Public Housing

Public housing constitutes government created or heavily subsidized housing. The most typical use of the term refers to a large amount of housing projects started by various governments during the early to mid 20th century in order to house the poor and middle class, modernize housing architecture, and eliminate what was dubbed ‘urban blight’ and ‘slum conditions’.

Modern public housing arguably first originated in the UK, as a response to the scale and accelerating prominence of slum conditions during the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, the the slum conditions created by overcrowded living conditions near factories.

USA

History

American Housing Act of 1937

Public housing in the USA started with the American Housing Act of 1937.

Catherine Bauer is credited for most of the American Housing Act. She helped write it and lobby for it. Catherine was an anti-capitalist (particularly fond of Robert Owen) who worked to gather support from unions for American housing reform. Writing in the early 1900s, Catherine regarded the laissez-faire 1800s as the lowest historical point in the state of the human social environment, particularly housing.

She continually gave the opinion that she felt the modern intellectual and industrial revolutions were often worse than medieval times at public hygiene, architectural beauty, and maintenance of the public space. She loathed the 1800s, and derided the era in particular as being tainted by a selfish, individualist Progressivism which sought solutions for everything except decent housing.

“[But proponents of 1800s progress say] look at electric lights, steel skeletons, power, elevators, paved roads, automobiles, steamships, telephone and telegraph […] but the cities grew progressively uglier and more wasteful and less workable. The average dwelling of the average citizen was more dark, dirty, and crowded than ever before [… with] far less accessibility to work-places and play-places [and with] greatly increased rents” — Catherine Bauer, 1934¹

Catherine was particularly disturbed by overcrowding, including among the poor. When she presented the American Housing Act to Congress, she hedged that she was not fully happy with the final bill presentation, which was co-authored by others with whom she had disagreements. Bauer cautioned that she did not wish the bill to be used only to replace urban blight. She strongly emphasized she also wished to see the building of millions of new public housing units on new land to aid in underhousing, population growth, and overcrowding among the general population, not just urban slums.²

Despite Bauer’s warnings, the negative consequences of the American Housing Act of 1937 allegedly included an over-focus on replacing urban blight, displacing African-American communities, and introducing blight of its own over the decades. Bauer, however, did not advocate dense urban planning, and particularly not the high-rise buildings which defined the first public housing in the USA. The most famous of the original housing projects, like Robert Taylor Homes, were inspired by the Modernist architectural movement. The modernists imagined reworking entire cities into a series of densely populated, identical, and sterile high-rises.

Nixon Era

New tenants of high-rise public housing in America, while experiencing increased living standards, complained of crowded conditions, onerous rules, and later, crime. However, despite these issues, high-rise efforts left the USA almost free from involuntary homelessness until the mid-1970s, when Nixon ordered a moratorium on public housing during a period of rising crime across the entire country, seen starkly in public housing high-rises.

Reagan Era

After further defunding of public housing by Reagan and another crime wave in the late ’80s, some of Chicago’s African-American–dominated high-rise housing projects developed a violence problem often compared to a war zone, with a significant share of the population falling victim to shootings and stabbings, particularly in Cabrini–Green.³ Chicago residents celebrated when the isolated high-rise public housing buildings transformed into mixed-income public housing. However, even for the prior high-rises, the issue of violence was somewhat chicken-and-egg, as a significant amount of the homeless displaced residents still committed crimes while homeless, and it’s not as if homelessness deterred the crime seen in Cabrini–Green. Even today, without public housing, the Cabrini rowhouse section of Chicago is an epicenter of crime in Chicago.

Clinton Era

A cap was placed on all future units of Public Housing under President Bill Clinton called the Faircloth Amendment.

NIMBY, YIMBY, PHIMBY

After the gutting of public housing, the debate over urbanism ultimately resulted in a rather tedious dispute between “NIMBYs” (“Not in my backyard”) and “YIMBYs” (“Yes in my backyard”), who argue, among other things, about the value of “affordable housing” privatization schemes in their backyard. They typically ignore the PHIMBYs — or “Public housing in my backyard” advocates — who push for actual public housing within our communities. Unless, of course, actual public housing is built in the suburbs, during which a substantial portion of YIMBYs would become NIMBYs if their voting history is any indicator.

Failures of neoliberal market solutions

The neoliberal answer to the problems of dense urban planning in the USA was more dense urban planning and also less public housing. US neoliberal efforts to fix modern housing crises through crude supply-and-demand market tactics seemed to only make them worse. Neoliberals and modernist urbanists in the late 20th century to today promote building more dense urban private property as solutions to unaffordable land and real estate. However, rather than increased housing density lowering land costs, increased American city density has become synonymous with unaffordable rents. Unaffordable, dense urban planning has become almost romanticized through American fetishization of the danger of expensive, elite, and dense urban centers, seen most starkly with the obsession with New York, whose rents would drop sharply were it to become less population dense. The higher the density of urban centers, the more profit speculators can extract per parcel. Americans in dense urban cities became conditioned to each increase in extreme rents over the decades, like frogs in boiling water.

Administration

Federal public housing in the USA is administered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, (HUD) which coordinates with local housing authorities throughout the USA. Some states are attempting to side-step HUD though, like Rhode Island, which is developing public housing separate from HUD. Additionally, individual US counties will offer heavily subsidized apartments sometimes, also separate from HUD.

Types of existing public housing

Non-traditional federal public housing includes HUD’s “HCV vouchers”, previously known as Section 8, and which replaced the previous Section 23 vouchers. Other public housing HUD vouchers include “Project-Based Vouchers”, “Section 202” for the elderly, and “Section 811” for the disabled. HUD vouchers allow recipients to rent a private apartment with funds from the government. If they are project-based, they are typically tied to a specific apartment complex, otherwise the vouchers can be used to pick from a much wider array of apartment complexes. If the HUD housing resident have no official income source, they pay between nothing to about $50 per month. If they earn money, they pay a proportion of their monthly earnings.

Public housing vs “affordable housing”

“Public housing” is increasingly distinguished from “affordable housing” by some US local government authorities.⁴ The insinuation is not that public housing is unaffordable (public housing is often free), but that what people refer to as “affordable housing” nowadays is not actually affordable or public housing due to high minimum rents. After the gutting of public housing in the USA, both the US federal and local governments sought public/private programs like “LIHTC subsidized housing,” among other programs, all of which share a common theme: they are not participating in (and sometimes rejecting) the US Housing Act of 1937, which attempts to guarantee housing to all. Therefore, “affordable housing” is sometimes seen as a smokescreen, diverting attention away from public housing in favor of private projects with minimum rents that can exceed $1,500 per month. Whatever “affordable housing” is, if it’s in the thousands, it is not even true affordable housing.

When the topic of public housing is brought up nowadays, a common knee-jerk phrase from Democrats is that more affordable housing is needed, before the conversation shuts down. However, that phrase is somewhat bizarre given how commonly “affordable housing” is used as a divergence away from both affordable and public housing in recent years. It could mean almost anything, including exorbitantly priced $2,000+/month apartments, yet it remains the term most often used today to distract from or replace public housing with less-affordable options. The term “affordable housing” is also insensitive to the growing number of workers spending over half their income on rent — workers who can technically “afford” housing, it’s just that the price is so high they don’t feel secure from homelessness.

To understand how far the concept of “affordable housing” has strayed from its original intent, it’s helpful to look back at the language and provisions of the US Housing Act of 1937. This law makes extensive use of terminology which sidesteps the modern contradiction in terms; its authors actually preferred the phrase “affordable housing” over “public housing” in the bill itself. In general, the bill is riddled with language that distracts from how generous the overall bill is. For example, the bill repeatedly positions itself as a solution for families, constantly emphasizing families. Near the end of the bill, one might get the impression singles were entirely excluded. However, in a small portion, the bill makes clear that tax-defined single-person households without children are eligible as well for public housing. Public housing under the US Housing Act of 1937 provided millions of singles without any psychiatric diagnosis or children the ability to own their own place simply if they were poor, contrary to some popular perceptions of public housing being only for single mothers.

Australia

(Needs work)

Australia has an income-flexible public housing program similar to public housing in the USA.

Singapore

77% of Singapore’s population lives in high-rise government-managed housing⁵ called “B.T.O. flats,” which are leased to citizens for under $100k per 99 years. They are also allowed to be sold on a secondary market under certain conditions. While not at all public housing by US or Australian standards, due to lease costs and means testing, there are also allegedly further programs for low-income individuals to obtain such flats. These B.T.O. flats are meant to encourage heterosexual family formation by mostly offering them to heterosexual couples, including flats for couples who still wish to live with their parents. Singapore did not allow singles to buy government flats until recently; now singles older than 35 are allowed to obtain such flats.⁶

Singaporeans can obtain B.T.O. flats from the government by applying for a lottery and waiting about three years.⁶ In order to prevent citizens from selling these flats on a secondary market too soon or in places with a lot of demand, citizens can only sell them on a secondary market after living in them for at least 10 years.⁶

Well aware of the slum and decay that occurs among government-owned high-rises in the USA, the Singaporean government proactively cleans high-rise grounds and regularly gives old properties “facelifts.” The government credits its ruling party for clean housing conditions and cautions that voting against the People’s Action Party might result in more rundown high-rise conditions.⁶

Japan

Public housing in Japan typically refers to “Danchi,” state-built and state-run housing with multiple purposes over the years. Nowadays it is primarily known as subsidized rental housing for those with low income. The amount paid by the resident is proportional to their income and ranges from 3,000 yen ($20 USD) to 50,000 yen ($329) per month.⁷

Danchi was started in the 1950s as a response to population growth the market wasn’t meeting, and was managed by the state “Japan Housing Corporation.” Another primary purpose was to help modernize Japanese housing after Japan’s military defeat in World War Two.⁸

Danchi units at this time were typically a spacious 41 square meters, with a genkan micro-entrance, three multi-purpose tatami rooms, metal doors, and individual bathrooms. At the time of construction, even individual bathrooms were considered luxurious to an extent.⁸

In 1965, Japan began building micro-cities of Danchi, called “New Towns.” The 1970s saw the positive effect of Danchi on reducing underhousing, but instead of expanding the program, this decade saw stagnation. The 1980s and further decades saw a consumerist attitude that was often hostile to public housing.⁸

By the 1990s, Danchi was being limited to low-income individuals and the elderly. And by the 2000s, the unpopular Danchi neighborhoods began to be demolished.⁸

Danchi, while it still exists, is often stigmatized today. Family and friends are often reluctant to admit a member is living in one. However, there still exists positive reporting of Danchis within Japan.

Existing aversion to Danchi today is partially because the Japanese government has not maintained funding for these units in full good faith, resulting in physical dilapidation. While the dilapidation is perhaps not on the scale of US public housing, it can still involve mold and cracks. Additionally, Danchi units haven’t adjusted to modern expectations such as efficient insulation and disability support for the elderly, such as elevators. Coupled with stigmatization of the residents, the lack of structural disability support has created a modern situation of kodokushi: elderly people being socially isolated and discovered passed away in their residences long after the fact. Non-elderly Danchi residents are also reported to avoid interaction outside of Danchis to an extent, due to embarrassment of their social status. The situation is not hopeless for residents, however, young architects and housing developers have expressed a desire to help the government rebuild these units.⁸

USA