to ask why so many people think social housing is subsidised?

[butwhythen22]

Not a TAAT but inspired by a recent mention on here - one of very, very many.

I live in a council flat, FWIW.

So, so often I hear people say that it’s subsidised (the implication that someone else is paying part of the cost on my behalf).

This is not correct. The building is owned outright by a housing corporation. It’s a non-profit organisation that charges enough in rent and service costs to cover all its overheads, which are presumably many. This rent is, however, substantially lower than what the flat would fetch on the open market.

However, nobody is paying that “shortfall” on my behalf. It’s simply that the housing corporation’s mission is to provide affordable housing, so they are not charging more than they need to in order to keep everything running well.

(I don’t even receive UC or rent subsidies or anything like that, not that there would be anything wrong with it if I did. I support myself from paid employment.)

Why don’t people get this?

The problem with claiming that not making the maximum possible profit on people having housing as being a subsidy, is that you then create the idea that one group is beholden to another when it isn't actually true, anymore than people should be beholden to muggers not mugging them when they can.

You could equally insist that children in care are 'subsidized children', and from an economic pov that would actually be true as we wouldn't even be looking at lost 'opportunity cost' but at actual costs paid out of our taxes.
We quite rightly don't talk about them as 'subsidized children' or 'children receiving subsidized care' even though it's correct from an economic/accounting perspective, because we look at the necessity from a "philosophical/political/moral perspective" which is where the concept of creating social housing came from.

So I guess a lot depends on if you think everything should be governed by capitalist pursuits and aims or not.

Creating (or trying to add weight to) new forms of class divisions isn't the direction society should be seeking to go in.