Social housing: Difference between revisions

 

 

According to ''The Dictionary of Urbanism'' by Robert Cowan (UK, 2005), "social housing" is: <blockquote>''"Housing provided for social purposes (rather than for profit), usually by local authorities, housing associations of housing trusts. In the UK, the term's wide currency dates from the early 1980s. It was coined by the then Conservative government as a more appropriate description than 'council housing', which the government planned effectively to abolish by discounted sales to tenants and transfers to housing associations."'' </blockquote>&nbsp;

 

 

The portion of housing in different countries that could be called some form of 'social' housing varies widely, and depends on how defined.&nbsp; The below chart of estimates for "social&nbsp;''rented dwellings"&nbsp;''as a&nbsp;% of all housing, shows a range from 34% in Netherlands, to < 1% in Latvia. [OECD 2017].

To roughly estimate for the United States:

 

 

=> 7.8M units / 126M households =&nbsp;'''6.2% or so of US housing is social/assisted low-income.&nbsp;'''

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"The world's oldest social housing complex still in use. It is a walled enclave within the city of '''Augsburg, Bavaria'''. It takes its name from the Fugger family and was founded in 1516 by Jakob Fugger the Younger (known as "Jakob Fugger the Rich") as a place where the needy citizens of Augsburg could be housed. By 1523, 52 houses had been built, and in the coming years the area expanded with various streets, small squares and a church. The gates were locked at night, so the Fuggerei was, in its own right, very similar to a small independent medieval town. It is still inhabited today, affording it the status of being the oldest social housing project in the world."&nbsp;[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei [1]].&nbsp;

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A significant emblem of publicly-provided housing for the needy, Les Invalides, "formally the Hôtel national des Invalides (The National Residence of the Invalids), or also as Hôtel des Invalides, is a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France, containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as well as a hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, the building's original purpose."

 

"Louis XIV initiated the project by an order dated 24 November '''1670''', as a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers: the name is a shortened form of hôpital des invalides." -Wikipedia.

 

Like Les Invalides, the Royal Hospital (aka Greenwich Hospital) is an example of a civic/national monument that includes "public housing". It was created on the site of a former royal palace where many British monarchs including Queen Elizabeth I were born.

 

"King Charles II founded the Royal Hospital in 1682 as a retreat for veterans. The provision of a hostel rather than the payment of pensions was inspired by Les Invalides in Paris." -Wikipedia. "Royal Hospital Chelsea."

 

"The Royal Charter of William and Mary dated 25 October '''1694''' established the Royal Hospital for Seamen (latterly known as Greenwich Hospital). It was a home for retired seamen of the Royal Navy, and to provide support for seamens widows and education for their children, and the improvement of navigation. The first Pensioners arrived at Greenwich in 1705. By the end of the century there were more than 2,000 pensioners living there.

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[[File:Trinity-Almshouses London from-The-Survey-of-London--Matt Garbutt 1896.jpg|alt=Trinity Almhouses, London, built in 1695. Image from The Survey of London, 1896.|thumb|600x600px|Trinity Almhouses, London, built in 1695. Image from The Survey of London, 1896.]]

 

(formerly '''Trinity Hospital'''), were originally built in 1695 to provide housing for retired sailors, by the Corporation of Trinity House, which is the official authority for lighthouses in England & Wales, established 1514. On Mile End Road in Whitechapel, they are the oldest almshouses in Central London.

 

"Prompted by the unwitting demolition of a Tudor hunting lodge in Bromley-By-Bow for a new school, the Arts and Crafts architect, designer and social reformer Charles Robert Ashbee set up a committee for the Survey of Memorials in Greater London in 1894. The first publication was a monograph devoted to Trinity Almshouses on the Mile End Road. It interwove architectural and social history and helped prevent demolition. Ashbee thus initiated a London-wide register of buildings of interest to bring together photographs, measured drawings and historical notes." [Survey of London. "The History of the Survey of London." accessed 17 April, 2020. [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london/history-survey-london <nowiki>https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/research/survey-london/history-survey-london].</nowiki>]

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[[File:Sailors-Home London 1835 from-British-Workman-1857-1024x525.jpg|alt=Sailors' Home, London, opened 1835|thumb|600x600px|Sailors' Home, London, opened 1835]]

"The Sailors’ Home, also known at first as the Brunswick Maritime Establishment, was built in 1830–5 with Philip Hardwick as its architect. Enlarged to Dock Street in 1863–5, substantially altered in 1911–12, rebuilt on the Dock Street side in 1954­­–7, adapted to be a hostel for the homeless in 1976–8, and again converted to be a youth hostel in 2012–14, this has been, ''mutatis mutandis'', a major local presence for nearly two centuries, all the while used as a hostel. As the first purpose-built short-stay hostel for sailors anywhere, it represented in its original form the invention of a building type, the Royal Hospital for Seamen in Greenwich notwithstanding. It was to have seminal influence on the development of lodging-house architecture."

"Between 1879 and 1884 Joseph Conrad (Jozef Korzeniowski) [the author and sailor] stayed several times at the Home and studied in its navigation school. Conrad called the Home a ‘friendly place’, ‘quietly unobtrusively, with a regard for the independence of the men who sought its shelter ashore, and with no ulterior aims behind that effective friendliness.’" [Joseph Conrad, ‘A Friendly Place’, ''Notes on Life and Letters'', 1912, p. 203]." - [Survey of London, 2019].

 

 

18th-19th-century English cities were among the earliest sites of modern industrialization, and industrial slums, and are where many current traditions of social housing and housing regulation begin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sunlight Port Sunlight]&nbsp;in 1888.

 

===The slum city in literature and reports===

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Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Poor.

 

 

&nbsp;see discussion in <div style="clear: both"></div>

 

 

 

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Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 [UK]<br />

 

"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.

 

"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]

Farringdon Road Buildings, built by Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Poor in mid-1870s opposite Corporation Buildings.

 

described in Gissing, George.&nbsp;''The Nether World'' (1889).

"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].

 

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"The world’s first large-scale [public] housing project&nbsp;was also built in London, to replace one of the capital’s most notorious slums – the&nbsp;Old Nichol. Nearly 6,000 individuals were crammed into the packed streets, where one child in four died before his or her first birthday.&nbsp;Arthur Morrison&nbsp;wrote the influential&nbsp;''A Child of the Jago'', an account of the life of a child in the slum, which sparked a public outcry.

 

More information: an Interesting short history of over a century of social housing, from the House of Commons Library:&nbsp;<br /> http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/housing-and-home-life/build-it-up-sell-it-off/

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"With the United States government hesitant to intervene in housing problems (the government saw this as an invasion on private property rights), civic groups, architects and philanthropists began to look for possible solutions to the housing conditions in New York in foreign projects, particularly in Britain and France.&nbsp;

"In the 1860s were established the New York City Council of Hygiene, a Citizens Association, and the Department of Survey and &nbsp;Inspection of Buildings.&nbsp;A survey of the 15,309 tenement buildings in New York City was completed by the Council of Hygiene and was published in 1865. This study also included the plans for the plans for Waterlow's&nbsp;1863 Improved Dwellings Company buildings, the first Englist model tenement English plans published in the&nbsp;U.S.&nbsp;&nbsp;[American] architects that subsequently traveled and investigated these model houses included James E. Ware, Henry Atterbury Smith, Grosvenor Atterbury, Ernest Flagg, and I.N. Phelps-Stokes; and philanthropists Alfred Tredway White, Olivia Sage (Mrs. Russell Sage), Caroline and Olivia Phelps-Stokes and Ann Harriman Vanderbilt. Once back in the United States they used not only the design ideas gathered from the model houses but also the financing scheme. The first successful model tenements to be erected in New York City were the Home Building and the Tower Building in Brooklyn. Financed by Alfred Treadway-Wright and designed by William Field and Son they were completed in 1877."&nbsp; &nbsp;[Flandro et al, 2008]&nbsp;

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[[File:Tower-Buildings-Brooklyn-1879-1.jpg|thumb|right|600px|Tower Buildings model worker housing, Brooklyn, 1879]]

[[File:Mare-Island-Vallejo-USHC-housing-1919.jpg|thumb|right|600px|USHC worker housing at Mare Island, Vallejo, California. 1915 plan]]

 

 

Ben-Joseph, Eran. "[http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/ww1/ww1a.html Workers' Paradise: The Forgotten Communities of World War I]."&nbsp; Online research project, MIT School of Architecture+ Planning.&nbsp;<br /> http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/ww1/ww1a.html.

Today the area is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Homes_Historic_District_(Milwaukee,_Wisconsin) Garden Homes Historic District], containing all of the 93 original buildings, comprising 105 housing units.

 

 

Illinois Senator Paul Douglas published&nbsp;"The Coming of a New Party" in 1932 [Douglas 1932], calling for a US equivalent to the UK Labour Party. Among other topics, he also proposed mixed-income public housing, adapted from the Vienna model, paid for with rents, land value tax, and Federal subsidies.&nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;

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Headwaters Apartment & Headwaters Village, Portland.&nbsp;

"inexpensive housing" system established in France in 1894 via the Siegfried law, financed mainly by charitable sources. Predecessor to HLM system.

 

 

("rent-controlled housing"), a form of private or public social housing in France, Algeria, Senegal, Quebec; started 1950. 16% of French housing. 1998 law requires French towns to have 20%+ HLM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLM<br /> &nbsp;

 

 

contracting for affordable units in private developments is how France mostly does it:

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wikipedia says Urban Renaissance manages about 750k units. Japan has about 50M households, so UR/social housing is about 1.5% of households. For comparison, US Federal rent assistance (Public, Sec 8 project, Sec 8 voucher, etc) helps about 4.8M of 326M population, also about 1.5%

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===SF YIMBY proposal for mixed-income public housing (2017- )===

[[File:Peoples-Policy-Project--Social-Housing-report-cover-2018.jpg|thumb|right|500px|PPP]]

 

 

In April 5, 2018, the People's Policy Project (founded by writer Matt Breunig) released "[https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/04/05/a-plan-to-solve-the-housing-crisis-through-social-housing/ A Plan to Solve the Housing Crisis Through Social Housing]," authored by&nbsp;Irish political organizer Peter Gowan and New York-based journalist Ryan Cooper. [Gowan 2018].&nbsp;

[[File:A-National-Homes-Guarantee-Briefing-Book-2019.jpg|thumb|right|500px|A National Homes Guarantee, Briefing Book (Sept 2019)]]

 

<blockquote>''"For decades, tenants, residents of public and subsidized housing, and people experiencing homelessness have been organizing to protect their rights and win structural reforms, in and across cities, suburbs, and small towns, all over the country. People’s Action has a long history of driving visionary housing policy. Our members, along with movement partners, have won landmark reforms like the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975), Community Reinvestment Act (1977), Dodd-Frank (2010), and much more at the state and local levels.'' ''"Grassroots leaders, as a part of the People’s Action housing justice cohort, developed the Homes Guarantee framework over a year ago. Since then, we launched an intensive organizing process: building our base through popular education trainings on racial capitalism and housing policy, forging relationships with legislative champions, hosting a briefing with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, recruiting a policy team, and, finally, drafting our ambitious proposal for a national Homes Guarantee. We completed a draft in late July.'' ''"Since then, our member organizations and grassroots leaders have picked it apart and put it back together, making our vision bigger, bolder, and more responsive to community needs. Additionally, over 115 movement allies and institutions have reviewed the draft and submitted feedback''</blockquote>

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*Bonnewit, Natalie. “[http://www.gmfus.org/publications/affordable-housing-amsterdam-and-copenhagen-lessons-san-francisco-bay-area Affordable Housing in Amsterdam and Copenhagen: Lessons for the San Francisco Bay Area].” German Marshall Fund of the United States, 8 December 2017. http://www.gmfus.org/publications/affordable-housing-amsterdam-and-copenhagen-lessons-san-francisco-bay-area.<br /> &nbsp;

*Boughton, John.&nbsp;''Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing'', 2018.&nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;

*Carter, Leighton. "The Slum of All Fears: Dickens's Concern with Urban Poverty and Sanitation." article in Brown University's Victorianweb.org, 2007.<br /> &nbsp;

*Comptroller General of the United States. "[https://www.gao.gov/assets/130/121049.pdf Section 236 Rental Housing -- An Evaluation With Lessons For The Future.]"&nbsp;PAD-78-13 JANUARY 10, 1978.&nbsp;https://www.gao.gov/assets/130/121049.pdf<br /> ''"This report presents a comprehensive evaluation of the section 236 program; compares section 236 to many other Federal programs;<br /> and discusses investment incentives, program equity, subsidized tenants and program impact. The 236 program has succeded in providing nearly half a million housing units to an income group which is now largely excluded from housing assistance.<br /> It contains recommendations to the Congress and the Department of Housing and Urban Development which would assure that moderate income households receive a reasonable share of future housing assistance."''<br /> &nbsp;

*Congressional Research Service. "[https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL34591.html Overview of Federal Housing Assistance Programs and Policy]." July 22, 2008 – March 27, 2019. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL34591.html.<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 />

*Hoffman, Alexander von [1998]. "[https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/von_hoffman_w98-2.pdf The Origins of American Housing Reform]." Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, publication W98-2, August 1998. [https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/von_hoffman_w98-2.pdf. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/von_hoffman_w98-2.pdf.&nbsp;]<br /> &nbsp;

*Hogarty, Dave. "[https://ny.curbed.com/2012/2/15/10396106/warren-mews-cottage-for-workingman-with-1-375-million Warren Mews Cottage For Workingman With $1.375 Million.]"&nbsp; Curbed NY, Feb 15, 2012.&nbsp;[https://ny.curbed.com/2012/2/15/10396106/warren-mews-cottage-for-workingman-with-1-375-million. https://ny.curbed.com/2012/2/15/10396106/warren-mews-cottage-for-workingman-with-1-375-million.&nbsp;]<br /> &nbsp;

*Kay, James Phillips (1832). ''The moral and physical condition of the working classes employed in the cotton manufacture in Manchester.'' https://archive.org/details/moralphysicalcon00kaysuoft/. <br /> &nbsp;

*Kemeny,&nbsp;Jim.&nbsp;"From Public Housing to Social Market" (1995).&nbsp;&nbsp;https://books.google.com/books?id=DjGIAgAAQBAJ&pg=PR1&lpg=PR1&dq=Jim+Kemeny+From+Public+Housing+to+Social+Market&source=bl&ots=Z9PNHbPSHq&sig=Sxrayape8GgzGi1dbj8Df2rpQ1Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj95enOgvXUAhWHx4MKHa8LDiQQ6AEISjAN#v=onepage&q&f=false.<br /> &nbsp;

*Mallach, Alan. "Using the Wrong Tools to Build Affordable Housing." ''Shelterforce, ''1 March 2016.&nbsp;<br /> ''"Now, when French developers build subdivisions or condo projects, nonprofit housing corporations enter into turnkey contracts with the developer to buy blocs of apartments or houses, up to a maximum of 50 percent, of the units in the development. Based on those contracts, the nonprofits apply for a package of government loans, grants, and tax breaks so they can both buy the units and make sure they remain affordable. When the projects are completed, the nonprofit buys the units and operates them as affordable rental housing."''<br /> &nbsp;

*Mayhew, Henry. ''London Labour and the London Poor''. (periodical publication in 1840s; collected for book publication in 1851).<br /> &nbsp;