Solving Housing and Homeless

[kaima]

This is radically different thinking than we are accustomed to in the USA.

Housing crisis can’t be solved by tinkering with planning laws – build more social housing instead
March 6, 2018


Author
Jo Richardson
Professor of Housing and Social Research, De Montfort University

Disclosure statement
Jo Richardson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.


The UK prime minister, Theresa May, has set out to address citizens’ anger over the lack of affordable housing in the UK, blaming councils for failing to enforce planning rules, and private developers for focusing on making a profit for shareholders.

Yet her suggestion to tinker with the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) will keep leaders talking, rather than building – it will not resolve the nation’s housing crises. And yes, the crises are plural, not singular, depending on where you live.

The government must now step in and take the lead on housing policy and socially-focused capital investment, to provide the homes that people so desperately need.

Fundamentally, the purpose of housing – whether owned or rented – is to provide shelter from the elements: a place from which to access school, work and health care and to find privacy from the public gaze. Housing should also give people a sense of being “at home” – a place to be their authentic selves, and realise their ambitions.

For these reasons, housing is too important to be led by the private market. When the purpose of housing is to provide a profit for shareholders, it creates perverse incentives to build expensive luxury homes for the wealthy to live or invest in, or to delay construction while waiting for land values to rise (a practice known as “land banking”, identified by May in her speech).

Social housing investment
The other option is social housing: homes owned by local councils or housing associations, rented out at significantly less than the market rate. There needs to be a mixed housing economy, which prioritises the delivery of sustainable and properly affordable homes. But there are several steps which both government, and society at large, must take in order to get there.

For one thing, it’s vital to change the way we talk about housing. All too often, private individuals and organisations are encouraged by government to invest in bricks and mortar, for example through the “right to buy” policy. But if government gets involved - directly building property - it’s not seen as a capital investment to benefit citizens – the nation’s “shareholders” – but as a “burden” or a “debt”, in terms of public sector borrowing.



Talk the talk, walk the walk. Neil Hall/EPA Pool.
Government should invest in capital subsidies to build social housing, in the name of the public good. The Welsh government is abolishing the right to buy in Wales, and England needs to follow suit. The policy means homes are being built with public money, then heavily discounted and sold to private landlords, who gain the uplift in value on resale as the market values rise.

There are even examples of houses bought through right to buy being let on the private market, to tenants who pay rent using a housing benefit from the government. As part of my ongoing research, I have even heard from landlords who won’t let to tenants on benefits anymore, because their mortgage company considers it too much of a risk.

All the while, the nation’s stock of affordable social homes is fast being depleted, with about 4,000 being sold each year. Borrowing rules need to be loosened, to allow councils to build social housing at really affordable rates. A tighter link to earnings – not rising property and land values – would create really affordable housing, in relation to tenants’ income.

Housing the homeless
The recent cold spell has underlined the urgent need for a rapid response, to end the growing problem of rough sleeping and homelessness. The market is partly to blame for the unacceptable rise in homelessness, alongside the government’s failure to invest in building more council housing. The impact of universal credit and benefit caps mean people cannot afford private rents in some areas, and there is not sufficient social or affordable housing to plug the gap.



Left out in the cold. jax10289 / Shutterstock.
The government can prevent people from having to sleep on the street, sofa-surf or engage in other forms of hidden homelessness by properly investing in health, education and social care, to help keep people secure in their homes. Research has found that homeless people have many complex needs, which often require specialist support.

Building for the future
Another symptom of the lack of affordable homes is that only a quarter of young people today can afford to buy a house – the rest have been priced out. Many are delaying their transition into adulthood by continuing to live in their parents’ home, or sharing with others out of financial necessity when they would rather be moving into a family home with the person they love.

Both of these big social issues could be tackled with an integrated social policy with housing at its heart, and with investment by the government in building social and affordable homes. But there is also a keen need for more infrastructure and support, to help develop functional and well-connected communities.

The government recently announced a £866m investment to fund local council infrastructure schemes, but still more continued and consistent investment is needed. May’s changes to the NPPF to “encourage” building firms to get on and build homes - in addition to the funding already announced – is one part of the puzzle. But there is so much more that can and should be done.

The message to the government is clear: build more homes - social housing - by loosening borrowing rules and investing in bricks and mortar which can be rented at well below market rates. Don’t blame it all on private housebuilders, whose eye is on the bottom line, shareholders and profits. It is time for you to take the lead.

theconversation.com/housing-crisis-cant-be-solved-by-tinkering-with-planning-laws-build-more-social-housing-instead-92902

[kaima]

Why Washington can't fix the new housing crisis
There aren’t enough homes where Americans want to live—and not even the president has the tools to change the market. What now?

By LORRAINE WOELLERT 07/07/2017 05:24 AM EDT


Donald Trump campaigned on restoring the “American dream,” a 1931 metaphor for economic success that has become political shorthand for homeownership. But as president, Trump faces a unique challenge delivering on that promise: The country is in the grip of a new kind of housing crisis that Washington has virtually no power to solve.

The crisis is a shortage of houses. Nationally, the inventory of homes for sale has been shrinking for 24 straight months, stoking bidding wars for even the lowliest fixer-uppers. In January, a measure of supply hit its lowest in history, according to the National Association of Realtors. That scarcity has helped push the homeownership rate to a near 50-year low. As 83 million millennials approach homebuying age, the shortage is expected to get only worse.

The president claims to have the problem well in hand. “Homebuilders are starting to build again,” he told a cheering crowd in Iowa last month. But that’s wrong: Construction is at an eight-month low and builder optimism is waning. There were so few houses for sale in May that buyers pushed prices to a new record high. The scarcity has helped push homeownership among young adults to its lowest in at least a generation, according to Bank of America. Today’s millennials are less likely to be homeowners than their parents or grandparents were at their age.

But Washington, which has a centurylong track record of goosing the market to encourage buyers, has almost no leverage when those buyers have nothing to buy. The Trump administration has offered few plans for tackling the problem beyond rolling back a clean-water regulation that raised builders’ cost of doing business. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has said building codes need to be updated to pave the way for inexpensive modular homes and other construction innovations, although he hasn’t gotten more specific.

The problem they’re facing is that American housing policy has always pointed one direction: encouraging people to own their own houses. Subsidized mortgages, tax breaks and, lately, crazy-low interest rates are all designed to boost the market for housing. And the market has usually cooperated: With the government juicing demand, builders swooped in and a steady supply of new houses typically followed.

But in recent years, that dynamic has broken down. Cities and towns that hold sway over residential construction have increasingly been derailing Washington’s demand-driven agenda. Ever since New York City pioneered land-use controls a century ago, local laws have tended to rein in homebuilding rather than accelerate it. Today’s not-in-my-backyard activists, environmentalists and preservationists are armed with arsenals of local and hyperlocal rules designed to keep development at bay. And the most in-demand cities and suburbs tend to have the tightest restrictions—putting a huge squeeze on people trying to live in the country’s most thriving areas.

As the mismatch between local and federal policies starts to look more like a collision, economists and housing leaders, including Mark Calabria, a top Trump administration official, and Shaun Donovan, Barack Obama’s HUD secretary, have sounded the alarm. But a fix might be out of Washington’s hands. “These rules are made at the micro, micro level,” said Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. “The federal ability to override local regulation is really pretty minimal.”

In job centers large and small, a lack of residential construction is reaching crisis proportions, prompting workers to shun high-cost cities such as Denver and San Francisco for more-affordable living in places like Atlanta and Dallas. It’s a historic shift. In the past, America’s urban economic engines were also construction boomtowns. From 1880 to 1910, Chicago’s population grew by an average of 56,000 each year, according to Glaeser. By contrast, from 1980 to 2010, as San Francisco was blossoming into the world’s tech capital, its population barely changed: annual growth averaged only 4,200.

Scarcity has home prices rising at a rapid clip. From 2011 to 2016 — a period of economic sluggishness and weak wage growth—the median price of a new home went up nearly 34 percent, to $348,900.

“If we want housing to be more affordable, we need more houses,” said Sam Khater, deputy chief economist at CoreLogic, a housing data provider. “From a federal perspective there’s nothing being done.”

WHAT COULD BE done? The problem is, not much. Americans have repaired their credit since the financial collapse, and there’s no lack of appetite for homes, but the federal housing agenda is still fixated on boosting demand from buyers. Its toolkit consists of levers such as preserving homeowner tax breaks, access to credit, and the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage—an American innovation that owes its existence to government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Federal policy has less to offer the supply side of the equation—builders—and the economic recovery has less been less kind to them. The number of homebuilding companies shrank 50 percent from 2007 to 2012, according to the most recent Census data, hitting their lowest level since 1997. The industry has yet to recover.

Those builders that remain can’t break ground fast enough to keep up with demand. They lack skilled workers, who fled the business during lean years and never came back. Smaller banks stunned by the housing collapse and flood of regulation that followed aren’t eager to offer development and construction loans. The cost of materials has skyrocketed and is bound to rise even more after the Trump administration said it would impose tariffs of up to 24 percent on Canadian lumber.

