ancient cities

736 Social Housing
Social housing forms a significant part of the
housing stock in many cities. For example, public
housing accounts for about 50 percent of all housing
in Hong Kong and over 80 percent in Singapore.
Most cities require some form of social housing.
Rapid urbanization and population growth have
compounded housing problems in many cities.
An annual 12 million to 15 million new households,
requiring an equivalent number of housing
units, are added to cities in developing countries.
Many end up in slum and squatter settlements.
Governments are faced with the challenge of devising
solutions for housing the poor. The United
Nations estimates there will be 1.4 billion slum
dwellers by 2020, with the majority in Asia-Pacific.
There is an urgent need to improve housing conditions
for a large number of people, especially the
urban poor.
Evolution of Social Housing
Social housing has its origin in the late nineteenthcentury
cooperative movement and “philanthropic”
housing in the United States of America and
Europe. The evolution of social housing can be
traced to two basic underlying ideas. The first is the
notion of collective provision—an idea of welfare.
The perspective is that housing is a basic human
need but not everyone can afford it. Pooling everyone’s
resources can enable everybody to have a
home. Thus, social housing is a public service—
usually provided by the local authority—for the use
of all and paid for by all. The second is the idea of
temporary rental housing. The assumption is that
all people should buy their own house. Therefore,
social housing should exist only to prevent serious
hardship at times when some people cannot afford
their own home. These two different views have
often caused shifts in social housing policies.
As housing needs and political environments
differ, each country has evolved its own social
housing program and policies, including serving a
range of broader public purposes of slum clearance,
poverty reduction, economic and urban revitalization,
and so forth. Among the many ideas of
welfare state, the London County Council developed
the first council (public) housing in 1896. By
the beginning of World War II, the United Kingdom
had more than a million council units, 10 percent
of its entire housing stock. Although private
housing production exceeded local authority housing,
the experience had established the capacity
and principle of public responsibility for housing.
In the United States, government responsibility in
housing evolved from an initial introduction of
building standards, to socially oriented cooperative
housing, to housing for civilian workers in war-related
industries during World War I, to local authority
housing for people with low incomes. The
development of local authority housing remained
largely insignificant until the Great Depression of
1930s, when government housing production was
increased as part of the antirecession effort to provide
construction jobs and stimulate the economy.
The U.S. Housing Act of 1937 was enacted, providing
local housing authorities with complete responsibility
for developing, owning, and managing
public housing projects. By 1942, one in eight new
housing was local authority housing.
Postwar reconstruction and enormous housing
shortages further fueled social housing development
in the United Kingdom and other parts of the
world. Western colonization helped spread social
housing ideology and practices to developing
countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The
United Kingdom built council housing as “homes
for war heroes” and, since the mid-1950s, as part
of its slum clearance and rehousing of lower-
income inner-city populations. Similar homes for
war heroes were built in Australia’s early social
housing program. The United States, Australia, the
Netherlands, and other European countries also
expanded their inner-city public housing as part of
the slum clearance–urban renewal program.
Many of the inner-city public housing estates
built in the 1960s were high-rise buildings, which
were seen as “new architecture for new people.” A
decade later, however, these urban high-rises were
increasingly ascribed with livability and other
problems, leading to a halt of their construction.
High-rise public housing development in Asia, particularly
in Hong Kong and Singapore, has continued
to the present time and is widely celebrated as
exemplary examples of public housing programs.
Public Housing
Public housing is the most common form of social
housing. Public housing is a form of housing tenure
in which the property is owned by a government