Social Housing in America: Architects Must Answer the Call
If you follow housing policy in America, you may have noticed a particular term cropping up a lot recently: social housing. Maybe you’ve read a longform academic article, live in a city that is codifying a social-housing policy like Seattle or Atlanta, or seen one of the recent mentions in The New York Times, highlighting U.S. and Viennese success stories. On the design front, Dezeen is running a social-housing revival series.
Boston Road provides 154 units of housing for formerly homeless people, many of them seniors and living with HIV/AIDS, as well as low-income working adults from the South Bronx. Boston Road / Alexander Gorlin Architects. Image © Michael Moran
If you follow housing policy in America, you may have noticed a particular term cropping up a lot recently: social housing. Maybe you’ve read a longform academic article, live in a city that is codifying a social-housing policy like Seattle or Atlanta, or seen one of the recent mentions in The New York Times, highlighting U.S. and Viennese success stories. On the design front, Dezeen is running a social-housing revival series.
As the term is coming into common use, varied definitions have emerged. In the interest of casting a wide net, the distinction I’m interested in within the American context is the idea that governments (federal, state, local) should be more actively involved in the production and provision of housing. This distinction is important, because we already have a dizzying array of policies at different levels of government guiding housing production in America. Good work has been done recently in California to reform and streamline housing production, and these changes are important. But a growing chorus is asking whether incremental changes will be enough (they won’t), or whether we need systemic reform in the face of a persistent housing crisis across the country (we do).
