Why Public Housing Was Abandoned and Why It Should Come Back
July 22, 2025 · Frisian News
Western governments dismantled public housing in favor of private markets from the 1980s onward, creating housing shortages and unaffordable rents. Today, cities across Europe and North America face a crisis that only renewed state investment in housing can solve.
In the 1950s, Vienna built apartment blocks that housed working families for modest rents. Rotterdam built neighborhoods where factory workers lived near their jobs. These were not experiments in charity. They were practical answers to a real problem: cities needed housing, fast, and the market was not building it. Governments stepped in and built. The outcomes speak for themselves: stable communities, low vacancy rates, and ordinary people who could afford to live where they worked.
Starting in the 1980s, politicians and economists across the West decided public housing was inefficient and ideologically wrong. Margaret Thatcher sold off council housing in Britain. Ronald Reagan stripped funding from American public housing authorities. Neoliberal ideology promised that deregulation and private development would deliver more homes, faster and cheaper. Instead, rents climbed. Homelessness rose. Developers built for profit, not for people who earned ordinary wages. The market worked perfectly for investors. It failed the rest of us.
Today, a young worker in Amsterdam or Dublin or Seattle faces a choice that previous generations did not have to make: spend half your income on rent, or leave the city. Landlords and developers capture wealth that workers once kept. Land becomes scarce not because there is too little of it, but because speculators and investors hoard it, waiting for prices to climb further. The housing shortage is not accidental. It is the direct result of policy choices made forty years ago.
Some cities have learned this lesson. Vienna still builds public housing, and rents remain affordable. Singapore uses public housing for the majority of its residents. These places did not abandon the model. They refined it. They proved that governments can build housing efficiently, maintain it well, and keep it affordable without subsidizing developers or waiting for the market to work. The model works. It always did.
The question facing Western cities is not whether public housing is possible. It is whether elected officials will admit they made a mistake, and whether they have the political will to rebuild what they dismantled. The housing crisis will not solve itself. Markets have had forty years to deliver. They failed. Public housing is not a relic. It is an answer waiting to be used again.
Published July 22, 2025 · Frisian News