Affordable Housing

Housing policies: social housing and government subsidies

As Thailand, many other countries have tried to solve the housing issue, both in developing and western countries. The different strategies used to reach the goal can be basically grouped into three categories:

1. The clearance of all slums and the rehousing of their residents in new standard and sanitary housing.
2. Public housing construction of low-cost dwelling units for lower income groups.
3. Government subsidy or rent control.

Countries applied one of the above or a mixture of them, depending on the situation. For example, in Western Europe social housing is very much used for working-class and middle-class people (not just the very poor). Still, affordability of housing remains one of the biggest challenges across the EU right now.

Across the Atlantic however, the response in the US is based on a mixed approach, that includes both public housing and subsidies that has its pros and cons – and yet housing often remains prohibitively expensive in big cities.

In South America, on the other hand, policies tend to move towards government subsidies. In Chile, for example, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MINVU) initiated its first rental subsidy program for low- and middle-income groups. The basic idea behind it was to facilitate families to contribute to rent, at an average rate of 25% of their monthly income; this amount was then used as a subsidized housing rent for those who could not afford housing otherwise.

In Africa and South Asia, most policies are concentrating on the first point, since slums are becoming more and more an issue. In 2018, to face this challenge,  the Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), the European Commission (EC) and UN-Habitat launched the Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme (PSUP), to commonly address the issue of urban poverty and improve the lives of slum dwellers within the ACP regions. Currently, there are 35 ACP states implementing the programme.

In the last two years, our ShelterTech Accelerator program in Kenya has sought to identify, nurture and accelerate start-ups and growth-stage companies that bring shelter products and services to the low-income household market. The aim is to help the government tackle the housing deficit of 2 million homes in the country.

References

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_{Tariq, Fariha & Salman, Muhammad & Malik, Sana & Gul, Areesha. (2018). Developing Countries Perspective on Housing Affordability: Recommendations for Pakistan.}