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Enabling citizens to live in a pleasant environment is the top priority as well as the natural duty of a government. One typical way to actualize those is social housing. It is that a government provides rental housing for qualified people, and more and more countries have implemented this policy. When it comes to social housing, there are both positive and adverse influence in a community.
One advantage of social housing is that it can be a potential remedy to housing inequality in a community. On the whole, its targets are low-income families who cannot afford to buy their own house and struggle with paying high rent. Most of them live in poor conditions with lack of access to safe and secure housing. However, social housing puts them in a better place because it is supplied with favorable conditions at a low cost by a government. To illustrate, our government, South Korea, has provided social housing for families who do not have a house, are underpaid and have many family members by priority. Through this policy, the government relieves residents’ financial burden by guaranteeing long-term residence and restriction of rent going up.
On the other hand, its disadvantage is that it brings a decline of a sense of community. In most communities, various classes coexist. Upper class tends to care about many factors to keep a sense of entitlement as to housing, which includes the price of land, the area’s reputation and neighbor’s economic levels. If a social house is built in their community, upper class are likely to firmly exclude people living in social housing because they think that it is not well-matched their class and negatively affects their area. It will split one community up. For instance, there had been huge conflicts in one community of Seoul for more a year. Upper class did not allow to build a social housing due to the reputation of the area and worries about decline of real estate prices while low class really wanted to be provided it because it was closely connected with their survival.
Although social housing has its advantage, this issue is related to many complicated interests. In my view, we should first think a lot about a big advantage that it gives our society and lower-income group and then collaborate to find a solution for removal its disadvantage in many ways |