Calabria, chief economist to Vice President Mike Pence and an administration point person on housing, has warned about the inability of cities and counties to respond to big swings in buyer demand and population growth. Calabria is an advocate of zoning deregulation— he called land use a “crucial economic issue” for the whole country—but absent a big new idea or profound shift in thinking, the administration has little power to force localities to liberalize land-use laws.

Calabria, who is assembling a team to develop the Trump administration’s plan for housing reform, didn’t respond to questions about what he has in mind. Last fall, he tipped his hat to Obama after the president tried to jawbone cities and counties into easing up on zoning restrictions. “There are a lot of very strong economic reasons to worry about the constraints on housing supply that go beyond housing affordability,” Calabria told POLITICO. “It reduces mobility, it adds inequality.”

Indeed, a lack of residential construction is one reason Americans on the economic margins are still struggling after eight years of economic growth. Entry-level homes are seeing the biggest price gains, according to Khater, so the inventory crunch has hit lower-income households and first-time buyers the hardest.

WHAT NOW? TRUMP has few easy options. At the federal level, builders are pinning their hopes on infrastructure spending, looser bank rules and an immigration bill that will draw foreign workers back into construction, though it’s not likely those priorities can get political traction in Congress.

Washington, of course, can dial back its demand levers. Affordable housing groups are lobbying to cut the mortgage interest deduction, a tax break that flows largely to the wealthy and encourages people to buy bigger, more expensive houses, but they’re up against a deep-pocketed and powerful housing lobby, including bankers and real estate agents, aiming to preserve the status quo. Then there’s the risk that congressional tinkering with tax or mortgage rules could cause home prices to fall or sales to slow, a shift that would be felt well beyond Middle America, to Wall Street and the foreign investors who hold billions of dollars in U.S. home loans. That’s one reason Congress still hasn’t tackled mortgage reform nearly nine years after the crisis.

That leaves the supply side of the equation. Trump could, like Obama, use his bully pulpit to make the case for local land-use deregulation, a message that would appeal to libertarian ideals and cheer progressives fighting for more affordable housing.

But the best hope for a policy fix might lie somewhere between the White House and Main Street. States have the authority to curb local power and some, including Massachusetts, have already tried. Massachusetts builders can win zoning flexibility if they build affordable housing units where prices are high, for example. The state also can levy financial penalties against high-cost communities that refuse to greenlight new construction.

“I don’t think there’s anything in the Constitution that gives the federal government the right to override local rules,” Glaeser said. “The place you can make a difference is the statehouse.”

And a new breed of local revolutionaries outside the Beltway is doing what the federal government can’t — challenging the not-in-my-backyard establishment. A coalition of California renters established the YIMBY Party, which is taking root against NIMBYism in Denver, Austin and other high-cost cities. YIMBYs — it stands for “yes, in my backyard” and isn’t an actual political party — claimed their first victory last summer when they blocked a San Francisco ballot initiative that would have subjected zoning decisions to hyperlocal control.

While the group is focused on affordable rentals, its pro-growth agenda calls for higher density housing that will lift homeowners and tenants alike.

“The U.S. government has been totally hands off with this,” said Sonja Trauss, the YIMBY Party’s 35-year-old co-founder. “Someone has to get involved.”

www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/07/07/housing-crisis-shortage-no-fix-000472

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

Public housing

Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local.

Social housing is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the two, usually with the aim of providing affordable housing. Social housing can also be seen as a potential remedy to housing inequality.

Although the common goal of public housing is to provide affordable housing, the details, terminology, definitions of poverty and other criteria for allocation vary within different contexts.

The Netherlands


30 of the World's Most Impressive Social Housing Projects Hatert Housing GÇô Nijmegen, Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the rent for the cheaper rental homes is kept low through governmental oversight and regulation. These types of homes are known as sociale huurwoningen.

In practice this is accomplished by non-profit private housing foundations or associations (toegelaten instellingen). Due to frequent mergers the number of these organizations dropped to around 430 (2009). They manage 2.4 million dwellings. The majority of the low-rent apartments in the Netherlands are owned by such organisations. Since the policy changed in 1995 the social housing organizations have become financially independent focusing on their role as social entrepreneurs. In most Dutch municipalities there came to exist a certain minimum capacity of social housing throughout the last decades. In many cities such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht the percentage of social housing approaches or even passes 50 percent. The public (financial) supervision is done by the central fund for housing (Centraal Fonds Volkshuisvesting).


Modern social housing apartment building Silodam alongside IJ in Amsterdam


Modern social housing apartment building Silodam alongside IJ in Amsterdam

The Dutch housing policy is based on a concept of universal access to affordable housing for all and the prevention of segregation.


Social housing project in the Neighborhood Malburgen in Arnhem South. Arnhem is an exellent example of succesful social housing projects in many neighbopurhoods with appartement buildings, houses and affordable student flats for Vocational university students.

We have about four Housing cooperatives in Arnhem; Volkshuisvesting, Portaal, Vivare, Portaal and Mooiland (Beautiful land)


Another social housing project in Arnhem, this is in the North-Eastern neighbourhood Presikhaaf.

Denmark


Danish social housing association, Lejerbo- a member of Housing Europe's Danish member organisation, BL- just got awarded the Lille Arne’ prize by the Danish Association of Architects. The award goes to praises architecture that combines high-quality buildings with quality outdoor areas.



In Denmark, public housing is called Almennyttigt Boligbyggeri and is owned and administered by approximately 700 self-governing, democratic and non-profit organizations by and for the tenants themselves. Many of the public housing organizations in Denmark are rooted in the early history of the labor unions and currently forms about 20% of the total housing stock with about 7,500 departments countrywide. A membership of a housing organization is usually required to obtain a rental and they are granted with regard to length of membership.


Renovation of gyldenrisparken social housing, Copenhagen, 2005-2012

Although the buildings are owned and administered by self-governing and economically independent organizations, the State of Denmark is strongly regulating public housing in the country. By law, the municipalities have access to 25% of the rentals, usually reserving them for the poor, the unemployed, the disabled or mentally ill or any other group dependent on social benefits from the municipality. Over the years, these regulations have created many 'especially vulnerable residential areas' – so called "ghettos" – within the country. The Danish Public Housing has never had any income restrictions, but in recent years new state regulations has made it mandatory for several of them to favor fully employed renters and disfavor unemployed or part-time employed people. This is a relatively new effort by the state to counter the ghettofication, which is now an officially recognized problem countrywide.


Trekroner Housing, Denmark: Roskilde Homes



As in Sweden, state and municipal policies carried out throughout the first decade of the 21st century, has led to an increased privatization of public housing. In many areas, residents have been offered to buy their own flats, thereby effectively changing the status of the property. The privatization of public housing was initiated as part of an ideological program by the right wing governments of the early 21st century and was launched a few years after the closure of the former Ministry of Housing Affairs in 2001. The former ministry was re-opened as Ministry of Housing, Urban and Rural Affairs in October 2011, when a new coalition government led by social-democrats was formed.


Housing Østerbro, Aalborg, Denmark

Germany


More than 84 per cent of households in Berlin rent their home.

Between 1925 and 1930 Germany was the site of innovative and extensive municipal public housing projects, mostly in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt am Main. These Siedlungen (settlements), were made necessary by the dreadful living conditions of pre-war urban tenements. The right to a healthy dwelling was written into the 1919 Weimar Constitution, but few dwellings were built until economic stability in 1925.

These settlements were low-rise, no more than 5 stories, and in suburban settings. Residents were provided access to light, air, and sun. The size, shape, orientation and architectural style of Germany's public housing were informed by the recent experience of the Vienese and the Dutch, the anti-urban Garden City Movement in Britain, by new industrialized mass-production and pre-fabrication building techniques, by the novel use of steel and glass, and by the progressive-liberal policies of the Social Democrats.


Bruno Taut, Uncle Tom's Cabin Estate, Wilskistrasse, Berlin.

Architect Martin Wagner (with Bruno Taut) was responsible for the thousands of dwellings built in and around Berlin, including the Horseshoe Siedlung (named for its shape), and Uncle Tom's Cabin Siedlung (named for a local restaurant). But Wagner was second to the city planner Ernst May in Frankfurt. May was responsible for the construction of 23 separate settlements, 15,000 total units, in five years. He ran his own sizable research facility to investigate, for instance, air-flow in various floorplan configurations, construction techniques, etc. The Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky applied the principles of Taylorism to the kitchen workspace and developed the Frankfurt kitchen while working for Ernst May.

Beyond technical research May also published two magazines and embarked on a significant public-relations project, with films and classes and public exhibitions, to make Neues Bauen acceptable to the public. In the late 1920s the principles of equal access to "Licht, Luft und Sonne" (light, air and sun) and the social effects of a guaranteed "Existenzminimum" became a matter of lively popular debate all over Germany. One indirect result of this publicity was the American housing movement: a young Catherine Bauer attended one of May's conferences in 1930, and wrote her seminal "Modern Housing" based on research done in Frankfurt and with Dutch architect JJP Oud.

