>OK, but why doesn't the left seize this issue away from the right? Nice
>homes for everybody, with public construction management and public finance.
Its home _ownership_ that people want. Home ownership is an icon of personal security, it represents not merely security in terms of having a secure place to live, but financial security in the sense of a valuable asset.
Public housing addresses only the bare housing issue, home ownership is more than that. What needs to be addressed by the left is economic security. As I've said many times, universal economic security is synonymous with socialism. Capitalism is constitutionally unable to provide universal economic security, because at its very core is its need to keep the working class insecure so that they can be coerced to work for a boss.
Because we are insecure, we desperately try to find some way of becoming more secure personally. Buying a house has, historically given a real measure of economic security to many people in the working class. In Australia, it has been a genuine and accessible strategy for achieving personal economic security since the end of WW2. Because government policy has been consciously dedicated to ensuring that home ownership was affordable.
Government strategies have included subsidised public housing construction, designed to keep downward pressure on the market price of residential housing. But this strategy has been discontinued, resulting in much lower rental market vacancy rates. This is one significant factor in in the inflation of house prices of recent years.
The trouble with any renewed public policy to subsidise housing construction is that it would again put downward pressure on the market price of residential housing. Which would have a disastrous effect on those currently paying off a mortgage on a house purchased at the inflated prices of the last few years. This would not tend to attract the support of this sector of the working class.
It is correct to suggest we seize the issue by promoting a collective and universal solution. But to only address the tip of the iceberg, the narrow issue of housing, would fail. Because it isn't just housing security that people are seeking through home ownership.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas