Housing

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

Ah, private equity; is there any bad situation you can't make much, much worse?

In the midst of an affordable housing crunch and with yearslong Section 8 voucher waitlists, manufactured homes tend to be a more affordable option compared with traditional site-built houses, particularly for seniors and low-income households. A factory-built home can be a steppingstone for families pursuing homeownership or the last stop before falling into homelessness. But advocates say manufactured housing is quickly becoming unaffordable as private equity firms buy up parks and raise rents. In some cases, it’s unclear who owns the lots, making it easier for maintenance problems to go unaddressed.

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A household that lives in a manufactured home may own the structure but rent the land on which it sits. For many, “mobile” may be a misnomer.

“It's difficult, expensive or outright impossible to move these homes and so residents are forced to tolerate escalating rents, arbitrary fees, lack of transparency in billing and failure to invest in the maintenance of park properties, all which contribute to their housing insecurity,” said Esther Sullivan, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, at the Senate committee hearing.

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“It's really frustrating as someone who has spent time in social services for so long to not be able to help people, particularly when they're in your city and you should have some jurisdiction over situations like these, where the living conditions are compromising the residents’ health, safety and well-being. We should be able to do something and hold those people accountable,” said Warren City Council President Angela Rogensues, who spearheaded the nuisance complaint.

Rogensues told state lawmakers last month that many parks are in “tremendous disrepair.” She reported seeing residents dealing with rat infestation, trees growing through trailers, trip hazards and trailers filled with garbage in 2022. Rogensues said she reached out to city and state departments and was told they didn’t have jurisdiction over mobile home parks. The city cannot test to regulate the water once it enters the park, she said, meaning the owner is responsible for the water quality. 

“Renters of mobile homes and even owners of mobile homes do not fall into a category I can regulate or enforce,” she told lawmakers.

The residents of dozens of public housing towers in the southern Australian city of Melbourne heard the state government was planning to demolish their homes on the news.

“Everyone found out from the TV, from the news, with the rest of Victoria,” Sara*, a resident of the first group of towers to be knocked down, told Al Jazeera.

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The government says the renewal will boost “social housing by at least 10 percent”, a modest increase in a city where there is already a huge gap in affordable housing.

According to Australian census data, the percentage of Australian households who rent their home from a state or territory housing authority dropped from 6 percent in 1999-2000 to 3 percent in 2019-2020.

In the state of Victoria, the share of housing classified as public or community housing, is just 2.8 percent.

By comparison, in Paris and Vienna, the share of public housing has increased since the 1990s, with about 25 percent of the population of both cities now living in socially-rented housing.

This is just great.

Housing is an investment. And investment prices must go up. Housing is shelter. When the price of shelter goes up, people experience distress. Housing can’t be both a good investment and broadly affordable—yet we insist on both. This is the housing trap.

In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)

The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.

One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.

“Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse,” announced the headline of the top story on the WSJ website on Monday. The article illustrated “Austin’s recent downswing” and its “glut of luxury apartment buildings” with photographs of abandoned downtown plazas, as if the fastest-growing city of the 2010s had been suddenly hollowed out by a plague and left to zombies and tumbleweeds.

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If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset.

This magical thinking isn’t just a phenomenon of real-estate reporting. It is deeply rooted even in the highest echelons of policy making.