockquote> <blockquote>▼
"The Housing Act of 1961 (P.L. 87-70) further expanded the role of the private sector in providing housing to low- and moderate-income households. The act created the Section 221(d)(3) Below Market Interest Rate (BMIR) housing program, which both insured mortgages to private developers of multifamily housing and provided loans to developers at low interest rates. The BMIR program expanded the pool of eligible borrowers to private for-profit developers and government entities, as well as nonprofit developers. Eligible developers included cooperatives, limited-dividend corporations, and state or local government agencies. Like the Section 202 program, the low interest rates in the BMIR program were meant to ensure that building owners could offer affordable rents to tenants.
▲
"Another development during the 1960s was an '''income-based rent structure'''. Under the public housing program, tenants generally paid rent in an amount equal to the costs of operating the assisted housing in which they lived. Over time, as operating costs rose, there was a concern that the below-market rents being charged were too high to be affordable to the poorest families. The Brooke Amendment, which was included as part of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1969 (P.L. 91-152), limited tenant contributions toward rent in all rent assisted units (including public housing and all project-based rental assistance units) to an amount equal to 25% of tenant income (this was later raised to 30%). '''The Brooke Amendment is considered to be responsible for codifying an income-based rent structure''' in federal housing programs."
</blockquote>
Line 481 ⟶ 510:
*Conrad, Joseph. (1912) "A Friendly Place/" ''Notes on Life and Letters'', 1912, p. 203. cited in [Survey of London, 2019].<br />
*Curl, James S. (1983). ''The life and work of Henry Roberts, 1803-1876: the evangelical conscience and the campaign for model housing and healthy nations''. Chichester : Phillimore, 1983. <br />
*Dockerill, Bertie (2015). "From St Martin's Cottages to Juvenal Dwellings: Liverpool's pioneering role in the provision of public housing." ''Liverpool History Journal'' 14 (2015). <nowiki>https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/131169926.pdf</nowiki>. <br />
*Dockerill, Bertie. (2016). "Liverpool Corporation and the origins of municipal social housing, 1842–1890." ''Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire'', 165, 39–56. doi:10.3828/transactions.165.5 <br />
*Douglas, Paul. ''The Coming of a New Party''. (1932). [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015004856913&view=1up&seq=11. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015004856913&view=1up&seq=11. ] [version with images viewable online; text-only version downloadable as PDF].<br />
*Flandro et al (2008). "[https://www.scribd.com/document/2963635/Progressive-Housing-in-New-York-City-A-Closer-Look-at-Model-Tenements-and-Finnish-Cooperatives Progressive Housing in New York City: A Closer Look at Model Tenements and Finnish Cooperatives]."<br /> (Xsusha Carlyann Flandro, Christine Huh, Negin Maleki, Mariana Sarango-Manaças, & Jennifer Schork; for Historical Preservation Graduate Studio II, Columbia University, Spring 2008). <br /> [https://www.scribd.com/document/2963635/Progressive-Housing-in-New-York-City-A-Closer-Look-at-Model-Tenements-and-Finnish-Cooperatives. https://www.scribd.com/document/2963635/Progressive-Housing-in-New-York-City-A-Closer-Look-at-Model-Tenements-and-Finnish-Cooperatives. ]<br />
Line 504 ⟶ 535:
*Mumford, Lewis [1938]. ''The Culture of Cities. ''<br />
*OECD - Social Policy Division. "Social Rental Housing Stock." Last updated on 06/03/2017. <br /> https://www.oecd.org/els/family/PH4-2-Social-rental-housing-stock.pdf.<br /> Compares social rental housing stock across all OECD nations. <br />
*Plunz, Richard (2016). ''A History of Housing in New York City.''
*Pooley, C. (2006). "Living in Liverpool". In J. Belchem (Ed.), ''Liverpool 800 : Character, Culture, History : Culture, Character and History'' (pp. 171-255). Liverpool University Press.<br />
*Radford, Gail. ''Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era'' (1996).<br />
*Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, 1884-5 - Report. <br />
| |||