The Government Can Build Quality Housing for Everyone
In Australia today, public housing is seen as an option of last resort for poor families only. But the South Australian Housing Authority spent decades building affordable, quality homes for all. We can do the same now.
South Australia Housing Trust cottages from the late 1940s just outside Adelaide. (Wikimedia Commons)
Today, only socialists seem to advocate for high-quality, affordable public housing. In the mid-twentieth century, however, a state government led by South Australia’s Liberal and Country League (LCL) developed one of the world’s most remarkable public housing agencies, the South Australian Housing Trust (SAHT).
The government of South Australia (SA) established the SAHT in 1936. Over the course of its life, it built 122,000 high-quality homes for hundreds of thousands of workers. The SAHT was a product of a different era in the history of capitalism. SA’s need to industrialize, combined with high rates of economic growth, and a strong and organized working class, created the conditions for a pact between industrial capital and the state.
The SAHT emerged out of this corporatist arrangement. Building infrastructure and providing quality housing for workers was a way of lowering labor costs by reducing the cost of housing for the working class, making it cheaper for capitalists to invest.
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