Mira Bar Hillel – What Even Is Affordable Housing?

Independent.co.uk. December 4, 2013. “The definition of this vanishing resource slips all over the place.”

A friend of mine, who used to be a very senior civil servant in what was, in the 1980s, the department now known as Communities and Local Government, had a recurrent nightmare.
“I used to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat”, he told me. “In my dream someone is demanding that I define the term ‘affordable housing’…”

The poor chap, who was tasked with devising and producing housing policies, used the term endlessly. It was a political buzzword, like “sustainable” used to be until the Government decided that green was becoming an expensive colour. Decades later, the worse the housing crisis becomes, the more the word “affordable” is used – but still with no definition attached.

So what IS affordable housing?

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/