Social housing

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Revision as of 09:41, 1 February 2018 by imported>Tmccormick
Social housing under construction in Toronto
Social housing under construction in Toronto

Social housing is housing owned and/or managed by governments or private organizations for the aim of providing affordable or otherwise socially beneficial housing.

Unlike "public housing" the term social housing may include a wider range of cases including the significant earlier history of private social housing, e.g. Tower Buildings in Brooklyn, 1879. 
 

Almshouses 

"The documented history of social housing in Britain starts with almshouses, which were established from the 10th century, to provide a place of residence for "poor, old and distressed folk". The first recorded almshouse was founded in York by King Æthelstan; the oldest still in existence is the Hospital of St. Cross in Winchester, dating to circa 1133."
-Wikipedia, "Public housing in the United Kingdom."
 

The Fuggerei, Augsburg Germany (1516-)

"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." [1]. 
 

19th Century England - slum housing and reform

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. The factories and slums of Manchester attracted many visitors and writers from around the UK and the world starting in the early 19th C., now most famously Engels who wrote based on it The Condition of the Working Class in England.  Thanks to extensive journalistic, sociological, and literary interest of these 19thC UK slum conditions, we have an extensive and diverse written record of the conditions there and how responses to them helped produce reformist movements including company towns (e.g. Robert Owens, Borneville), private social housing and model tenements, and early public housing. 
 
In the 1840s Henry Mayhew he observed, documented, and described the state of working people in London for a series of articles in a newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, that were later compiled into book form, published in 1851. 
 
Around the same time, novelist Charles Dickens took a strong interest in housing condititions of the London poor. Carter [2007] observes: 
"Charles Dickens showed great concern for the despicable conditions of London slums and campaigned for their improvement. His hatred of slums and the governmental practices that allowed them to exist is especially apparent around the time he began conceiving and writing Bleak House (published in installments from March 1852 through September 1853). In the new preface to Martin Chuzzlewit of November 1849, he upholds literature's utility in social activism: "In all my writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity to showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor" (qtd. in Butt, p. 11). He published several articles on the subject, such as "Health by Act of Parliament, "A Home Question," and "Commission and Omission," in 1850 editions of Household Words. Again in 1850, he made a speech to The Metropolitan Sanitary Association condemning slum landlords and local politicians and, in 1852, he advised philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts on the model flats she was financing for London's Columbia Square (Blount 341). In Bleak House, the theme of sanitation, or the lack thereof, surfaces prominently in Dickens's treatment of the brick-maker's house and Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens actually used "Tom-All-Alone's" as a working title for Bleak House, further demonstrating slums' importance for the novel."
 

Some philanthropists began to provide housing in tenement blocks, and some factory owners built entire villages for their workers, such as Saltaire in 1853, Bournville (1879),
and Port Sunlight in 1888.
 

Early public housing in England

The City of London Corporation built tenements in the Farringdon Road in 1865.

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

Redevelopment had been resisted by members of the Bethnall Green vestry (parish) who owned much of the rookery, and were responsible for electing members of the Metropolitan Board of Works. The powers the vestries and board were limited to the Torrens Act and the Cross Act which the Bethnall Green vestry refused to use.

It was in 1885, after the report of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, 1884-5, that the national government first took an interest. This led to the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1885, which empowered Local Government Boards to shut down unhealthy properties and encouraged them to improve the housing in their areas.

"London County Council was created by the Local Government (England and Wales) Act 1888, some 53 years after other major cities had been municipalised. It took responsibility for the housing of the working classes from the Metropolitan Board of Works.  In the first election, the progressives obtained a large majority. The Housing Committee secured from Parliament the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1890, which gave it powers to implement the Torrens and Cross acts, and gave legal basis for it to manage housing estates. LCC chose Boundary Street as their flagship scheme. Initially they attempted to get the private sector involved but failed. In 1893, on the back of the 1892 Blackwall Tunnel Act they gained permission from the Home Secretary, to rebuild as small section of the scheme."
-Wikipedia. "Boundary Estate." 

Boundary Estate 

Boundary Street 1890, three years later, the London County Council began slum clearance

Construction of the Boundary Estate was begun in 1890 by the Metropolitan Board of Works and completed by the recently formed London County Council in 1900.

"Whilst the new flats replaced the existing slums, with decent accommodation for the same number of people, it wasn't the same group of people. The original inhabitants were forced further to the East, creating new overcrowding and new slums in areas such as Dalston and Bethnal Green. At this time, no help was available to find new accommodation for the displaced, and this added to the suffering and misery of many of the former residents of the slum. The new blocks had policies to enforce sobriety and the new tenants were clerks, policemen, cigarmakers and nurses."
-Wikipedia. "Boundary Estate." 

From A Child of the Jago (

"Even the gradual removal of the Old Jago itself was begun. For the County Council bought a row of houses at the end of Jago Row, by Honey Lane, with a design to build big barrack dwellings on the site. The scenes of the Jago Court eviction were repeated, with less governed antics. For the County Council knew not Jago ways; and when deputations came forth weeping, protesting the impossibility of finding new lodgings, and beseeching a respite, they were given six weeks more, and went back delighted into free quarters. At the end of the six weeks a larger deputation protested a little louder, wept a great deal more, and poached another month; for it would seem an unpopular thing to turn the people into the street. Thus, in the end, when the unpopular thing had to be done, it was with sevenfold trouble, loud cursing of the County Council in the public street, and many fights. But this one spot of the Jago cleared, the County Council began to creep along Jago Row and into Half Jago street; and after long delay the crude yellow brick of the barrack dwellings rose above the oft-stolen hoardings, and grew, storey by storey." "The dispossessed Jagos had gone to infect the neighbourhoods across the border, and to crowd the people a little closer. They did not return to live in the new barrack-buildings; which was a strange thing, for the County Council was charging very little more than double the rents which the landlords of the old Jago had charged. And so another Jago, teeming and villainous as the one displaced, was slowly growing in the form of a ring, round about the great yellow houses."

