Low-Income Housing

Housing has been recognized as a human right under a number of international conventions. For low-income people, access to housing is problematic. Various state, private, and third-sector initiatives have been implementing solutions to the economic barriers to housing. Small-scale actions to address the problem individually or locally have also been tried.

Formally, through organized civil disobedience, or informally and often covertly, through squatting and reclaiming abandoned land and buildings, efforts [Page 874]have occurred to immediately address the need for low-income housing. From Winstanley and the diggers' efforts to reclaim St. George's Hill during the English Civil War to constructing simple shelters under overpasses in downtown Toronto, the use of marginal or unused resources has been an ongoing way to obtain shelter. While such efforts are often short-term, many urban centers have shantytowns on their edges that have become permanent housing. In some cases, such as in Durban, South Africa, such communities have been able to successfully organize to negotiate for basic municipal services.

Faith-based and community groups have a long history of providing emergency and ongoing housing for those who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless because of the cost of housing. Some initiatives are very basic. The Out of the Cold Program in Toronto, for example, has churches opening up sanctuary and meeting spaces for overnight shelter—often no more than a mat on the floor. The Catholic Worker movement has, at its core, the provision of houses of hospitality where members of the movement live in community with the homeless. More institutional expressions include nonprofit housing initiatives and homes for those with particular needs such as hospices for those with HIV/AIDS, seniors, and abused women. The affordable home ownership model of Habitat for Humanity is one of these initiatives.

The need for affordable housing has led to various models of resident-controlled housing. Nonprofit housing cooperatives, communes, intentional communities, and collectives have developed to permit the sharing of resources to obtain housing individuals could not afford to obtain and maintain on their own. While some such efforts require individual equity, others have developed with government support or support from labor, church, and cooperative organizations. Ensuring the long-term accessibility of such projects is difficult and often requires government legislation or binding agreements with project sponsors and funders to ensure that low-income people will continue to be able to join. Some models have a tradition of frequent failure, particularly communes and collectives. Housing cooperatives as a whole, and some intentional communities, have proven to be long-term stable alternatives.

Governments have often played a key role in the development, management, and funding of housing for low-income people. Council housing in England, tax credits for developing new affordable housing in Japan, and rent-geared-to-income personal subsidies in the United States are various ways that the state has been involved in promoting access to housing for low-income individuals. A prototype for a failure of urban renewal to provide housing for low-income people was the redevelopment of the Old Nichol area of London, England, in the late 19th century. An effort to improve the housing stock for all people, a campaign inspired by Arthur Morrison's 1902 book A Child of the Jago, resulted in displacing low-income people of the community and the middle class moving in.

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