Housing Reform Research Articles

Rapid Rural-to-Urban Migration to Lima: A Need for a Sustainable Housing Reform

Rapid Rural-to-Urban Migration to Lima: A Need for a Sustainable Housing Reform

'Unladylike Commotion': Early feminism and nursing's role in gender/trans dialogue.

From nursing's history comes the impetus and grounding for our current voice in gender/trans dialogue. Modern nursing struggled its way into being against restrictive, unjust, and oppressive social structures. Many of the obstructions and constraints that nurses and nursing leaders faced were shared by the general populace of women, and yet nurses were different from other women. Nurses worked outside the home, caring for strangers, including unrelated men, in a period when women were otherwise confined to the home. Nurses fought for women's suffrage, for child labor laws, for the welfare of factory workers, for garment workers, for unionization, for vaccination, for housing reform, for the humane treatment of mentally ill persons, for access to birth control, for the amelioration of a panoramic terrain of terrible social injustices, and for the control of nursing education, registration, and practice. For 150years, nursing has been intrinsically, practically, and politically feminist. The hard-fought gains would eventually position nursing in tension with emerging trans issues. And yet, its history is exactly what situates nursing for fruitful participation in the developing trans discourse and to address issues of transinvisibility and unjust social and health structures that impede dignified and respectful health care.

Between the Idea and the Reality: Public Housing Reform and the Further Marginalization of the Poor

Between the Idea and the Reality: Public Housing Reform and the Further Marginalization of the Poor

Living space and psychological well-being in urban China: Differentiated relationships across socio-economic gradients

Western research has shown that a shortage of living space is associated with poor psychological well-being. By contrast, norms and practices of extended family co-residence, collectivist social organization, and a bureaucratic quota-based housing allocation system were thought to limit the adverse psychological effects of cramped dwelling conditions in pre-reform China. As these buffers may be weakening with the dramatic housing reforms, socio-economic, and cultural changes taking place in post-reform urban China, we use data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies ( N = 13,367) to re-examine the relationship between living space and psychological well-being in contemporary Chinese cities. In particular, we examine the ways in which this relationship is moderated by family wealth and community poverty in order to explore how subjective experiences of dwelling space are shaped by one’s relative socio-economic position. The results show that cramped living conditions are significantly associated with poor psychological well-being in post-reform urban China. Importantly, the psychological implications of cramped dwellings may vary with family and particularly community socio-economic status as this association tends to be stronger among more affluent families and communities than among those that are more impoverished. Taken together the findings indicate that uneven socio-economic development, segmented cultural change, and drastic housing reforms within China’s cities may be interacting to configure people’s housing experiences and health outcomes.

Living space and psychological well-being in urban China: Differentiated relationships across socio-economic gradients

Western research has shown that a shortage of living space is associated with poor psychological well-being. By contrast, norms and practices of extended family co-residence, collectivist social or...

Negotiating the (legal) right to the city: Public housing demolition and the federal courts in two postindustrial U.S. cities

ABSTRACTPublic housing reform has fostered widespread revitalization in American cities. Courts have been critical to this process, but so far urban scholars have not yet closely analyzed this role. This article illuminates how courts participated in reform, sometimes empowering and at other times disempowering tenants. Looking at litigation filed by tenants to fight demolition, I examine how courts framed disputes in legal terms and how the judicial stance on demolition coevolved with national policy debate. In particular, I emphasize how tenants tapped into the ideological power of rights in American society and show that courts never explicitly rejected the notion that tenants held rights against demolition but instead gradually adopted urban planning sensibilities that implicitly denied rights to tenants. Thus, this article reveals the complicated and paradoxical nature of legal rights in the Right to the City struggles.

Context-Specific Eldercare Patterns, Cultural Categories of Elder Mistreatment, and Potential Social Causes in Post-Socialist China

This article explores the impact of housing reform on eldercare patterns through examining the social causes for the increasing phenomenon of elder mistreatment in urban China. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, this article suggests a new eldercare pattern, including prioritized conjugal care, “heritage-based” adult-child care, as well as housing-for-pension care. This pattern has been constructed in the post-reform era in Chinese urban areas, which lays a foundation for a culture-related elder mistreatment. Three cultural categories of elder mistreatment have been identified: neglect and/or intergenerational conflicts, family care and ties contingent upon inheritance of the seniors’ houses, and “structural mistreatment.” Further examination suggests three major factors contributing to the emerging phenomenon of elder mistreatment: (1) privatization of housing ownership resulting in social-spatial differentiation of living affecting care patterns and potential for mistreatment of the elderly; (2) sociocultural limitations and structural restrictions on approaching social eldercare resulting from an economically-focused social environment; and (3) transformed social values, such as materialism and individualism, which have led to reinterpretation of intergenerational exchange. By contextualizing elder mistreatment within housing reform, this study offers a new perspective for studies of the family in post-reform China.

In Search of the “Human Scale”

The article explores one of the most important tropes in twentieth-century urban planning discourses: the “human scale.” Drawing from printed and archival sources from Sweden and Germany, it demonstrates how, in the 1930s and 1940s, this metaphor provided urban planning experts—architects, social scientists, and housing reformers—with an important epistemological framework: it helped them define the social in technical terms and thus substantiated ideas about the malleability of society by means of spatial intervention. In practice, in both countries, the human scale informed schemes for a decentralization and delimitation of the urban fabric. Neighborhood units or settlement cells, as they were called in Germany, were to correlate with—and thus reinforce—“organic” social entities: primary groups like families and small communities of neighbors. Planners were attempting to re-calibrate urban agglomerations to what they perceived as measurable, natural social entities. They were compiling anthropometric data, claiming that quantifiable dimensions like the “pram-pushing distance” were ideal criteria in delimiting the built environment. Such data even crossed borders between political systems as different as those of the Nazi-“Third Reich” and the social-democratic “People’s Home” in Sweden. Thus, notwithstanding the great differences regarding its political implication, analyzing the semantics of humanization in urban planning helps explain transnational efforts to “engineer” the social to overcome the disorder attributed to modernity itself.

Chinese Housing Reform and Social Sustainability: Evidence from Post-Reform Home Ownership

Since 1978, China has undergone an institutional reform, from a welfare-oriented housing allocation system to a market-oriented one. But with high housing prices, affordability is a major obstacle to home ownership for Chinese citizens. Now, the government has started to change the goal of housing policy from present economic benefits to sustainable housing, so future generations will have a decent place to live. Housing is an important indicator for social stratification, and home ownership, which is an important component of social sustainability in the Chinese context, is influenced by multiple factors that vary across countries. Although China has a long tradition of home ownership, there is a lack of comprehensive research on post-reform housing inequality. By undertaking a large-scale field study in the city of Xiamen, our research explored to what extent home ownership varies across socio-economic classes, and improves understanding of the reasons behind home ownership inequality. It was discovered that people have a variety of resources from which housing can be obtained, and that commercial housing served as the primary housing source, although, due to path dependence, public housing still comprises an important source of housing, as well as self-built houses. A structural equation model (SEM) was used to further explore the driving forces of home ownership inequality. The model indicated that hukou (household registration) status has the strongest effect on home ownership, followed by education, with family income and occupation as less important factors. Along with income and education, home ownership has a direct effect on people’s perception of their own socio-economic status (SES). A probability model of home ownership was developed, based on logistic regression. Local families with higher levels of income and education with at least one member working in a publicly owned organization had a higher probability of home ownership. Lastly, since 1999, housing reform in Xiamen has tended to increase social stratification, with negative economic and social consequences. Therefore, policies should pay more attention to the welfare of renters and integrating the migration process into urban planning.

SOME PROBLEMS OF HOUSING AND COMMUNAL COMPLEX TODAY – HOW TO FIND A WAY OUT OF THE CRISIS?

В статье рассмотрены актуальные проблемы жилищно-коммунального комплекса в условиях экономического кризиса, такие как ухудшение финансовых проблем ЖКХ за счет роста неплатежей за капитальный ремонт домов и несовершенство проведения реформы жилищно-коммунального хозяйства на региональном уровне. Недостатки реформы ЖКХ рассмотрены на примере конкретного субъекта РФ – Смоленской области. Выделены отрицательные и положительные результаты реформы по основным направлениям.

The Transformation of Social Obligations of Land Rights on State-Owned Land in China

Historically, Chinese residential housing was social welfare in nature, and the state mostly bore the social obligations rather than gaining any profit from it. Work units, as the most important social welfare engine in the society, helped to relieve the state’s burden of providing social welfare to urban residents. The practice of the central state government subsidizing low income residents or residential developers also conformed to the social norm.After 1978, Deng Xiaoping launched a series of drastic land use and housing reforms and eventually transformed the picture of Chinese social welfare. During these land use rights reforms, Chinese land ownership and property rights again played a role of instrumentality to achieve the state’s goal to strengthen state land ownership. These reforms have produced significant problems, such as that Chinese state government has completely abandoned their social obligations as both landowners and land regulators

Review: Södra Ängby: Modernism, Architecture, Landscape, by Thorbjörn Andersson, Sören Johansson, Paul Källenius, and Anders Lindunger

Thorbjorn Andersson, Soren Johansson, Paul Kallenius, and Anders Lindunger, eds. Sodra Angby: Modernism, Architecture, Landscape Stockholm: Carlsson Bokforlag, 2015, 184 pp., 141 color and 74 b/w illus. €45 (cloth), ISBN 9789173317375 During the opening decades of the twentieth century, the movement to improve urban conditions and institute housing reform in Sweden gained increased attention and support prompted by a sense of growing urgency. With the country's health statistics among the worst in Europe—statistics fed by the pressures of continuing urbanization—living conditions in cities like Stockholm had become dire. In response, polemics by social reformer Ellen Key and art historian and design proselytizer Gregor Paulsson laid the foundations for an embrace of modernization and the adoption of a version of modern architecture known as functionalism, or, more colloquially in Sweden, funkis .1 The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, for which Paulsson was commissioner-general and Gunnar Asplund served as coordinating architect, assembled the largest display of modernist buildings until that time, presenting modern design through actual construction and industrial products rather than through polemics alone. The buildings and displays of the exhibition introduced Sweden not only to a new architecture but also to a new way of living that departed dramatically from past modes of dwelling and furnishing. The life span of the exhibition was short, barely six months, but long-lasting effects followed in its wake. Among the exhibition's many legacies were the planning and architecture of a garden suburb beyond central Stockholm called Sodra Angby. As explained in Sodra Angby: Modernism, Architecture, Landscape , the making of the suburb was tied closely to the 1932 ascendancy of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. At that …

Colonial Housing Reform and Transitions in Architecture in the Bella Coola Area of British Columbia

The Northwest Coast’s iconic, multifamily, cedar-planked houses persisted in the Bella Coola area of British Columbia into the 20th century, despite the pressures of Indian agents and missionaries to adopt small, nuclear-family, frame houses. This may seem to be a simple example of conservatism and resistance to programs of acculturation, but such a view leaves unaddressed questions about why resistance occurs and how it is negotiated. Here it is argued that the underlying reasons were fundamental disconformities between European Canadian house forms and the riverine environment of the area, as well as an inability of the new house style to fulfill the multitude of deeply articulated social, economic, and ideological functions of the planked houses. Identifying these disconformities allows a consideration of how they were actively accommodated and negotiated, rather than simply viewing the encounter over housing to be one of resistance followed by loss.

Sustainability and Chinese Urban Settlements: Extending the Metabolism Model of Emergy Evaluation

Anthropogenic activity interacts with urban form and inner metabolic processes, ultimately impacting urban sustainability. China’s cities have experienced many environmental issues and metabolic disturbances since the nation-wide market-oriented “reform and opening-up” policy was adopted in the 1980s. To analyze urban reform policy impacts and metabolism sustainability at a settlement scale, this study provides an integrated analysis to evaluate settlement metabolism and sustainability using a combination of emergy analysis and sustainability indicators based on scrutiny of two typical settlements (one pre- and one post-reform). The results reveal that housing reform policy stimulated better planning and construction, thereby improving built environmental quality, mixed functional land use, and residential livability. The pre-reform work-unit settlements are comparatively denser in per capita area but have less mixed land use. Housing reform has spatially changed the work–housing balance and increased commuting travel demand. However, short commuting distances in pre-reform settlements will not always decrease overall motor vehicle usage. Integrating non-commuting transport with local mixed land-use functional planning is a necessary foundation for sustainable urban design. Functional planning should provide convenient facilities and infrastructure, green space, and a suitable household density, and allow for short travel distances; these characteristics are all present in the post-reform settlement.

The quasi-market approach: the answer for social housing in New Zealand?

One of the major current policy initiatives of the New Zealand government is the introduction of the quasi-market approach for the delivery of social housing under the Social Housing Reform Programme. The Social Housing Reform Programme seeks to increase the participation of third-party not-for-profit community housing providers in delivering social housing in competition with Housing New Zealand Corporation (Minister of Housing, 2012). What has become known as the ‘quasi-market’ approach in social policy is based on the idea of creating competition and using market-based incentives. The rationale of this approach is that if prices are based more on supply and demand, then resource allocation will be more efficient.

Problems of Reforming of Housing and Communal Services of Cities of Irkutsk Region in the 1990s

The aim of the article is the analysis of main trends and implications reforms in housing and communal services of cities of Irkutsk region in the first post-Soviet decade. The subject of research is the reform of housing and communal services, which provided a radical change from the planning and administrative methods of regulation of the housing sector to market mechanisms. The study tested hypothesized that the attempts of state authorities to entrust the accumulated problems in the industry on municipalities in isolation from the reform of public utilities, domestic service etc., and, most importantly, empowerment of local government in the pricing and quality of public services, and are unable to lead to the desired results. In the course of writing were used research methods of social phenomena in historical perspective, analyzes a variety of information sources and literature. The benefits of this study in studied publications in local, regional and central periodicals, monographs and articles, as well as statistical materials. The article concludes that the formation of the mechanisms of the sphere housing and communal services occurred in the conditions of hard budget constraints, there was a constant search of balance in the cost of housing between the population and the budget. Consequently, not enough has been worked out, and the conditions of the contractual relationship. The city authorities in some cases had no effect on the prices for heat generation and water, their transport and distribution. Ultimately, these and other problems indicated a significant difficulties in the process of reforming of housing and communal services.

Homeownership and housing consumption change in Urban China: Guangzhou under market transition

ABSTRACTHomeownership attainment is often seen as the first step in climbing the housing ladder and the building of wealth through acquisition of housing equity. While a number of authors have examined the issue of homeownership switch in China under market transition, the present paper is probably the first study on the extent of housing improvement in conjunction with and after the attainment of homeownership. Based on a household survey conducted in 2010, the study shows that ownership attainment in Guangzhou is generally accompanied by marked housing improvements, and subsequent moves bring further but percentage-wise much smaller improvements. While institution-related factors such as nature of work unit and occupational status might continue to be important, their effects on housing improvements are likely to be felt mainly through the income variable. But hukou status remains significant. More specifically, former peasants on the urban–rural fringe with claim to landownership rights have benefited most from the market-oriented land and housing reform.

What Pushes Up China’s Urban Housing Price So High?

Since the housing reform in 1998, real housing prices in China’s urban areas have increased 60 percent, much faster than the growth rate of disposable income. Consequently, the price-income ratio rose from 7.11 in 1998 to 15.37 in 2012, indicating a dramatic decrease in housing affordability. This article first describes the skyrocketing of China’s urban housing prices. It then discusses factors that led to the soaring housing prices, including institutional, cultural, and economic factors. Finally, the article examines recent government housing policies and their effectiveness. The article argues that removing the local government’s double monopoly powers and replacing taxes and fees at transactions with property taxes during possession could better control China’s fast growing housing price.

Voting in Local Political Elections by Urban Chinese Middle Class: Does Housing Matter?

<p>This paper examines the impact of types of housing on the tendency to engage in neighborhood-level political participation among urban residents in China, using 2005 China General Social Survey. Four types of housing were discussed: commercial housing; previously state-owned (<em>work unit</em>) housing; old neighborhood; and other types of housing (i.e. migration housing). Two indicators of local political participation were presented in the form of Local People’s Congress elections and Residents’ Committee elections. Using multivariate logistic regression analysis, the authors found that types of housing had strong implications for voting in local elections among Chinese urban residents. First, the likelihood of voting in two local elections was lowest among residents living in commercial housing, and the highest in old neighborhoods. Second, participation in community-led venues (i.e. cultural events) enhanced the voting rate among residents living in commercial housing. Results highlight the importance of the sweeping housing reform in urban neighborhoods to local political participation in contemporary China, and the changing relationship between state and society. Although rapid economic reform has diversified and alienated the neighborhood, community-led civic activities can reunify the residents and enhance their local political participation. This effect was more significant among the young, college-educated, high-income middle class. </p>

Building the World That Kills Us

One of the most troubling urban health issues is childhood poisoning caused by lead, the widespread environmental toxin. It is in old plumbing fixtures, solder, paint and other building materials in huge quantities. Despite decades of improvements in blood lead levels among America’s children, the continuing presence of lead on the walls of the nation’s older houses and the known neurological effects of low-level exposures presents a classic problem: in light of the enormous costs of detoxifying the nation’s housing, should society remove this toxin in order to prevent future impacts on IQ, attention deficits disorders, and possibly criminal behavior, or do we remove some of the most pernicious sources, such as window sashes and chipped paint to reduce, not eliminate, the risk to children? Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this issue emerged among public health advocates, HUD officials and housing reformers, and community organizers and activists. Who should bear the responsibility for polluted housing: Industry, housing officials, public health officials, landlords or tenants? The battles began during the 1960s and continue to today. In 2001 the high court in Maryland condemned studies conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers that sought to develop methods for the partial remediation of homes, saying they were akin to Nazi human experiments in which children were used as human guinea pigs. This article traces the evolving debate over responsibility for the public health consequences of polluted housing.