Housing

Last month, the FBI reportedly conducted an unannounced raid of Cortland Management, a major corporate landlord based in Atlanta. The surprise search appears to be part of a Department of Justice criminal investigation, first reported by Politico in March, into an alleged scheme among many corporate landlords to artificially increase rents through collusion.

The investigation centers around the use of RealPage, advanced property management software used by many corporate landlords. Following a 2022 exposé by ProPublica, RealPage and landlords that use the software have been named defendants in multiple class action lawsuits, as well as actions filed by the Attorneys General of Arizona and Washington, DC.

According to the lawsuit filed by the State of Arizona in February, landlords that are supposed to be in competition with each other "outsource daily pricing and ongoing revenue oversight" to RealPage. The company allegedly facilitates and encourages landlords to work cooperatively to increase rents. An e-book produced by RealPage says that the company allows corporate landlords who are “technically competitors” to "work together . . . to make us all more successful in our pricing." RealPage bragged that landlords that use its software “continually outpace the market in good times and bad.” In other words, RealPage helps landlords charge higher rates than they would in a truly competitive market. An executive for Camden Property Trust, a corporate landlord based in Houston, said deploying RealPage's software resulted in "pushing people out" with higher rents but ultimately increased revenue by $10 million. 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced a 12-year plan for the building industry when peace came.

The Ministry of Works had come up with Emergency Factory Made Houses, or EFMs.

They devised an ideal floor plan of a one-storey bungalow with two bedrooms, inside toilets, a fitted kitchen, a bathroom and a living room.

The homes would be detached and surrounded by a garden to encourage householders to grow fruit and vegetables, and would have a coal shed.

Soon better known as prefabs than EFMs, the homes were cheap to produce and, for many, an improvement on their previous living conditions.

[…]

In the first decade after the war, nearly 500,000 homes were built using some form of prefabrication.

Originally intended as an interim solution until the country could return to building permanent homes with traditional materials, 156,623 prefab bungalows were built between 1945 and 1949.

Each was expected to last for a decade. About 8,000 remain today.

From the ABC's summary:

The Albanese government's Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee released its second report recently. […]

The committee made 22 recommendations to the federal government on ways to best improve economic inclusion and create a more equal and prosperous nation.

It said its recommendations had been made with regard to their fiscal impact, their effect on workforce participation, and the long-term sustainability of the social security system.

But the committee said its five priority recommendations were to:

• "Substantially increase JobSeeker" and related working-age payments, and immediately improve the indexation arrangements of the payments.
• Increase the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance to better reflect the high rents actually charged in the private rental market.
• Commit to a "full-scale redesign" of Australia's employment services system to underpin the government's goal of full employment, and to replace the current system, which "worsens economic exclusion" with one that "promotes economic inclusion".
• Implement a national early childhood development system that is available to every child, beginning with abolishing the activity test for the child care subsidy to guarantee access to a minimum three days of high-quality care.
• Renew the culture and practice of Australia's social security system to support economic inclusion and wellbeing.

The committee's experts said that last point was really important.

We’re screwed if housing prices keep going up. We’re also screwed if they go down.

That’s the trap.

It should be obvious by now that the housing crisis is a complex, multi-faceted issue. There is no one silver bullet for addressing it. Unwinding the trap in a way that doesn’t cause a new Great Depression is going to take a lot of different changes working together in order to shift to a housing market that is responsive to local needs, rather than to global capital flows and national fiscal and interest-rate policy.

We need to rapidly add more housing at affordable price points. We also need to avoid crashing the current housing market. We need to encourage investment in our communities, increasing local economic productivity, without allowing all the profits to be siphoned out to faraway global investors. And we need to do it without adding more infrastructure liabilities to our already struggling cities.

What that will look like is more people doing home-to-duplex conversions, building backyard cottages, allowing more small businesses to mix into our residential neighborhoods to create local jobs while eliminating productivity-killing commutes, and growing local financing options.

Tenants in one of Victoria’s newest community housing blocks say they have gone weeks without being able to flush their toilets and months without being able to get a signal for TV, while their concerns over cracks in the building have gone unaddressed.

The $140m development in Dunlop Avenue in Ascot Value is the first development to open from the government’s Public Housing Renewal Program – now known as the Big Housing Build – and was heralded as the “most advanced” social housing project in the state when it was completed in March last year.

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The estate was previously public housing, managed directly by the Victorian government. Since its redevelopment, the 200-dwelling complex offers only community housing managed by third-party not-for-profit provider Evolve and rent-controlled affordable housing.

But residents of the estate say they have had ongoing issues with the building management. One tenant says they have been served a notice to vacate twice in 12 months – and residents say their requests for maintenance are often ignored or take weeks to address.

Now, as concerns about the UK's housing-affordability crisis continue to grow, author and journalist Anna Minton believes changing public sentiment about social housing may be turning the tide against further estate regeneration.

"The stock has been decimated and people would love to live in it," said Minton, a vocal critic of estate regeneration. "I think it's lost its bad reputation – people think, 'if only houses were available on council estates in the way they used to be'."

"There is a renewed interest because affordable housing and the housing crisis is right at the top of the political agenda in a way that it wasn't before," she told Dezeen. "This big push on estate regeneration – I think it has kind of peaked."

I love that "Tetrise" is now a verb:

Vancouver has long been nicknamed the “city of glass” for its shimmering high-rise skyline. Over the next few years, that skyline will get a very large new addition: Sen̓áḵw, an 11-tower development that will Tetrize 6,000 apartments onto just over 10 acres of land in the heart of the city. Once complete, this will be the densest neighbourhood in Canada, providing thousands of homes for Vancouverites who have long been squeezed between the country’s priciest real estate and some of its lowest vacancy rates.

Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank.

[…]

What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past. Coalitions of neighbours near Iy̓álmexw and Sen̓áḵw have offered their own counter-proposals for developing the sites, featuring smaller, shorter buildings and other changes. At the January hearing for Iy̓álmexw, one resident called on the First Nations to build entirely with selectively logged B.C. timber, in accord with what she claimed were their cultural values. These types of requests reveal that many Canadians believe the purpose of reconciliation is not to uphold Indigenous rights and sovereignty, but to quietly scrub centuries of colonial residue from the landscape, ultimately in service of their own aesthetic preferences and personal interests.

This looks good. I'm not mad about the enormous elevated stroad cutting the development in half, but it does promise:

There will be over 6,000 rental units at Sen̓áḵw. Included in these 6,000 are approximately 1,200 affordable rental units as defined by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The balance will be market rental. Of the 1,200 affordable rental units, 250 will be set aside for Squamish Nation members, with the remainder serving residents of the City of Vancouver.

[…]

Sen̓áḵw is designed to be a transit-oriented, car-light community. With this car-light emphasis, combined with the already highly restricted parking regulations for the surrounding Kits Point neighbourhood, the impact on the surrounding streets will be insignificant. It is anticipated that the development will add 7 to 8 cars per minute on average, spread across the two site access points during peak hours.

As a result, the upgrades negotiated through the Services Agreement are focused on accommodating the mobility needs for all travel modes including upgrades to cycling, pedestrian facilities and improved access to transit.

[…]

Sen̓áḵw will be one of Canada's first large-scale net zero operational carbon housing developments. There will be a district energy system on site developed in partnership with Creative Energy, that will utilize excess heat from adjacent Metro Vancouver infrastructure to provide a source of carbon free energy for the project. The buildings will also meet Step 3 of the BC Energy code and will feature highly efficient triple-glazed envelopes to minimize both thermal and noise transmission. The units will feature energy efficient appliances and fixtures to minimize water use and the entire development is designed to encourage alternative forms of transportation while reducing resident dependence on the automobile.

The commercial building in Phase 2 will leverage 45,000 square feet of mass timber construction, a material with 50% less embodied carbon than typical concrete construction.

Other sustainable features of the project include: the use of green roofs, permeable paving materials, native plantings, and rainwater capture and collection for irrigation.

[…]

A new transit hub at the south end of the Burrard bridge will be created as part of the Sen̓áḵw project to support increased transit connectivity to the site. While current transportation infrastructure in the area prioritizes north-south connections, the new density from Sen̓áḵw offers the opportunity to improve east-west connectivity through the potential revitalization of the False Creek streetcar line, upgraded aqua bus and ferry services, and enhanced cycling options. Further, the project is located within walking distance of the new Broadway Subway extension.

This research looks at the prevalence and impact of low-use housing for England, Wales and Scotland. Our map of what we’ve called “ghost enclaves” – the most concentrated areas of low-use properties – suggests that this is almost exclusively a coastal phenomenon. It effectively outlines the island of Great Britain in red.

[…]

In the ghost enclaves that topped our ranking, low-use homes account for between 34% and 54% of the local housing stock. These areas include Trawsfynnydd and New Quay in Wales; St Ives, Padstow, Grasmere and Benthall in England; and Earlsferry and Millport in Scotland. 

[…] 

We also interviewed 66 experts and campaigners across the UK: housing and planning officials, policy experts, campaigners, residents, councillors and politicians at local and national levels, plus trade body representatives.

They described how second homes and short-term lets have hollowed out many communities. Demand for essential services like schools has reduced as a result. Year-round social infrastructure, such as pubs and cafes, has withered due to the outsized seasonal demand followed by long fallow periods. Communities feel significant resentment.

Our findings chime with census data showing that Londoners are increasingly buying investment properties in the national parks and coastal areas of the south-west. Similarly, affluent households in the north-west of England are buying second homes in north Wales.

One planner we interviewed said any benefits from increasing housing development in rural areas (a policy that many support) – including releasing more land for housing and allowing rural exception sites, barn conversions and developments on small “pocket” sites (such as in a garden or between houses) – are essentially cancelled out by people turning existing stock into Airbnbs, holiday lets and second homes. “And we have no planning control over that,” one planner explained. They likened the whole exercise to filling the bath with the plug pulled out. 

This is spectacularly dysfunctional.

It’s not just historic flats from Britain’s postwar housebuilding boom that are being sold. Brand new council houses are also going under the hammer, almost as fast as they are being built. Design blog Dezeen revealed this month that seven of Norwich’s newest council homes are already in the process of being sold off, fewer than five years after they were completed. Other authorities have also been forced to sell their new council homes, such as Hackney in east London, which has already lost some of the social housing it built in Stoke Newington in 2018.

Despite right to buy being so destructive to public finances that it has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, Labour has announced it will keep Thatcher’s policy if it wins the next general election. This U-turn, backtracking on the party’s previous two manifestos, which promised to suspend sell-offs, has bitterly disappointed many local politicians who are desperate for change.

[…]

It’s hardly surprising most councils are not building many homes at all, given they are obliged to sell them at a discount almost as soon as the paint is dry. Would you spend hundreds of thousands of pounds building a new house to rent out if your tenants could force you to flog it to them for less than it cost to construct, just three years later? According to research from UCL, right to buy “remains the major disincentive to local authorities building more social rent homes” as the majority of councils rightly fear the policy will impact any new housing developments they undertake.

Instead, many authorities have launched schemes to cling on to as much of their remaining stock as possible. Some offer grants to incentivise council tenants to buy on the open market instead of via right to buy. Wandsworth, in south-west London, for instance, will chip in up to £120,000 towards helping their tenants purchase a home “within the UK or anywhere else in the world”, provided it is not a council property.

Climate and housing are vitally connected, and acknowledging this turns a pair of calamities into one huge opportunity.

That’s the message from the national Task Force for Housing and Climate, a cross-partisan group of former politicians and policy experts that launched in September and released their final report on March 5. The non-governmental task force convened fifteen heavy hitters from across the country, including former Conservative cabinet minister Lisa Raitt and Edmonton’s progressive former mayor Don Iveson as co-chairs, as well as economist and former governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney and former Toronto chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat. The group has created a road map for 5.8 million “affordable, low-carbon and resilient” homes to be built by 2030.

[…] 

If all this sounds wildly optimistic, somewhere between wartime effort and fever dream on the scale of probabilities, well, so is the fight against climate change. One could take heart from the fact that, last fall, housing minister Fraser told the CBC “this is a wartime effort we need to adopt.” There’s also the fact that the debate over housing policy hasn’t suffered the same partisan warping that afflicts climate policy. Nobody in Canada is arguing the housing crisis is a hoax or wildly overblown; instead, every party is now competing to prove it has the best, most aggressive solution.