Housing crisis

“ Home prices in cities across the country have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2006. And in Phoenix, they've fallen by 43 percent.
Even if your neighborhood hasn't been hit by foreclosures, you're likely feeling the effects of this crisis in other ways. Companies in your community that depend on the housing market -- construction companies and home furnishing stores and painters and landscapers -- they're all cutting back and laying people off. The number of residential construction jobs has fallen by more than a quarter million since mid-2006. ”

“ It is the poverty, the lack of planning, the lack of technical assistance, the lack of financing to buy construction materials, the lack of urban equipment. To change this housing policy for human settlements, they should stimulate self-construction, instead of financing these large housing complexes. ”

“ It is not a case of transforming human nature in the tenant, but of reforming it in the landlord builder. It is a plain question of the per cent he is willing to take.
So then, we have got it on the moral ground where it belongs. Let the capmaker's case be ever so strong, we shall yet win. We shall win his fight and our own together; they are one. This is the way it stands at the outset of the twentieth century: New York's housing is still the worst in the world. We have the biggest crowds. We have been killing the home that is our very life at the most reckless (p. 085) rate. ”

“ We need 470,000 dwellings a year: 100,000 in the cities and 370,000 in the rural areas. This means building 10 to 12 dwellings a year per 1,000 people, but unfortunately our dwelling construction averaged only two to three units a year per 1,000 people during the last 10 years.
This statistical statement hardly projects the human significance of our housing problem. In human terms the problem means sprawling squatter areas—vast pockets of poverty, ignorance and disease which debase, pervert and stultify their inhabitants. ”

“ For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor so successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home. ”

“ We look at the housing problem not only as an opportunity to propel economic activity but more as a challenge to alleviate the sad plight of our people in our slum dwellings. The challenge is to ensure continued investments in low-cost housing through stable financing and by devising new and imaginative arrangements that will maximize the private sector's role. I will certify to Congress a bill that makes contributions to PAG-IBIG mandatory beyond a certain salary ceiling and taps other sources for socialized housing. ”

“ To these natural and honest forces must also be added the weight of vested interests, which deliberately obtain power on local bodies for the purpose of preventing housing reform being put into thorough operation.
Never was there a greater and louder demand by the people for a fair share of the land they live in. The countryman wants his plot and his cottage, and the town dweller a decent house at a reasonable rent. ”

“ In theory, low and moderate income families should benefit even from construction of new housing which they themselves cannot afford because such housing creates vacancies which ‘filter down.’ In reality, however, most of these vacancies are absorbed by the enormous lag between population growth and new housing construction. Sagalyn & Sternlieb, supra at 42. The housing which does ‘filter down’ to persons with low or moderate incomes is often badly dilapidated and in deteriorating neighborhoods. ”

“ To the home it comes down in the end,—good government, bad government, and all the rest. As the homes of a community are, so is the community. New York has still the worst housing system in the world. Eight fifteenths of its people [Pg 94] live in tenements, not counting the better class of flats, though legally they come under the definition. The blight of the twenty-five-foot lot remains, with the double-decker. But we can now destroy what is not fit to stand; we have done it, and our republic yet survives. ”

“ The housing problem affects the tenant first of all, and in countless instances his unwholesome environment is ruining his health, ability, and character; but it also affects the community and the nation, for persons produced by such an environment do not make good citizens. The roots of family life are destroyed, gaunt poverty and loathsome disease hold hands along dark and dirty stairways and through the halls, foul language mingles with the foul air, and drunkenness is so common as to excite no remark. ”

“ Just as many persons cannot afford, without falling short of what is required elsewhere, to purchase a reasonable minimum of housing accommodation, so also they cannot afford to purchase a reasonable minimum of food or of education or of medical attendance. The failure with which we are confronted is the general fact of poverty, whereof inadequate housing is merely a manifestation. ”

“ Slum property will sink to zero, and the whole working population will move into houses of a class quite above those which they can now afford to occupy. Families which are now compelled to huddle together in one room will be able to rent five or six, and thus will the housing problem temporarily solve itself by the simple process of a diminution in the numbers of the tenants. ”

“ The most troublesome problem is the treatment of existing bad housing. In regard to this the policy of large improvement schemes under which extensive areas are bought up and demolished has had its day, and is not likely to be revived to any considerable extent. ”

“ As city population grows denser, land increases in value, and the evils of bad housing threaten the welfare of the great majority of city dwellers. Light, sun, air are shut out, and cleanliness, decency, and home life are made impossible. Two policies are open to the public. It may be left to private enterprise to solve the problem. If the tenant agrees to rent a disease-breeding house, he is the first to suffer. The interests of investors, it is said, will supply as good a house as each tenant can pay for. ”

“ I never believed that the best way to deal with the housing market was to just sit back, do nothing, and simply wait for things to hit bottom. That would have been a disaster for all the responsible families who – through no fault of their own – were struggling to make ends meet. ”

“ Some people hardly seem to realise that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all cling desperately to their houses lest worse should befall. So long as the housing shortage continues the local authorities cannot do much to make existing houses more liveable. ”

“ Cities that are under big pressure from rising housing prices need to increase as appropriate the supply of land for residential use, and we should better regulate housing development, marketing, and intermediary services. ”

