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Public housing describes a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Although the principles are common, the details of the arrangements differ between countries, and so does the terminology.
Canada
Arrangements and terminology in Canada are similar to those in the United States
Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, the government provides homes through public housing estates which are rented at a lower price than the markets, and through the Home Ownership Scheme.
Ireland
In Ireland, public housing and halting sites have been built by Local Authorities and are known as Local Authority Accommodation. Dublin Corporation and the former Dublin County Council provided the lion's share of Irish Local Authority Housing, with County Longford having the largest ratio of Local Authority to private housing in the state.
New Zealand
In New Zealand, public housing is referred to as State housing
Singapore
In Singapore, public housing is made by HDB.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom public housing is often referred to as "council housing" and "council estate," and is described in the article on that subject. Local not-for-profit housing associations have begun to operate some of the older council housing estates in the United Kingdom.
United States and Canada
In the United States and Canada, public housing is usually a block of
purpose-built housing operated by a government agency.
In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries government involvement in housing for the poor was chiefly in the area of requiring new buildings to meet certain standards - like having airshafts - for decent livability.
Most housing communities were developed from the 1930s onward. Unfortunately, most of the initial public housing was really more slum clearance than true public housing, with new projects scarcely providing more apartments than the old tenements that the buildings had replaced. Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote in 1938, "Today, we are launching an attack on the slums of this country."
Public housing in its earliest decades was usually much more working-class and middle-class and white than it was by the 1960s and after. Many Americans associate large, multi-story towers with public housing, but early projects, like the Ida B. Wells projects in Chicago, were actually low-rise, though Le Corbusier superblocks caught on before World War II, as seen in the (union built) Penn South houses in New York.
What Kenneth T. Jackson and other historians have called the "ghettofication" of public housing occurred for several reasons. One reason was the general weakening of the urban working classes. By the late 1950s the reservoir of needy working class urban dwellers was simply smaller than it had been previously.
Other reasons for the ghettofication of public housing can be attributed to broad public policy decisions. Federal law required that no person could pay more than a quarter of his or her income for rent in public housing. Since middle class people would pay as much, or more, for rent in public housing as they would in superior private housing, middle class people had no incentive to live in public housing at all. Another public policy factor that led to the decline in public housing was that, in general, city housing agencies ceased to screen tenants (New York City was an exception). In the 1940s, some public housing agencies, such as Chicago's under Elizabeth Wood, would only accept married tenants and gave special benefits to war veterans.
Public housing was only built with the blessing of the local government. Hence, unlike France, projects were almost never built on suburban greenfields. Usually projects were built in older neighborhoods, whose old housing was demolished to make way for them. The destruction of tenements and eviction of their low-income residents consistently created problems in nearby neighborhoods with "soft" real estate markets.
- The destruction of deteriorating buildings to make room for public housing often created problems in adjacent neighborhoods. An excellent example of this phenomenon can be found in Brooklyn. When blocks of slums in the Brownsville district were cleared to make room for public housing in the 1950s, thousands of displaced families moved into the neighboring district of East New York, which at that time was a predominantly white, middle-class area with a stable economy. The sudden influx of large, lower-income black and Hispanic familes from Brownsville strained the physical and social services of the community. A mass exodus of the white population began. Within six years a healthy community became one of the most decayed and dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. (Crabgrass Frontier, 229)
Houses, apartments or other residential units are usually subsidized on a rent-geared-to-income (RGI) basis. Some communities have now embraced a mixed income, with both assisted and market rents, when allocating homes as they become available.
In recent years, many such projects have been torn down, renovated or replaced after criticism that the concentration of poverty in economically depressed areas, inadequate management of the buildings, and government indifference have contributed to increased crime. Indeed, US public housing continues to have a reputation for violence, drug use, and prostitution, leading to the passage, in 1996, of a federal "one strike you're out" law, calling for the eviction of project tenants whose housing units are the scene of certain types of criminal activity, especially that which is drug-related.
In 1997, the top providers of US public housing, according to HUD were:
- New York City, 160,000 units
- Puerto Rico, 57,000 units
- Chicago, 40,000 units
- Philadelphia, 22,000 units
- Baltimore, 18,000 units
In reaction to the problems surrounding public housing, the US Congress passed legislation enacting the Section 8 Housing Program in 1974, which Richard Nixon signed into law, to encourage the private sector to construct affordable homes. This kind of housing assistance assists poor tenants by giving a monthly subsidy to their landlords. This assistance can be 'project based,' which applies to specific properties, or 'tenant based,' which provides tenants with a voucher they can use anywhere vouchers are accepted. Virtually no new project based Section 8 housing has been produced since 1983. Effective October 1, 1999, existing tenant based voucher programs were merged into the Housing Choice Voucher Program, which is today the primary means of providing subsidies to low income renters. The George W. Bush Administration has recently proposed controversial changes to the Housing Choice Voucher Program.
Some US public housing developments
- Atlanta
- Techwood Homes First projects in the nation. Located in downtown Atlanta south of the campus of Georgia Tech. Torn down for Olympics and turned into Centennial Place Apartments.
- Chicago
- Robert Taylor Homes was the largest public housing development in the world - 28 buildings of 16 stories each, housing 20,000 people. The Robert Taylor Homes have virtually all been closed, thanks to the Chicago Housing Authority's Transformation Plan.
- Cabrini-Green
- Detroit
- New York
- St. Louis
- Seattle
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