Increasing pressure from the rising Nazis brought this era to an end in 1933. A majority of the German public housing experts had Social Democrat or Communist sympathies and were forced out of the country.

In East Germany, Communist administration saw the rise of the Plattenbau ("panel building"). Virtually all new residential buildings since the 1960s were built in this style, as it was a quick and relatively cheap way to solve the country's severe housing shortage, which had been caused by wartime bombing raids and the large influx of German refugees from further east.

There were several common plattenbau designs. The most common series was the P2, followed by the WBS 70. the WHH GT 18, and Q3A. The designs were flexible and could be built as towers or rows of apartments of various heights.


Modern "social housing" in Germany

[kaima]

My favorite socialized apartments are in Vienna, where the city housing hired the artist / architect Hundertwasser to design a complex. I convinced a tour of engineers from America to include it on our tour once, and I did not get rave reviews for my recommendation.



The Hundertwasserhaus is an apartment house in Vienna, Austria, built after the idea and concept of Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser with architect Joseph Krawina as a co-author. This expressionist landmark of Vienna is located in the Landstraße district on the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse.



Friedensreich Hundertwasser started out as a painter. Since the early 1950s, however, he increasingly became focused on architecture, writing and reading in public .’ advocating natural forms of decay. In 1972, he had his first architectural models made for the TV-show ‘Wünsch dir was', in order to demonstrate his ideas on forested roofs, "tree tenants" and the "window right" of every tenant to embellish the facade around his windows. In these models Hundertwasser also developed new architectural shapes, such as the "eye-slit" house and the "high-rise meadow house"[1]

In lectures at academies and before architectural associations, Hundertwasser elucidated his concerns regarding an architecture in harmony with nature and man.

To this end, architect Josef Krawina was invited to join the artist and to help him to put his ideas into practice.



In August and September 1979, architect Krawina presented to Hundertwasser his preliminary drawings and a Styrofoam model. Hundertwasser was shocked and rejected them as representing exactly the leveling, straight-lined modular grid against which he had consistently fought.[2] As his model of the “Terrace House” for Eurovision showed, he had already conceptualized a quite different type of house.[3]

In the end the house was built between 1983 and 1985 according to the ideas and concepts of Hundertwasser with architect Univ.-Prof. Joseph Krawina as a co-author and architect Peter Pelikan as a planner. It features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a divine melody to the feet"[4]), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. Hundertwasser took no payment for the design of the house, declaring that it was worth it, to prevent something ugly from going up in its place.

Within the house there are 53 apartments, four offices, 16 private terraces and three communal terraces, and a total of 250 trees and bushes. The Hundertwasser House is one of Vienna's most visited buildings and has become part of Austria's cultural heritage.[5]



In 2001, twenty years after architect Krawina’s exit from the project, the firm H.B. Medienvertriebsgesellschaft mbH under its business manager Harald Böhm encouraged architect Krawina to legally substantiate his claim as co-creator of the “Hundertwasser House.” On March 11, 2010, after eight years of litigation, Austria's Oberster Gerichtshof [Supreme Court of Justice] ruled Josef Krawina along with Friedensreich Hundertwasser, to be co-creators of the house with the effect that it is now forbidden for the Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation to disseminate any illustration or replica of the house without acknowledging Krawina as co-creator. According to the ruling, Hundertwasser was the sole spiritual creator (German: Geistiger Schöpfer) of the building, however, Krawina must be recognized as a co-creator of equal standing and be paid an equal share in royalty receipts.[6]

Which is more than I knew about it before.
I do disagree with the uneven floor idea. It is put into practice in one shop and is very unnatural and a stumbling problem. So art may be great, but it also has limitations!

[Jaga]

Pieter,

I am glad that you started the subject of public housing. The picture of tallhouse in Nijmegen, Netherlands and in Germany are the most impressive for me. Some other buildings remind me our apartment complex in Poland, grey and all look alike.

[Jaga]

Kai, beautiful idea of the house. I was in Vienna several times when I lived in Poland. I remember to spend one day to get to the Hundertwasser and see its unique beauty.

[karl]

This a subject I know little about, but am learning from this presentation. It is a reality though, that low cost housing is an answer to fill a need, and that is in the manner of Federal controled building of such housing as expressed in the examples. Most are very attractive with an exception that is not only lacking in taste, but simply just ugly, and that is the Hundertwasserhaus. The named artist that sold this idea is a master of bull crap, his designs are simply off the wall of commonsense and deplorable.

The designs as exampled in The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany make good sense in both design and taste.

But then, I would only suppose my self am not Austrian.

Karl