Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 60
Amendment equal protection clause, touching off an ongoing project of litigation based
on the claim of many experts that “[p]ublic housing remains [racially] segregated.” 25
Even in the absence of widespread acute homelessness, inadequate and poorly planned
housing also presents a considerable threat to social solidarity by jeopardizing its basic
determinants: life expectancy, health, and substantive civil and political rights. When the
housing needs of low-income groups are not taken into direct consideration, the rapid and
disorganized urbanization which has characterized the growth of many societies in the
last 70 years often leads to the concentration of poverty and its attendant health and social
consequences in certain geographical areas. As a 1996 report by HABITAT, the United
Nations Centre for Human Settlements (hereinafter, “the Global Report”) observes, there
are considerable differences in terms of the principal determinants of social solidarity
between those living in “high quality, predominantly high income areas and those living
in poor quality, predominantly low-income areas.” 26 The Global Report cites a number of
studies to illustrate this point. Surprisingly, not all of its starkest examples come from the
developing world. In the Easterhouse estate of Glasgow, for instance, the infant mortality
rate exceeds 46 deaths per 1,000 births, while the rate in Bishopbriggs, a nearby middleclass
suburb, stands at 10 deaths per 1,000 births. 27
According to the Global Report, the effect of “housing-poverty” 28 on the determinants
of social solidarity is often as dramatic as “income-poverty.” 29 Conventional poverty
studies often overlook the importance of “safe, secure and healthy shelter with basic
infrastructure,” even though “the proportion of the population living in housing of
inadequate quality is often much higher than the proportion with below-poverty-line
incomes.” 30 The effect of poor housing on communities is both measurable and palpable:
House values drop, and buildings deteriorate. Urban services departments
spend less and less to maintain and upgrade ageing and vandalized
infrastructures. […] Tourists are very careful to avoid venturing into these
areas. The juxtaposition of these pockets of poverty and more affluent
areas generates envy on [the] one hand and fear on the other. 31
In terms of its acute effects on individuals and the networks of social relationships which
bind them, housing poverty also increases what Chambers calls “vulner-ability”:
“defencelessness, insecurity, and exposure to risk, shocks and stress.” 32 Such
powerlessness also “weakens people’s capacity to bargain for political and legal rights,” 33
an ability which is essential to full participation in the democratic process and hence to
social solidarity, broadly construed.
Finally, the lack of affordable housing can lead to the outright failure of communities.
In Guadalajara, Mexico, the economic crisis of the 1990s coupled with the absence of
affordable housing led to a dramatic increase in emigration to the USA. 34 As the Global
Report observes, “migration [also] became more heterogeneous since it now included
male and female urban residents from working-and middle-class backgrounds as well as
rural males who had previously been dominant in these emigration flows.” 35 The stress of
community failure is often transmitted to the sometimes only slightly more vibrant
communities who must absorb the emigration flow, and who may find their own housing
stock depleted, and their social services overwhelmed. The failure of local housing