Housing is more than physical shelter. The residential environment consists of not only the dwelling unit but the site and setting, neighbors and community, municipality and public services, habitability and accessibility, rights and responsibilities, costs and benefits. Yet housing is even more than the residential environment, for it is only in relation to those who inhabit and use it that housing has meaning and significance—not only physical and economic, but emotional, symbolic, and expressive. We occupy our houses, and, for better and for worse, they become our homes.

The residence is both the primary setting for physiologic reproduction through...

Half a century ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized that we were “one-third of a nation ill-housed.” If we had a President today as perceptive and candid, she would acknowledge that we are now one-third of a nation “shelter-poor.” Nearly 29 million households in the United States—containing 85 million people, or 34 percent of the population—face so great a squeeze between inadequate incomes and high housing costs that after paying for their housing they are unable to meet their non-shelter needs at even a minimum level of adequacy.

“Shelter poverty” challenges the conventional standard that says every household...

The squeeze between income, and housing costs has long been an inescapable fact of life for large numbers of people in our society, with consequences that could not be ignored: limited incomes have undermined the profitability of the housing market and related industries; workers’ demands for higher wages to pay for housing and other necessities have challenged the profitability of business in general; and the widespread distress of shelter poverty has been a source of political as well as economic instability.

Over the course of this country’s history, the housing affordability problem has provoked a variety of reactions, responses, and...

In the period from 1930 to 1970, the principal developments in U.S. housing were the growth of the mortgage system and the extensive intervention of the government. Business and government attempted to defuse the affordability problem socially and ideologically—primarily through the promotion of mortgaged suburban homeownership for middle-income families and, to a much lesser extent, through subsidies for the production and operation of rental housing for those of low income. At the same time, government action stimulated profits and capital accumulation in housing and mortgage lending in order to counteract the depressing effects of the affordability squeeze on the...

Over the past two decades, rising housing costs, stagnating real incomes, and widening inequality have exacerbated shelter poverty and exposed the fragility of middle-income homeownership. Since the 1970s, households in the bottom third of the income distribution have received a smaller share of the economic pie and seen their incomes lag behind inflation. They have been able to afford less for shelter just as housing costs were going up and government support for low-income housing was falling. Between 1970 and 1991 the number of shelter-poor households increased by more than 50 percent, from 19 million to 29 million. The incidence...

The system of housing provision and finance erected in the 1930s and fully implemented after World War II was one of the pillars of the postwar prosperity, sustaining and stabilizing the economy as well as transforming the social and physical geography of the nation. Yet, as pointed out in Chapter 4, this system contained a number of weaknesses. First, while mortgage credit could facilitate economic growth through the housing system, if mortgage payments were to go up faster than households’ incomes (due to rising mortgage debt and interest rates), the squeeze could eventually choke off further growth and lead to...

The traditional and now-platitudinous goal of “the realization as soon as possible of a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family” makes no mention of affordability. At the time it was enshrined in 1949, more than a century of affordability problems had left tens of millions of households living in physically deficient housing. Four decades later a much greater proportion of the U.S. population occupy what would be called “a decent home,” but the ability to afford a decent home has become more elusive.

A considerable amount of effort and an even greater amount of rhetoric have...

The barriers to realizing social ownership of housing in the United States are primarily political, not economic or technical. Nonetheless, there are a number of practical challenges involved in actually implementing social ownership on a widespread basis. Since financing is crucial, and the mortgage system has been so much a part of the problem, this chapter begins by examining capital-grant financing of social housing. It then presents a program under which as much as a third to a half of the housing in this country might come under some form of social ownership over the course of several decades, through...

Chapters 7 and 8 presented in bold strokes the major transformations in housing ownership and financing necessary for dealing with not only the manifestations but the causes of the affordability problem. Even though the prospects of fully overcoming shelter poverty through fundamental changes in the institutions of housing provision and income distribution are unlikely in the immediate future, these goals are important in defining the path toward the solution. They provide a framework for identifying and evaluating efforts already underway as well as possible reforms that move in the right direction.

This chapter and Chapter 10 present an extensive array...

This chapter continues the exploration of current and potential strategies and policies that move in the direction of social provision of housing. It focuses particularly on approaches to expanding social financing of housing and increasing private-sector financial accountability; reforming housing-subsidy formulas and income-support policies; supporting innovations and initiatives in housing design, community development, and residential services; and expanding democratic control over the creation and operation of housing.

The scale and power of the financial industry are so great that the prospects of radical transformation are remote unless public anger at the injustices and abuses in the system converges with genuine...

Struggle around housing have been second only to workplace and job-related conflicts as a focus for organizing and mass action by working-class people in most capitalist countries. Affordability has been a part of most of these conflicts, as either the ultimate cause or the proximate expression. Yet political actions around housing, no matter how great the mobilization, do not necessarily and inevitably contribute to the fundamental social change needed to solve the problem. For one thing, housing organizing in the United States has so emphasized tenure—assuming that being a tenant or a homeowner transcends other social categories and divisions...

The scope, the persistence, the causes, and the consequences of shelter poverty demonstrate with ever-increasing clarity the need for fundamental changes in the mechanisms of housing provision and income distribution. Such changes are required not only as a practical response to the objective failure of the economic institutions of capitalism, but also as a response to the moral failure of this society to meet the housing needs of a great proportion of its people.

On the basis of the analysis developed in this book, I have presented a program for transforming a large proportion of the housing in this country...