I lived in one of London’s
first council housing projects after World War II. That experience showed me
how a country (the United Kingdom, in this case) could create affordable
housing and maintain a nice aesthetic, using social architecture to
benefit both society and building inhabitants.
In 1952, the architects
Chamberlin, Powell & Bon built the Golden Lane Estatein
London on top of a bombed-out site. They sought to imbue the city with an
architectural model of social housing that was utilitarian, functional and
beautiful. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright
and Ludwig Hilberseimer, the modernism of this structure is to London
what Unité
d’habitation is to Marseille in France.
These estates in the U.K. have
nothing in common with the American model of social housing—often called
“projects”—which are, if anything, the nightmarish antithesis to the British
ideal of social housing. The American model of social housing is related to the
gentrification of cities. This keeps certain types of people outside of certain
parts of town and makes land accessible/affordable for an elite class.
But this practice is not new.
With the establishment of the National
Housing Act of 1934, both the Federal Housing Administration and the
Federal Home Loan Bank Board were created in the same year, and the abuse known
as “redlining” was born. Redlining is the way key services (e.g., home loans,
insurance) are denied or when costs are raised for residents of a specific
geographical area. These actions resulted in black neighborhoods being deemed
unsafe and unwise investments. Hence, it was next to impossible for African-Americans
to get loans. This helped to concentrate
poverty in certain neighborhoods. When social housing was constructed,
these “projects” became pockets of poverty, segregation and forced underdevelopment.
Growing impoverishment and large social housing blocks brought problems such as
crime, degraded public education and decrepit—even nonexistent—public services.
While the Fair Housing Act
of 1968 was meant to tackle these problems of concentrated poverty and
underdevelopment, there was little enforcement of this law, as Nikole
Hannah-Jones documented
for ProPublica. In essence, a law was created and purposefully allowed to
be unenforced—to suit those who benefited from social and economic segregation
at the time.
In this manner, the legacy of
the American model of public housing, compared with countries like
Austria, is an embarrassment. The Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) has 5 million low-income households (accounting for 10
million individuals) within HUD-subsidized
housing in the U.S. And although America has been home to some architecturally beautiful
housing projects, this is not the rule in the public housing history of the
country. Most people in U.S. government-subsidized housing are not enjoying
scenic views like the ones from Barbican or
living in posh areas such as
Hampstead.
Now, with the rising cost of
living and increasing problems of employment in the U.S., the housing
market is slowing down. This trend—and regulations that have been
designed to inform consumers of their rights, while enforcing fairness with
the Truth
in Lending Act (TILA) and the grass-roots bill S.
2155—makes getting home loans more difficult. With more Americans renting
today than at any time over the past 50 years, the pressure on the public
sector is mounting and is not aided by our own government officials. Even
the National Low-Income Housing Coalition has
stated that there are 7.2 million
fewer “affordable and available” homes than needed for extremely low-income
households.
If anything, the current administration’s
interest in lower-income housing can be summed up with the recent proposal of
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who has created
the Make
Affordable Housing Work Act.
Sit down for this one.
Carson’s plan would raise
the rent of those in public housing to 35 percent of household income
(from the current 30 percent) while eliminating all deductions that could in
any way lower this rental contribution. This proposed bill would force
low-income households to pay more—not less—of their earnings in rent, basically
tripling the rent for the poorest. So the “affordable” part of this act must
refer to the affordability for the state, not the individual or family.
Carson claims
that these changes “would require adults who are able to work to
shoulder more of their housing costs and provide an incentive to increase their
earnings.” Not only does this kind of thinking contradict actual
research which demonstrates that affordable housing improves economic
self-sufficiency while increasing children’s future earnings, but such an
approach flies in the face of basic mathematics, where paying more does not
mean having more. It clearly means having less for the basic
necessities of survival. Along with education and health care, housing is a
human right, with many viable options for the government to implement.
Last month, Peter Gowan and
Ryan Cooper of the think tank People’s
Policy Project (3P) suggested that municipal governments across the
United States build millions of units of social housing. With their proposal,
municipalities would use municipal bond markets, loans from the federal
government and federal grants that replicated already existing grants (i.e.,
the low-income housing tax credit program) to finance the construction of new
housing.
This plan proves to be
advantageous from various perspectives. First, the costs would be kept to a
minimum since the interest rates on government debt are lower than on any other
type of financing. Second, this model of construction would be built with
greater social cooperation and thus would be more efficiently undertaken. The
consensus among those who support the anti-gentrification model of urban
development is that short-term construction models would be better used if they
focus on the middle, rather than the high end, of the market, where housing
units can be constructed with smaller square footage per unit even if
sacrificing certain amenities. The 3P plan suggests that the newly built
housing units be managed through a public authority or a local property
management company.
However, missing from 3P’s
project is a green architecture perspective that is typically found in social
housing units in other countries. Such considerations are necessary in an era
where resources are limited and the means for processing energy can be easily
integrated into building structure and planning. For example, Vo Trong Nghia
introduced the S House and S House 3 for low-income
residents in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, a social housing project that adapts to
the landscape and in which the dwellings can be
assembled in only three hours. The Astrolarbre in
Paris is a 12-unit housing project designed around a single oak tree with
rainwater harvesting and gardens incorporated into the architecture. The Poljane
Community Housingin Maribor, Slovenia, incorporates roof gardens into its
structure, while the housing
project in Mieres, Spain, relies on solar power and passive solar
energy. And, as architecture has changed to accommodate climate change, so have
materials, with many architects returning to wood or mixtures of steel and
wood.
What we can learn from social
housing models in other countries is that housing can be made affordably
and without
being ugly. Embracing an ecological and aesthetic approach to social
housing in the future will rely upon getting politicians like Ben Carson on
board with basic math—and a pinch of humanity.
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