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GUEST COLUMN — Public housing, in which those with no or very little income are provided with an apartment whose rent is heavily subsidized, is a feature of social welfare programming in all Canadian cities.

While many Canadian cities avoid the worst problems that have been known to plague public housing elsewhere, there are better models for providing the poor with appropriate homes, such as rent vouchers and the promotion of home ownership.

New Zealand and Britain, for example, both radically changed their public housing in the 1980s, as discussed in a new Frontier Centre paper called The Right to Buy: From Public Housing to Home Ownership. In Britain under Margaret Thatcher, long-time tenants of public housing were allowed to purchase their homes at a significant discount. As a result, a whole generation of low- and middle-income earners was transformed from perpetual tenancy paying rent to the state to owner-occupiers who took pride in their homes and became both more financially stable and more invested in their communities as they built equity for the first time.

New Zealand's public housing dependents were offered the option to buy their homes, starting in the 1950s. One key to the success of this program was the philosophy that underpinned public housing there. Rather than being concentrated in large blocks of units, apartments and homes developed by the state for public housing were dispersed throughout neighbourhoods and built to the same standard of quality as nearby residences.

The last thing a Canadian city should be doing now is building or buying new public housing units. Two policy innovations exist, however, than can do a great deal to improve the quality of life of those who depend on public housing without requiring major new expenditures. The first is to encourage ownership on the model of Thatcher's Britain. If dependents of public housing were allowed to make their subsidized payment towards a mortgage, instead of as rent, they would over time build a financial cushion that could make permanent escape from poverty easier.

A second option, for those who may not want or be able to buy their housing unit, is a rent voucher. Vouchers that can be applied against market rent on the home of the tenant's choice would grant families in need of assistance a high degree of autonomy and the ability to make basic choices to make their lives better. Parents could choose a home near the school they wish their kids to attend, the working poor could live close to their jobs to cut down on travel time and costs and nobody would be stuck in a public housing ghetto. Vouchers would also be cheaper than maintaining the status quo, since the current high costs of administering and maintaining (poorly, at that) public housing would be transferred to the private sector. That means that with the same budget, even more families could be given the chance to live in housing that meets their needs and doesn't make their problems worse.

The occupants of public housing don't particularly want to live there, and have no stake in improving or maintaining their quarters.

A stake in one's own community and a sense of belonging are crucial to generating social capital and good relations between neighbours.

Rebecca Walberg is a Social Policy Analyst with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy