It would surely be a more cost-effective use of taxpayer's money if the authorities consistently acted as landlord,
The voucher program is a good idea, because it not only gives the recipient the option to live outside of government housing, but also takes care of people in areas where government or subsidized housing might not be readily available.
Actually, that does sound good . You have to remember though that i'm speakling for a population that's hugely resentful about our loss of social housing, and have found the alternative (in Britain, that is) to be utterly awful in numerous respects. Not that we ever really liked the council estates
there was a lot of room for improvemnent in what we used to have, but replacing it with (effectively) sunsidised private housing was by no means the solution , nor does it even imnprove those erstwhile council estates. eg in cases the housing was badly constructed and riddled with damp, to the point that it should have ben condemned in the eightess, same housing is still standing, amostly still owned by the council ofc, and still occupied by underprivileged families, living in a srtate of hopelssness, engenderered by low wages, unemployment and bleak surroundings. Slum clearance has pretty mucvh ground to a halt . And where it still occurs, the old housing is replaced with non-affordable private housing, There's a princuiple that new builds must must include "affordable" housing, but that concept is relative, and irrelevant to slum-dwellers. We can now count ourselves "lucky" if we can get the worst housing on those estates; most of most of us make do with bottom end of the private market, which is odten much worse, always mnore expensive,; and maybe worst of all we're on insecure short-tem tenancies , not the long rterm, secure tenancies that social housing offers... or rather, it used to offer. I 've heard that's also changing, now, in the wake of Housing Bennefit reforms, which leave too many tenants
unable to keep up with their rent. . Not even the housing associations are coming up with a better solution to that problem than eviction.
I say "we" because I actually lived on one of those estates in the eighties, in a misbegotten concrete tenmant that was so fucking ghastly that the residents were running round excitely, whooping for joy , when the rumour went round that it was going to be knocked down. Same building still stands. The surrounding housing (which is mostly considerably better) has been patchily sold off, so the estate is now more mixed economically, but that doesn't amount to any sort of improvement for anyone.
You can perhaps, therefore understand my cynism , when presented with a pretty-sounding alternative, involving the private sector? I think such schemes
could amount to imnprovements , if sincerely motivated, sensibly managed, and designed to supplement, rather than displace Social Housing. But what we;ve actually had , here in in Britain, is a sucession of trojan horses from a right-wing government who are clearly out to put as much public money and as much public property into private hands as possible, regardless of how much misery that causes.
That said, I can believe that things might actually be better in America, in many ways. So far as I can see, America has always been structured round right-wing econonomic principles . Not good, IMO, but it seems to result in various institutionalised counterbalances (eg by charities and local governments) which Britain lacks. I've often been surprised at how comparatively well -off the American poor are (in some ways, in siome places) Over here, we'ce been trained to to be grateful for "not being born in America"
as much as for "not being born in the third World"
