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

Low-income housing 63
It can thus be said that there is some consensus that housing should not be considered
merely as a market commodity, 43 but rather as an intrinsic social good. Most societies
place a value on housing that extends beyond economic willingness-to-pay schedules. In
fact, the equity argument for adequate housing is considered so intuitive that it is now
protected as a fundamental international right. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights states:
[e]veryone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and
well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing
and medical care and necessary social services. 44
However original it may seem to conceptualize housing as a human right, the clause
merely states, in the language of what Michael Ignatieff calls “the rights revolution,” 45 a
fact which is already enshrined in the housing policies of most states in Europe, North
America and Asia: that the absence of adequate housing is beneath human dignity, and an
indictment of any society which permits it.
Modes of provision
A survey of housing assistance programs in MDCs reveals that nations can, and do, adopt
a range of policy approaches to the problem of inadequate housing. According to Hallett,
countries “can be crudely divided, according to their housing systems, into three groups:”
comprehensive state socialist nations, more moderate social democratic countries like
most Western European nations and the United Kingdom, and “predominantly private
enterprise” systems like the United States. 46 However, given the near absence of
comprehensive socialist states in the current century, and the broad transnational trends
of privatization, deregulation and private-public partnerships, our analysis will continue
to rely on the policy spectrum outlined in Chapter 2, which ranges from pure public
provision to tax-and-transfer policies, with supply- and demand-side subsidies situated in
between. Our analysis will emphasize the tied demand-side subsidy as the basis for
comparison, and will attempt to establish the successes and failures of other modes in
meeting the housing needs of modern states, with a view towards evaluating whether
voucher programs actually present a better alternative.
It merits notice that many states employ a mixture of various instruments, and that
classifying certain programs is difficult. For instance, the primary forms of social
assistance are welfare benefits programs, which represent straight tax-and-transfer
instruments. Participants in the Ontario Works program, for instance, receive a basic
Personal Needs Assistance (PNA) allowance, which is supplemented by a Shelter
Allowance if the participant is responsible for rent or mortgage payments. Several
Canadian jurisdictions, however, also employ rent control measures. Since the two
approaches are used in tandem to address a single policy problem—inadequate housing
for low-income households—it is difficult to say which rubric the Canadian “solution”
falls under, or the extent to which its successes or failures are due to either instrument. In
the interest of providing clear comparative evidence, however, such ambiguous cases will