A tool to reduce social exclusion: Social housing

Huge social incidences such as Industrial Revolution, World Wars led to many permanent social changes in human life in the last few centuries. Mass destruction caused by World Wars left many people homeless. Moreover, the Industrial Revolution and the acceleration in urbanization led by this revolution resulted in the existence of mega cities containing many homeless people. Poverty, the inevitable result of economic crises, mechanization in industry and agriculture made people's life more and more difficult. Sheltering, one of the basic need of human life to survive for everyone, has become an unsustainable need which is not likely to be fulfilled easily. Many countries have developed formulas to overcome the sheltering problem of their citizens facing with poverty problem by making them home owners under certain circumstances. The project which is called social housing and used in many countries as an effective tool of social policy in the recent years has been applied in different ways almost in every country and increased its popularity in Turkey. The houses built by TOKİ are being sold to right owners on condition that the liability to pay the low instalments in 270 months. Although social housing has emerged as social project to ensure the reintegration of the people who have the risk of poverty and social exclusion by providing them sheltering facilities under reasonable conditions, it is a matter of debate whether it serves the purposes quoted above. When some articles and scientific reviews are studied, we make the inference that the efficacy of social housing project allegedly decreased due to a number of certain reasons and therefore, the social housing system started to be questioned. Furthermore, there are some data that supports the idea that people living in social houses feel themselves more disadvantaged. It is crucially important to study these ideas which can never be underestimated. This also brings peculiarity to the study since it surveys the theories that social housing, the tool to reduce social exclusion, is increasing social exclusion rather than decreasing it. The few and far between academic studies about social housing which is a high cost and important social policy tool made the research very important and provided a unique character to fill in a very important missing part of its area. This study is not only examining the conceptual part of social housing but also includes the observation of the national and international application of social housing system and argues its alleviating qualities against social exclusion in-depth. Along with the in-depth analysis of social housing system provided, views and proposals to obtain more effective implementation of social housing system are included in the last part of the study. Key Words: social policy, social exclusion, social housing, sheltering right, social inclusion, repayment, housing right, poverty, the disadvantaged.