How European-Style Public Housing Could Help Solve The Affordability Crisis

[muppet]

New social housing in Europe is of course not what you'd find in 1968 any more. These are new ones for London.


https://www.darlingassociates.net/po...ollard-street/

https://archinect.imgix.net

www.architecturetoday.co.uk
www.guardian.co.uk



www.ukconstructionmedia.co.uk

www.london.gov.uk

https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/20...zeen_784_3.jpg, https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/564849978249322164/

One thing they've definitely learned from the mistakes in the postwar era is not to ghettoise the poor. You save much more costs in the long run if you invest into a mixed community with proper infrastructure, desirability and social dignity. Thus new social housing is mixed into middle income or even luxury housing schemes (15-40%). I used to live in a luxury apartment in a new development, one of whose streets was all social housing. There was almost no difference in architecture (or space inside) other than their lack of front gardens and minimal landscaping, though all residents were entirely free to make use of the parks and lakes that dotted the development. The only thing you could tell the difference was that suddenly you saw all the residents hanging outside, with kids playing in the streets all day (and many of the rich kids and poor kids hanging out together).

This was the social housing street:


https://static.ezadspro.co.uk/media/...5330803_03.jpg

the middle income street



and the high end blocks


https://cdn.berkeleygroup.co.uk

All on the same lane^

[muppet]

The social housing is also often mixed within the same building as high end residents. A recent scandal has been 'poor doors' which some developers tried to introduce into their schemes to segregate the luxury from the chaff, to public outcry:


https://www.theguardian.com/society/...n-london-flats

[jd3189]

I wouldn’t mind living in any of those London developments and I know I’m not alone in that thought. This is what we should be doing over here, especially in the suburbs.

[muppet]

The thing is with London, although they've gotten the social housing right from the mistakes of the past, the centre is now entirely off-limits to almost everyone (although some very lucky people still get socially housed there, it's quite a minority). Thus a lot of the social housing is great, but there's a long waiting list and it's no longer as central.

Back in the day the tower blocks went up en masse and as we know often degraded into highrise ghettoes - however they were often in prime, central locations, such as bombsites and ex-industrial land (so most of them have now been taken over by the rich).

For example this is a very ugly looking estate I now live in (that narrowly missed the Celotex cladding makeover). However it's so much closer to the centre than the last luxury place I was in - my commute has gone from 1.25 hrs to 15 mins bus/ 5 mins train. Unbeknownst to most it's a rare gated development (in practice illegal in London, but was created that way back in the day), has a swimming pool, sauna, gym and indoor summer gardens and a flat starts at half a million $. There is still a generation of working class old timers and entire families sharing 2 beds who never sold out, but the majority of residents are middle class renters.




Thus it's sometimes adverse that the crummy looking estates in the Inner City ring are often more 'high end' than the luxury looking council housing outside.

Another example is this set of tiny ex-council flats near where I work - if you look carefully the showroom at the bottom is for designer Stella McCartney (Gucci). These former bedsits now sell for over $1.5 million a pop.


https://www.standard.co.uk/news/lond...-10269280.html

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/lond...-10269280.html




Likewise, also where I work:

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Part of the reason public housing "worked" for so long was because Western Europe was socially-economically-ethnically quasi-homogeneous, or was perceived as such.

In Germany, public housing had a long postwar history of success, but in recent years has deteriorated badly and is extremely undesirable to non-immigrants.

Bigoted Germans sometimes call public housing "Affenkäfigen" (monkey cages). I think the connotation is obvious. So Europe is kinda where the U.S. was with public housing in the 1960's.

What I said above. As Europe's smaller, more homogeneous countries become less so due to immigration, their public housing is going to come to resemble ours rather than ours resembling the ideal the article which started this thread argues for.

Originally Posted by muppet

I think you'll find the horrific Grenfell fire was due to the cladding they used, that they had used to make the building look nicer and be more environmentally sustainable. As a social housing project Grenfell would have been fireproof (insofar as any fire in the building would have been confined to the one flat), however thanks to the new cladding the fire raced from the 4th floor to the roof within 20 minutes.

As for Grenfell towers, who picked the flammable cladding? A public housing authority of course. I believe the particular cladding involved was already banned in the US. It was just another example, really, of incompetence of government to do certain things and managing housing they'll never live in is one of those things.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by muppet

The social housing is also often mixed within the same building as high end residents. A recent scandal has been 'poor doors' which some developers tried to introduce into their schemes to segregate the luxury from the chaff, to public outcry

The point of this thread is that the US should do like Europe which is absurd.

Parts of the US, at least, have been doing these mixed use projects for decades. San Francisco is full of them. EVERY new market rate housing project now must have a component of "affordable" (subsidized) housing. Every one.

The difference is that these are not "public housing". Nothing is managed by the government--they are managed by the same management responsible for the rest of the building if in a mixed building. However, since the law also allows developers to contribute to an "affordable housing fund" rather than put the affordable component in their market rate buildings (a better idea when it comes to for-sale housing IMHO), the fund is used by non-profit developers to build and manage entire affordable buildings.

Once again, in San Francisco these affordable components and non-profit affordable buildings are thriving while the government "public housing authority" was recently shut down by the feds for incompetence and corruption.

By the way, I believe the "poor door" issue was first raised in New York, not the UK. It hasn't come up in San Francisco because the Planning Commission would never have allowed such a thing.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by yaletown_fella

I'm not a fan of public housing. Almost every public building in Toronto is full of cockroaches, beurocratic waste, brutally outdated, and many have dangerous people roaming the common areas.

A system of vouchers is what would work best to solve this problem, IMO.

Combine that with less red tape and bureaucracy and NIMBYism when it's time to build, and you have the optimal recipe.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by lio45

A system of vouchers is what would work best to solve this problem, IMO.

= Section 8.

The main problem with that program, though, is (a) the usual red tape associated with government payment programs and (b) what landlords often see as the lesser disirability (either in terms of racial/ethnic prejudice or, to put it a little nicer, compatibility with other residents) of Section 8 tenants.

[muppet]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

The point of this thread is that the US should do like Europe which is absurd.

Parts of the US, at least, have been doing these mixed use projects for decades. San Francisco is full of them. EVERY new market rate housing project now must have a component of "affordable" (subsidized) housing. Every one.

The difference is that these are not "public housing". Nothing is managed by the government--they are managed by the same management responsible for the rest of the building if in a mixed building. However, since the law also allows developers to contribute to an "affordable housing fund" rather than put the affordable component in their market rate buildings (a better idea when it comes to for-sale housing IMHO), the fund is used by non-profit developers to build and manage entire affordable buildings.

Once again, in San Francisco these affordable components and non-profit affordable buildings are thriving while the government "public housing authority" was recently shut down by the feds for incompetence and corruption.

By the way, I believe the "poor door" issue was first raised in New York, not the UK. It hasn't come up in San Francisco because the Planning Commission would never have allowed such a thing.

Erm what exactly is your point?

The Celotex insulation and Arconic cladding (which was banned in its native US) was indeed approved by the council - the Public Enquiry found the council at fault for using 2013 strategy rather than the 2016 one, which would have vetoed its use and demanded the safest ones on the market, and thus guilty. However the companies were found to have 'pointed the gun and pulled the trigger' after knowingly missold the product, and offloading the banned product into the UK in 2013-14 where it was sold as a Class 0 (classed as minimum safe) but unbeknownst had recently failed European tests (downgraded to Class E, the second lowest possible, after a similar fire in France- minimum legality requires Class B).#

Arconic (Arcoa metals group) is currently denying release of its documents by citing an old French law, after lawsuits from fire victims in France, UK and US. Celotex (from France) was also mis-sold as it's insulation gave off cyanide when burned, unless combined with fire-resistant cladding which Arconic wasn't, and that it knowingly lied about. In the UK testing it even submitted a different material, which was how it got approval. Thus in reality the combined materials used had NEVER been tested.


https://www.ft.com/content/8a63066a-...6-9bf4d1957a67

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44200041

But also note Celotex/ Arconic was widely used throughout the private market also. Your attempt to obfuscate applies to both markets, you can point that exact same finger at say a for-profit, private development agency, or a university, which were just as easily duped as the council (about 160 buildings have it in the UK), and which would also make your point moot.

And the fact poor doors was an issue in NYC and London? What is the point there? Or was it purely dick measuring?