“ In very many cases, however, inability to afford the price of decent housing is not susceptible of this simple remedy. It arises, at least in part, from the fact that the ill-housed workman's income, however well it may be expended, is insufficient to give command over the various sorts of minima which we deem it proper he should attain. This is the dominant difficulty with which housing reformers are faced. It is not—let me emphasise the point—specially or peculiarly a housing difficulty. ”

“ It is disastrous to the nation as a whole, that many of its workers should be unable to pay for proper accommodation, nor can it ultimately benefit the employer. We must not only cheapen housing and decasualise labour, but we must raise wages, and then we can definitely compel the municipalities to carry out the law which says "Every house in this locality shall be reasonably fit for habitation." ”

“ This category of city dwellers desperately needs much better housing and living conditions than is available to them now, both in a rehabilitated city and in outlying municipalities. They make up, along with the other classes of persons earlier mentioned who also cannot afford the only generally permitted housing in the developing municipalities, the acknowledged great demand for low and moderate income housing. ”

“ This obligation is enforcible by the local authority, and that body is empowered, if necessary, to execute such repairs as may be required at the landlord's expense. [5] When we have to do with a town which has always been, or has somehow become, free from houses unfit for human habitation, the adoption of this policy for the future need not involve any great difficulty. For not many houses could become uninhabitable in such a way that renovation was impracticable in any one year, and there would, therefore, be no danger of closing orders leading to a shortage. ”

“ There was a housing conference at which that part of the work was parcelled out: the building of model tenements to the capitalists who formed the City and Suburban Homes Company; the erection of model lodging-houses to D. O. Mills, the banker philanthropist, who was anxious to help that way. I chose for the Good Government clubs the demolition of the old tenements. It was my chance. I hated them. A law had been made the year before empowering the Health Board to seize and destroy tenement-house property that was a threat to the city's health, but it had remained a dead letter. ”

“ It springs from the colossal economic waste in land, in municipal and private construction, the cost of which accumulates until it becomes a crushing burden on housing. This burden is further weighted with an excessive load of charges for speculative financing.
Deterioration in architecture
How can the wage-earner, even the fairly prosperous individual, be expected to carry this burden? Of course he cannot. He is helpless in the face of the relentless operation of factors which he, as an individual, cannot control. ”

“ The Government, I gather, have decided on a huge scheme for urban and rural housing. About that I have this to say. The rural housing ought to take precedence of the urban, not because it is more intrinsically necessary, but because if the moment of demobilisation is let slip for want of rural cottages, we shall lose our very life blood, our future safety, perhaps our existence as a nation. We must seize on this one precious chance of restoring the land and guaranteeing our future. The towns can wait a little for their housing, the country cannot. ”

“ The problem of housing for the poor is one of the most acute facing the Nation. The poor are relegated to ghettos and are beset by substandard housing at exorbitant rents. Because of their lack of bargaining power, the poor are made to accept onerous lease terms. Summary eviction proceeds are the order of the day. Default judgment in eviction proceedings are obtained in machinegun rapidity, since the indigent cannot afford counsel to defend. Housing laws often have a built-in bias against the poor. Slumlords have a tight hold on the Nation. ”

“ Since then the housing shortage in countless communities, affecting millions of families, has magnified this call to action.
Today we face both an immediate emergency and a major postwar problem.
Since VJ-day the wartime housing shortage has been growing steadily worse and pressure on real estate values has increased. Returning veterans often cannot find a satisfactory place for their families to live, and many who buy have to pay exorbitant prices. Rapid demobilization inevitably means further overcrowding. ”

“ The housing shortage continues to be acute. As an immediate step, the Congress should enact the provisions for low-rent public housing, slum clearance, farm housing, and housing research which I have repeatedly recommended. The number of low-rent public housing units provided for in the legislation should be increased to 1 million units in the next 7 years. Even this number of units will not begin to meet our need for new housing.
Most of the houses we need will have to be built by private enterprise, without public subsidy. ”

“ The most serious aspect of the housing shortage was that as yet respectable New Yorkers knew but two modes of residence: one must either take a full single house, or consent to a dismal boarding house. ”

“ In spite of all attempts at relief, the housing problem is becoming more serious every year in all the larger centers of industry; and other strata of society, such as professional people, clerks, officials, teachers, small dealers, etc., are affected by it. The workingman’s wife who returns to her “home” at night exhausted from a day’s hard labor, must begin work anew. She must toil in feverish haste to attend to the most necessary details of housekeeping. ”

“ Rent control has done a great deal to prevent the housing shortage from having had worse effects during this postwar period of adjustment. Rent control is still necessary to prevent widespread hardship and sharp curtailment of the buying power of millions of consumers in metropolitan areas. ”

“ As one drops down the economic scale the present failure to properly house the wage-earner becomes more striking. For the family of the semi-skilled worker, for the factory worker's family whose income is hardly larger than average factory wage, for the lower-paid ranks of the "white collar" worker and of the government employee, decent housing in new construction is scarcely to be had to-day anywhere. And as for the housing problem of the unskilled worker, married and with a normalsized family, it may be a long time indeed before he can be provided for. ”