Planners and politicians in many cities — especially those with high housing costs — face a dilemma when it comes to providing non-market housing (sometimes called social housing). The most cost effective solutions in terms of dollars per unit can be to build a big apartment block in a struggling area of the city where land is cheaper.
Unfortunately, this can tend to reinforce a poor ghetto’s status, which can make it harder for individuals and families to make those broader connections in a wider community that help break the cycle of poverty, especially for kids.
Better for many people is to be mixed into market-housing neighbourhoods. In a recent interview, a child who grew up in a smaller Vancouver social housing project located in a generally wealthier area of the city noted how she and her cohorts in the social housing townhouses went to school with the children of successful business people and university professors. As a result, she argued, the high school performance and university graduation rate of these children from the social housing complex was quite high. She was very grateful for having had the opportunity to be a part of this high performing peer group as it allowed her to break a cycle of poverty in her family.
Her experience was from the 1970s. Today, it would can be hard to get a medium-sized non-market housing project approved in an existing neighbourhood. So what if those seeking to provide non-market housing thought much smaller.
In many cities across North America there is a movement to increase the density of existing and sometimes older areas by allowing duplexes, secondary suites, and laneway houses be added to existing properties.
What if social housing organizations went around existing, and maybe gentrifying, neighbourhoods and bought up suitable existing houses that could be converted into 2 or 3 units.
Those who would benefit from the homes could be invited or required to provide some labor during the renovation. This would keep costs down along with using the existing home’s “solid old bones” as a base.
Buying the occasional fixer-upper house that comes up for sale anywhere in the city would eliminate the social housing ghettos. The city could even mandate there not be more than one house on any given block.
Surely this has been tried somewhere. Does it work? Can it work?
Given the amazing cost overruns at a Vancouver social housing project (I think the units will cost tax payers over $700,000 each), buying up existing houses just seems easier.
Note: by social housing I’m not talking about homeless shelters, but homes for those with jobs, or students with children, for example, who just cannot afford the escalating costs of housing in some of North America’s more dynamic cities.
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Wendy,
Where in live in London (UK, not Ontario!), around a third of the homes in my street and the next one over are social housing, but they are the same kind of Victorian terraced houses that everyone else lives in. It all goes back to the 70s when the local council and various co-operatives / housing associations started buying up street properties. It seems to work very well in that there is no stigma associated with living in social housing and the neighbourhood feels like it has a good economic and demographic mix. The policy was repeated across much of London and, IMO, contributes greatly to the appealing mix of many of London’s neighbourhoods. Of course it was a lot easier to do this kind of thing in the 1970s when London seemed to be emptying out and houses like these could be snapped up on the cheap. Now they go for around half a million pounds each – these days the vast majority of our new social housing is in the form of medium or high-density apartments, although there is a small amount of existing home purchase.
I think this is an approach that is definitely worth considering. In addition, we should consider purchasing scattered apartments in buildings in suitable neighbourhoods to help integrate social housing with market housing. Some argue this is too complicated to manage…well, I would argue that with the savings on acquisition, a bit more could be spent on management, if necessary.
Toronto Communinity Housing has a large group of single family homes as seen in linked map…
http://www.torontohousing.ca/webfm_send/5164
Rooming houses and half-way houses are integrated into neighbourhoods throughout Toronto. Integrating low-cost housing into neighbourhoods reduces crime. In central Cairo a large poor population lives in the same neighbourhood as the middle class. They just live on the roof tops. Crime is not an issue, because the poor feel included in the environment, and not segregated.
Sounds like there are some lessons from London: (a) it works. (b) buy before prices go any higher in a place like Vancouver. (c) presumably London has figured out some way to manage the whole system of having flats and row houses and single family in the non-market pool (as per Michael’s point about buying some condos as well as houses, which I think is brilliant for Vancouver).
Over the past few years the city of Atlanta has demolished all of its public housing projects and has given its tenants vouchers to offset costs of renting elsewhere in the city. The idea is that the public housing would be decentralized and would result in more mixed income communities. In the place of the demolished housing, new communities will be created with higher densities with a mix of public and private housing. I seem to recall reading somewhere that all new condo builds in Atlanta also had to set aside a certain percentage of the units for public housing (it was often used to acquire higher densities, something akin to section 37 dollars in Toronto). I can’t find this policy anywhere online though.
More info on the new projects: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/us/21atlanta.html
This is happening at a small, localized scale. Ottawa has actively endorsed acquisition as part of its overall housing strategy. A couple of small non-profit groups have been buying up and renovating existing apartments, and the Canadian Mental Health Association in Ottawa has successfully been buying condo units to house their clients.
The main problem is that current Canadian housing funding programs are really stimulus programs for the home building industry, not low-income affordable housing. Thus it is more difficult to use those funds for acquisition than for new development.
This reflects the core failure of current Canadian housing policy, which is focused on the needs of the financial and development industry, and completely ignores urban planning, economic development (beyond job and wealth creation) and social policy needs.