Social Planning Relating to Housing
The primary function of organizations of social planning is to help in the building and strengthening of the community. Most of their work focuses on social issues that affect individuals plus families. Among these roles is the provision of decent and affordable housing. Housing shortage is one social planning issue related to housing that can be identified in the two films of Farewell Oak Street and Imagining Home.
Housing shortage refers to a situation in which many households lack affordable dwelling places. The film ‘Imagining Home’ directs its attention to the revolution of a historical, aspersed and valued public housing location in Portland, Oregon into a culturally diverse, mixed income modern development. The documentary elicits the soul of this neighbourhood through the tales of multiple displaced or relocated families. This issue was especially challenging for women because aside from this, they experienced other difficulties (Arbuthnot et al., 2001).
The unlawful residents’ movement that commenced in the summer of the year 1946 with the Scunthorpe army camp occupying the area had resulted to the occupation of more than one thousand camps by over forty thousand households by autumn of the same year. Those that had homes frequently lived in pitiable conditions; A survey in 1947 revealed that less than fifty per cent of British families had a bathroom of their own while forty four per cent lacked any appliances for purposes of heating water.
Farewell Oak Street on the other hand represents a before and after image of individuals in a large-scale civic housing scheme in Toronto. Because of housing shortages, the households had no other option but to live in foeti, begrimed flats and derelict residential areas on a congested street in Northern Regent Park. Now they are able to access modern housing improvements that have been designed to provide them with privacy, lighting as well as space (National Film Board of Canada, 2010).
Oak Street is one of the primogenitor lanes in Toronto that has gone through substantial alterations in the previous sixty years and is still, to present a day, in the process of revolution. The area has mostly been concomitant with paucity or poor planning. This is believed to have had its origins in what was originally supposed to be a tranquil combo of modern renewal coupled with social reform. Toronto’s version of post-World War II reforms was that existent localities be annihilated and replaced as opposed to being fortified in less dire mannerisms. The reason as to why Oak was the primary concern of the reforms at the time was because it marked the hub of a devastated locality. This, according to the social reformers, was blight on the atlas of a blossoming, post-war town.
The accessibility of affordable and decent housing has been an issue that has gained steam over the past decades. Fewer homes than needed have been put up. Urgent action is necessary because rising costs of housing only means that the younger generation today is increasingly rated out of purchasing or renting homes. One of the solutions as seen in the documentaries discussed in this essay is the enactment of planning reforms. Ambiguous packages that combine instantaneous short-term actions for investment boosting plus long-term social reforms will guarantee the construction of housing required presently and for a time to come. Appealing to more investment, either public or private, could help deal with the housing shortage problems today too.
References
Arbuthnot, S., Wilhelm, R., & Hare in the Gate Productions. (2001). Imagining home. Portland, OR: Hare in the Gate Productions.
National Film Board of Canada. (2010). Farewell Oak Street. Ottawa: National Film Board of Canada.