 

On 19thC London private social housing, some sources noted in: 
Gill, Stephen. "Notes" to Oxford University Press edition of The Nether World by George Gissing. 1992:
 

alt text

 

 

 
 
Gissing, George. The Nether World (1889).
 

"Model Tenement" projects

The City of London Corporation built tenements in the Farringdon Road in 1865.

Tower Buildings, Brooklyn

This 1879 building in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn were build by a private philanthropist to offer quality, affordable worker housing. They are considered the first US "model tenement." 

See Gray (2008), "Architectural Wealth, Built for the Poor."  New York Times. 10 Oct, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/realestate/12scap.html. 
 

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

YIMBYwiki editor Tim McCormick previously lived next to US's 1st municipal public housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Houses from early 1930s, and later also lived near the 1st US model tenement, the Tower Buildings.
 

United States public housing


World War 1 worker housing

[find MIT site about this].
 

Milwaukie's Garden Homes development,1923

The City of Milwaukee, under socialist mayor Daniel Hoan, implemented the country's first public housing project, known as Garden Homes, in 1923. This experiment with a municipally-sponsored housing cooperative saw initial success, but was plagued by development and land acquisition problems, and the board overseeing the project dissolved the Gardens Home Corporation just two years after construction on the homes was completed.

"The Gardens Homes housing project had its start during the 1910 election campaign of Milwaukee's first socialist mayor, Emil Seidel, who ran on a platform that included construction of low cost, city-built, homes for workers. Though Seidel was soundly defeated in 1912, the city's second socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, was able to get a project started to ease Milwaukee's housing shortage. The shortage, caused by the rapid growth of Milwaukee's manufacturing sector, was worsened by the World War I-era moratorium on new housing construction. Because the city's housing shortage had started before World War I, and it could not prove the lack of housing was delaying the production of war materials, it was unable to obtain federal aid.

"Instead, after the war, Milwaukee's housing commission proposed a cooperative housing project. It was funded in two ways. The initial cost was to be financed by the sale of preferred stock in the Garden Homes Project, sold to city and county governments, and also made available to any other investor. The preferred stock was expected to pay a 5 percent dividend per year. The occupants of the housing would purchase common stock in the project, equal to the value of the home. They would put 10 percent down, and make payments over the next 20 years, including interest, taxes, upkeep, and other costs. After about 20 years, the preferred stock would mature and be retired, and the tenants would then own the corporation. At that time, the common shareholders could elect to convert the project to individual ownership.

"This concept was based on a similar plan in England, promoted by Ebenezer Howard's garden city concept from the Garden Cities of Tomorrow published in 1900. About 60 housing associations had been established there by 1919. Several streets in Garden Homes would initially be named after garden cities in England, including Ealing, Hampstead, Port Sunlight, Bourneville, and Letchworth."

"Shortly after construction problems involving the annexation of the Garden Homes project by the city ensued...Tenants were also unsure about the value of private improvements to their units if the plan was not eventually converted to individual ownership."

"By June 1925, state lawmakers had voted to permit the sale, rather than lease, of the project houses. Soon thereafter, the Garden Homes project board of directors disbanded the cooperative, allowing the tenants to purchase their units." 

Today the area is Garden Homes Historic District, containing all of the 93 original buildings, comprising 105 housing units.

 

New York City Housing Authority - First Houses, 1936

First Houses take their name from their distinction of being the first public housing units constructed in the United States, opening for the first tenants on December 3, 1935. Victorian-era 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 Housing Authority. The units opened in December 1935.

 

Federal Public Works Administration (PWA), 1933-

"Permanent, federally funded housing came into being in the United States as a part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Title II, Section 202 of the National Industrial Recovery Act, passed June 16, 1933, directed the Public Works Administration (PWA) to develop a program for the "construction, reconstruction, alteration, or repair under public regulation or control of low-cost housing and slum clearance projects...". Led by the Housing Division of the PWA and headed by architect Robert Kohn, the initial, Limited-Dividend Program aimed to provide low-interest loans to public or private groups to fund the construction of low-income housing."

"Too few qualified applicants stepped forward, and the Limited-Dividend Program funded only seven housing projects nationally. In the spring of 1934, PWA Administrator Harold Ickes directed the Housing Division to undertake the direct construction of public housing, a decisive step that would serve as a precedent for the 1937 Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, and the permanent public housing program in the United States. Kohn stepped down during the reorganization, and between 1934 and 1937 the Housing Division, now headed by Colonel Horatio B. Hackett, constructed fifty-two housing projects across the United States, as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Atlanta's Techwood Homes opened on 1 September 1936 and was the first of the fifty-two opened."

 

 

French contract units system (contemporary)

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

http://www.rooflines.org/4402/using_the_wrong_tools_to_build_affordable_housing/

 

Inclusionary housing (on-site)

 

 

References

 

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