Housing

Today New York congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota senator Tina Smith have introduced new national legislation that, if passed and funded, would go a long way toward making real the social housing revolution.

The Homes Act of 2024 would create a Housing Development Authority (HDA) for the entire country. Housed under the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) agency but operating autonomously, the HDA’s sole mission would be to build, buy, renovate, and operate social housing, which it defines as housing with public, nonprofit, or resident ownership; permanent protections and affordability; community control; and deep sustainability and accessibility. It would be governed by a board that includes not only expert appointees in housing and the environment but also its residents and members of the unions that build and support it.

The HDA would be a flexible vehicle, modeled after a 2020 Urban Democracy Lab report entitled “The SHDA — A Proposal.” It could build social housing itself; it could buy anti-social housing and convert it into social housing, then operate it itself or pass it on to tenant, labor, or community groups; it could finance social housing projects operated by state and municipal housing agencies or Public Housing Authorities; or it could finance social housing projects initiated by tenant, labor, and community organizations or by Community Land Trusts.

Using a nationwide online survey (N = 534), we investigate how individual-level characteristics and past actions are related to support of affordable housing at the neighborhood level. Several demographic characteristics, past actions, federal government trust, personal exposure, racism (symbolic racism scale), and affect (emotional connotation) are found to be significant predictors of support. We provide evidence for racism and affect being mediating factors acting in series to shape support of affordable housing. In addition to racism, individuals’ affect can potentially help explain the shift from support of hypothetical scenarios to opposition of real affordable housing development proposals and warrants continued study.

In May, Victoria’s Housing Justice Project released a report that supported what low-income folks have been telling us directly: when you’re low-income, you cannot afford to rent most new social housing. 

Single mother of two Toni Love spoke at the project’s May 9 news conference at the legislature, pointing out that housing rules require her to rent a three-bedroom unit and make $85,000 a year to qualify for that unit.

When most people hear the words “social housing,” they imagine housing for low-income people.

But now the province — and many municipalities — don’t mandate affordability in social housing. 

B.C.’s current definition of social housing is “a housing development that government subsidizes and that either government or a non-profit housing partner owns and/or operates.”

In Vancouver, before 2015, social housing was defined as “residential units bought by the government or a non-profit using government funding in order to house seniors, disabled people and low-income families or individuals.”

Now, it’s defined as housing owned by a government or non-profit that has 30 per cent of the units with rent below BC Housing’s housing income limits, or HILs, meaning your income should be between about $40,000 and $58,000 if you rent a one-bedroom or bachelor apartment, and more for bigger units.

The other 70 per cent of social housing units are generally rented at what’s called “low end of market” — about 10 per cent below market rents. Average market for a two-bedroom apartment in purpose-built rental housing in Vancouver in 2023, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., was $2,181 a month.

Low end of market is around $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, which is more than the total monthly income of a person on social assistance, disability or basic pension, about 74 per cent of the total income of a person earning minimum wage and 57 per cent of the income of a single person earning the median Vancouver income.

As a result, many social housing buildings in Vancouver actually exclude low-income people.

It starts with asking yourself: Do you want families downtown and in urban places? A number of cities say they do, yet they’re not willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen, such as regulate. That’s particularly a problem in the United States, where regulation is a dirty word. It’s that ideology around regulation that can often keep cities from progressing.

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Point two is, even if you have the homes, you need the services and amenities that support family living. Those start with daycare and schools.

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Point three is, you design the public realm for kids and families, because that means it will work for everyone. You have to think about all age groups: the parents with their strollers, young kids and their need for playgrounds, and then teenagers and their distinctive needs, which are different than those of younger kids.

In the United States, the federal government’s favored program for producing low-income rental housing has shifted from public housing to the LIHTC program. LIHTC provides tax breaks to for-profit investors who invest in lower-income housing. This means LIHTC essentially wastes our public dollars on enriching private Wall Street investors. The investors are earning more in tax breaks from the government than they actually pay into affordable housing. It would be more cost-effective for the government to directly fund the production of affordable housing instead of allowing this profit-skimming to occur.

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Nationally, 80 percent of LIHTC developers are for-profit entities. Moreover, many LIHTC landlords are increasingly profit-seeking corporations rather than mission-driven nonprofits. Corporate landlords also benefit from rent increases, evictions, neglect of maintenance, and deplorable conditions for tenants. Profit-seeking landlords are more likely to convert buildings to market rate once LIHTC’s temporary affordability restrictions expire.

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State and federal governments must reform LIHTC to require that any housing it produces is permanently and deeply affordable, with strong tenant protections. Moreover, rather than tax breaks for for-profit investors, our communities need massive direct public funding for the creation of affordable housing.

All these things have increased housing demand, as have the grab bag of government subsidies for homebuyers: first home owner grants, stamp duty concessions, mortgage deposit guarantee schemes and shared equity schemes.

Saul Eslake sardonically calls them “builders’ and land developers’ profit margin expansion grants”, and notes that once again John Howard’s fingerprints are on them.

“Almost 60 years of history – since Menzies introduced the first home owners’ grant scheme at the instigation of the Young Liberals’ then president, John Howard – shows that anything that allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise would have has resulted in more expensive housing, not in more people owning houses.

“Suppose a first homebuyer can afford to spend $500,000. And then the state government comes along and says, ‘Well, you won’t have to pay $50,000 on stamp duty’, then the homebuyer thinks, ‘Well, okay, I can now afford to spend $550,000.’ Probably buying the same house, because there’ll be someone else with the same stamp duty exemption competing for it.”

This is the preprint version. Later paywalled here.

Despite the prevalence of urban high density, little research to-date has investigated the impacts of apartment living on food practices. Physical constraints of apartment kitchens (size, storage, cooking facilities) and the influence of the surrounding community food environment may present challenges to apartment residents’ healthful food practices, particularly in smaller apartments. This study aimed to determine whether these hypothesised barriers were evident in TikTok videos (n=250) sampled from five popular apartment-related hashtags. Overall, the majority of videos (87%) portrayed apartment living with a positive or neutral sentiment; with only 2% of videos portraying kitchen size and function negatively. Only a small number of videos portrayed the food practices of cooking at home (n=11), grocery shopping (n=5), and eating foods prepared out of the home (n=5). Further research investigating the actual impact of apartment living on the food practices of residents will enable comparison of this public portrayal, to the reality.

In 2023, 27,408 dwellings (1.5% of all homes) were left totally empty over the year, and a further 70,453 (3.7% of all homes) were barely used.

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Empty homes are widely dispersed across the city, but the fastest growth has been in the City of Melbourne, where 10,000 homes are now vacant – equivalent to half the new builds in this area over the last five years.

That many renters cannot afford to outbid the convenience value of an empty property speaks of deep inequality, the root cause of unaffordable housing.

But vacant homes also illustrate how housing supply is at the mercy of speculative incentives. Low interest rates and taxes that favour capital gains over rental income make it rational for some owners to choose the flexibility of an empty home over the cash it could yield.

In Australia, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the cost of tax breaks for the owners of multiple properties – including in particular negative gearing and capital gains tax rebates – will be more than $165 billion over the next decade. That’s almost half a million dollars for each of the 377,000 new dwellings the NSW government aims to build in the state under the National Housing Accord – deployable as a subsidy or used to build mass public housing outright with no net cost.

Ending these wealth-entrenching tax breaks would have other immense benefits as well. In particular, it would disincentivise housing-as-investment, thereby cooling the market and making purchase more possible for the young. At the same time, it would redirect massive investment funds towards industries that actually create goods.

Further, by reducing the incentive to land-bank, it would likely decrease vacancy rates. Of Australia’s roughly 10 million homes, 10 per cent were empty on the last census night. Prosper Australia estimates almost half of these vacant homes were “speculative vacancies”, deliberately kept empty or derelict.

The Special Rapporteur recommends that:

• New initiatives be developed in order to bridge the worlds of corporate and government finance, housing, planning and human rights;
• Strategies be developed to achieve target 11.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda include a full range of taxation, regulatory and planning measures;
• Trade and investment treaties recognize the paramountcy of human rights, including the right to housing;
• Business and human rights guidelines, on a priority basis, be developed specifically for financial actors operating in the housing system;
• States review all laws and policies related to foreclosure, indebtedness and housing, to ensure consistency with the right to adequate housing;
• States ensure that courts, tribunals and human rights institutions recognize and apply the paramountcy of human rights; and
• International, regional and national human rights bodies devote more attention to the issue of financialization, and clarify it for States.