After Los Angeles suffered some of the most devastating wildfires in the city’s fire-prone history earlier this year, there has been a flurry of activity aimed at a rapid recovery.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass declared that LA would “aggressively” rebuild, and signed
city ordinances to stop landlords from
price-gouging displaced renters and ban evictions of survivors for a year. Through his nonprofit Steadfast LA, failed billionaire mayoral candidate Rick Caruso offered prefab homes to survivors who can’t afford to rebuild. Building permits are also being speedily approved. After Governor Gavin Newsom nearly immediately slashed environmental regulations, some reconstruction has already begun without testing the soil for toxic substances.
Meanwhile, the nonprofit Urban Land Institute Los Angeles, in tandem with UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate and the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, recently released a
175-page recovery plan that touches on everything from clearing debris to rebuilding infrastructure in the Altadena and Pacific Palisades neighborhoods, where an estimated 12,500 housing units were burned down.
Yet one of the most obvious answers to the city’s deepening housing crisis remains absent from plans and political promises: public housing.
The omission is a worrying error. Research shows that natural disasters lead to
rent increases that can last decades, creating widespread housing affordability issues that affect entire communities, not just those who suffered direct damage. Los Angeles already has massive
housing affordability and homelessness issues. Cal Poly Pomona associate professor Anthony Orlando, one of the researchers behind a
report for the Brookings Institution that looked at two decades of post-disaster rent rises across the United States, has
warned in the
Los Angeles Times that the wildfires “could spell the end of whatever income diversity existed in the Palisades prior to the fires.” The aftermath of natural disasters has a way of exacerbating preexisting housing inequalities. Orlando observes that rich evacuees from the once tony Pacific Palisades, where 770 rent-controlled apartments were burned, are already “crudely” opposing rebuilding plans that include affordable housing units.
Rather than continue to dance around the edges of a raging housing crisis with rent restrictions or at times ineffective affordable housing regulations, city officials have a rare opportunity to do something truly visionary to solve Los Angeles’s housing crisis at long last: build high-quality, mixed-income, affordable public housing en masse. If that’s hard to imagine, consider the case of another global metropolis that did exactly that post-fire: Singapore.
Los Angeles wouldn’t be the first city to turn to public housing after a tragic fire. When a catastrophic conflagration in Singapore razed an entire central neighborhood to the ground, the hyper-capitalist city-state placed a new dream of public housing for all at the heart of its rebuilding efforts.
In Chua Beng Huat’s 1997 book
Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore, the Singaporean sociologist — who lost his childhood home in the Bukit Ho Swee fire — describes how the aftermath of the tragedy revealed one of the keys to HDB’s success. As a response to the incident, the country’s Legislative Assembly quickly passed an amendment to the colonial Land Acquisition Ordinance of 1920 that allowed the government, ruled by Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP), to quickly purchase land from landowners in Bukit Ho Swee. The move would become the precursor to the 1966 Land Acquisition Act, the law that Chua and others argue is at the very core of Singapore’s public housing transformation.
“The 1966 Land Acquisition Act empowers the government to acquire any land that is deemed necessary in the interest of national development,” Chua writes. A 1973 amendment, he explains, allowed the government to buy land at low market rates. The fixed 1973 values were not adjusted again until 1986, when, Chua argues, “the government deemed it had already sufficient land banked for development purposes.” By 2005, the state owned 90 percent of Singapore’s entire land mass of 283.8 square miles.
Aside from laying the groundwork for further land acquisition, the Bukit Ho Swee rehousing project revealed another key to HDB’s success: the institution proved it could build swiftly and affordably to meet demand. In the nine months after the fire, HDB built five apartment blocks containing a total of 768 homes; in the following six years, it built around 12,000 apartments on the site of the former Bukit Ho Swee village. For the most part, the apartments were relatively basic, but they were built with modern plumbing and electricity — a novelty for many former traditional kampong village dwellers. From 1960 to 1963, HDB built more than thirty thousand apartments, proving it could develop and deliver housing at previously unseen speeds.
Around this time, in 1964, the PAP-led government decided to start offering HDB apartments for sale and began to view public housing no longer as rented social housing for Singapore’s poorest citizens, but rather as a means to ensure that all Singaporeans could live in well-built homes. HDB speculated that homeownership, as opposed to renting, would “stake” citizens into their homes — and by extension into a nascent Singaporean nation. Legislation introduced in the late 1960s eventually allowed citizens to tap into mandatory pension savings accounts to purchase HDB units on public land leased to apartment owners, unleashing the financial potential of its own residents to pay for a mass mixed-income public housing building drive that continues to this day.
Once a collection of shophouses, kampongs, and informal settlements with no running water or electricity, Singapore has transformed into a metropolis with over a million HDB units housing a population that’s more than tripled since the Bukit Ho Swee fire. Today
80 percent of the approximately 4.1 million Singaporean citizens and permanent residents live in high-quality HDB high-rises. Families from all income brackets and a variety of cultural backgrounds thrive in vibrant neighborhoods offering numerous public and commercial services designed with communities’ needs in mind. With less than 0.2 percent of the population unhoused, homelessness has essentially been eradicated, and housing has become an unwritten right. What’s more, HDB housing is actually extremely popular in Singapore, where the unfortunate stigma attached to public housing has been entirely lifted.
jacobin.com