Also, if you want to take a look, this is the bidding process for building the council housing in London, to curb the housing crisis. In short the European approach in fact has long been using similar as San Francisco with govt funding and support, a halfway house of private and public (but more to public in terms of funds and set up, and reliant on Housing Assocations, which are privately run non-profits funded by the govt):


https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do...omes-londoners ($6.2 billion fund just for the next 2 years)

[mousquet]

@Crawford To my knowledge, extra-European immigration is something rather recent in Germany. They only had a pretty long tradition of Turkish immigration, probably due to the historical diplomatic ties between Turkey and Germany.

Owed to their former colonial empires, France and the UK have been much more experienced in that respect since the 1960s. The French population is already quite diverse, especially over the main cities of the country. And you'd be naive to think that all African descents over here would be bums stuck in brutalist commieblocks. it is simply no longer the case, as things change over the course of time, thankfully.

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

As has been said, we had examples like these:


https://damocles.co/plan-banlieues-Macron/

That thing might have been demolished by now by the way. A lot of the €100 billion that have been allocated to those ghettos for the past 30 years were precisely intended to tear them down.
The source sounds like a nationalist medium to me, and I suspect they'd use the worst possible picture of their record to spread their propaganda.

There are just 2 requirements on my mind for social housing to be effective over here in Paris.

1 - There shouldn't be too much of it. Our left wing always tends to build too much because they assume public housing dwellers would always depend on them, thus would forever vote for them, which is cynical and nasty.

2 - It has to be scattered all over the place. In other words, there shouldn't be any exclusive "social housing" neighborhood, or they don't fail to turn into impoverished ghettos and shitholes. And here, the problem is our right wing that often acts as NIMBYs to social housing. Those poor people wouldn't ever vote for us, they must think.

That's about it. When it's smartly managed, it might work.

[muppet]

I think some people think social housing in Europe means this, and actively selling it as such:



https://cdn.architecturelab.net

rather than this, which is what the article is referencing (and yes, that's all social housing):


https://divisare-res.cloudinary.com


https://cdnimd.worldarchitecture.org

www.architectural-review.com


https://inhabitat.com

www.designbuild-network.com

[mousquet]

@muppet Some of our best recent social housing is located over "Rive Gauche", the large master plan of the 13th arrondissement that they've been implementing for some 20 years!
It is quite large and involves some hard work like covering some rail tracks, so it takes forever to gradually build the entire new neighborhood.
It is designed to be diverse in all aspects of life, which is the best you can do.

My favorite is still this one.

http://www.pss-archi.eu/photos/photo-4905.html

Not the tallest, but I like the fact that they tried some quality stained concrete to it.
People often don't realize, but concrete is just a composite material, so you may put whatever you want in there.
Like it doesn't have to be gray/grey and sometimes, it happens to really be good looking.

The current municipality of Paris also went to some crazier "social" projects of theirs, like turning some of this into social housing for instance.


https://www.duten.fr/projets/bourse-de-commerce-paris

You see these buildings with an arc shape? Lol, I think they are supposed to be social housing now.
I guess most people would find it mad, but frankly, I hardly care.

[Encolpius]

Originally Posted by Epicurean

I'm not sure that Amsterdam is a very good model. The rental market is crushingly expensive and difficult to get into. The social market (mostly stock owned by private individuals, not public housing corporations) has a waiting list that stretches into the decades. People who have places in the social market hold onto them no matter what, worsening the market still further. It works extremely well for people who already have places, but (anecdotally) might be the worst city I have personally seen for people who are trying to get into the market - worse than Toronto, Vancouver or Portland by far. By the end of this year, most of the people I know will have left the Netherlands (or at least Amsterdam) because they simply cannot live here with any quality of life.

Mind you, I basically like the system, but it seems to cope extremely poorly with significant growth or influx of wealth, making it a questionable model for fast-growing, wealthy American or Canadian cities. I do think it could do better if there was more give-and-take (e.g., if we are going to impose more rules on landlords, perhaps we can do something to also make renting easier), but the mentality here seems to be that more rules are always better, which simply doesn't seem productive or realistic to me.

Social housing in the Netherlands is owned not by private individuals but by nonprofit housing associations.

From what I understand, Amsterdam's housing policy was a victim of its own success. The progressives' aim was to 'decommodify' housing and they did it -- too well for some people. By the early nineties they complained that poor people didn't live in crummier housing than rich people, that there weren't enough luxury flats for rich people, and that it was hard to buy a flat in Amsterdam since so much of it was social housing.

Since 1995, Amsterdam's housing policy has been neoliberalized. The waiting list for social housing is now so long because the government's largely stopped building it and sold off significant amounts of the existing stock or converted it to market housing or privatized it via right-to-buy; it has encouraged the building of luxury apartments and discouraged affordable housing. Not surprising to hear that people who still have social housing are desperately clinging onto it, while it's renters who get squeezed.

Amsterdam's a very interesting case study, but hardly an argument against building social housing.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by muppet

Erm what exactly is your point?

That we have nothing on this subject to learn from Europe (except maybe that things go smoothing in many ways if your population is homogeneous).

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Epicurean

People who have places in the social market hold onto them no matter what, worsening the market still further.

This is a common problem everywhere, to varying degrees, unless a place is a perfectly free market.

Needlessly long commutes within the same metro area after job switches from rent-controlled apartments that can't be given up (otherwise you wouldn't be able to find anything remotely similar) would be funny if it weren't sad and so avoidable.

Worst part is there's probably someone doing the opposite long commute every day who also can't move.

[badrunner]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

The point of this thread is that the US should do like Europe which is absurd.

Parts of the US, at least, have been doing these mixed use projects for decades. San Francisco is full of them. EVERY new market rate housing project now must have a component of "affordable" (subsidized) housing. Every one.

Same thing in LA. Maybe not every project but most new housing developments have these affordable units, usually in a 90/10 split market rate/subsidized. It's negotiated as part of the approval process on each project, but it's NOT government run. A much better solution than housing projects.

Europeans don't understand how housing projects are perceived here. "Public housing" is a dirty word, and for good reason. It's segregation by another name. It leads to the same problems.

[jd3189]

I’m not sure about not being able to learn from Europe because their population is more homogeneous. London seems to be a pretty diverse city these days, comparable many top US cities.

The reasons public housing in America failed before have been learned and should not be repeated in this new era. We should have learned to not put poor people in bland projects in terrible areas of town. We should have learned to better integrate these communities into the urban fabric in a way that allows everyone to live in a better harmony.

Lastly, we should have learned, in 2020, to not abandon a neighborhood just because your new neighbor is a different skin color from you or maintain a housing system in which these neighbors and people who look like them are not able to be live decently in your community if they have the means to do so. That bullshit prejudice single-handedly fucked almost all our cities up and is a stain in this country that hopefully dies with the previous generations. Sorry to bring politics into this, but every time I see white flight as a reason for the decline of American cities, I can help but think that it was essentially people shooting themselves on the foot, believing that the new plastic prosthetic was better than the old thing. Shame on the people in the past. Now we have to undo their mistakes.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by lio45

This is a common problem everywhere, to varying degrees, unless a place is a perfectly free market.

There's nothing like any perfectly free market in the world. That's a naive view. Some people are greedy and authoritarian and will always try to take control of everything around, and regulations are always needed to some extent anyway.
A perfectly free market would require everybody to be perfectly educated and wise... You do realize that it's only a dream on your mind. It will take thousands of years for mankind to grow this advanced.

Now, you just reminded of point 3 that i forgot above.
That is, once your incomes exceed a certain threshold, you have to leave social housing and deal with your life on your own to make room to people with lower salaries.
Regulations should enforce such a rule here in France.
You may say - but then, people would act in a way that their incomes would always remain just below the threshold determined by a given municipality.
I don't think they'd do that. They always want to make more money anyway.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by mousquet

Now, you just reminded of point 3 that i forgot above.
That is, once your incomes exceed a certain threshold, you have to leave social housing and deal with your life on your own to make room to people with lower salaries.
Regulations should enforce such a rule here in France.

A good friend of mine is a perfect example - he's had his pre-gentrification rent-controlled Park Avenue apartment in Montreal for ~20 years now (he's ~40, had it since he was ~20) and for years now he's been a landlord with several million dollars in assets. But he continued to live in his rent-controlled apartment because it was much cheaper than any mortgage.

"Landlord of a sizable real estate portfolio who is a renter in someone else's drastically-rent-controlled building" is an aberration... but it's the reality here.

The apartment my friend is hogging isn't available for anyone else. This distorts everything.

[muppet]

Originally Posted by jd3189

I’m not sure about not being able to learn from Europe because their population is more homogeneous. London seems to be a pretty diverse city these days, comparable many top US cities.

Yep, London is as diverse as you can get.

Many thanks to Nito: