Public housing is under threat across the Atlantic too

Genuinely affordable, non-market housing in the US has been struggling for survival for decades. The cumulative impact of successive presidencies has seen the virtual destruction of what the Americans call public housing and we call council housing. It is being replaced with a discretionary private renting voucher programme, similar to housing benefit.

“The election of a billionaire property developer and landlord poses a new scale of threat.”

Millions of Americans on low and moderate incomes face a constant battle against eviction, displacement, transience and homelessness without the minimal protections available in the UK. But the election of a billionaire property developer and landlord as president poses a new scale of threat.

The appointment of Ben Carson as secretary of housing and urban development (HUD) – which has the equivalent function to the Department for Communities and Local Government – was a clear message from Donald Trump. Mr Carson has no relevant experience and has stated his hostility to subsidised housing.

President Trump’s spending plans, unveiled this month, will see housing expenditure reduced by $6.2bn as part of a $54bn transfer from domestic social policies to military and security hardware. These measures would affect 300,000 families eligible for housing vouchers and severely reduce investment for repairing already dilapidated public housing. Welfare services like meals on wheels would also be cut, alongside removing healthcare for 24 million people through the reversal of ObamaCare – an issue that’s now in flux after the collapse of Trump’s healthcare reforms.

The National Alliance of HUD Tenants (NAHT) has branded it a “death budget”. President Trump, like many other property speculators, enriched himself partly through the billions of dollars spent each year by US governments on subsidising the private housing market – four times as much as it spends on affordable housing for its poorest citizens.

This has its UK mirror image. The cuts to housing budgets introduced by the post-2010 coalition, to pay for the crisis caused by the dysfunctional housing market, dwarfed even those of President Trump.

Our government is currently set to spend £44bn on housing by 2020, of which only £2bn will go to social rented housing, £6.4bn on Starter Homes and shared ownership and the remainder on subsidising the private market.

It is clear that the future of public housing is at risk on both sides of the Atlantic.

Glyn Robbins, estate manager, Quaker Court Tenant Management Organisation