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Public housing is a form of housing tenure in which the property is owned by a government authority, which may be central or local. Social housing is an umbrella term referring to rental housing which may be owned and managed by the state, by non-profit organizations, or by a combination of the two, usually with the aim of providing affordable housing. It can also be seen as a potential remedy to housing inequality. Although the common goal of public housing is to provide affordable housing, the details, terminology, definitions of poverty and other criteria for allocation vary. 
Public housings in Brazil.
In mainland China, the government provides public housing through various sources, such as new housing, abandoned properties, and old flats which are rented at a very low price and called ’Lian Zu Fang’ (literally ’low-rent house’or ’low-rent housing’, Chinese: 廉租房). Additional housing is built by providing free land and exemption from fees to estate developers: the resulting houses are called ’Jing Ji Shi Yong Fang’ (literally ’the economically affordable Housing’, Chinese: 经济适用房). The concept of the low-cost rest house can be traced to a 1998 policy statement, but did not truly take off until 2006 due to limited funding and administrative problems. Main article: Public housing in Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, the government provides public housing through flats which are rented at a lower price than the markets, and through the Home Ownership Scheme, which are sold at a lower price. These are built and administered by the Hong Kong Housing Authority and the Hong Kong Housing Society. Nearly half of Hong Kong population lives in public housing. 
HDB-built flats in Singapore Main article: Public housing in Singapore
In Singapore, the public housing program, particularly the planning and development of new public housing and the allocation of rental units and resale of existing ownership units, is managed by the Housing and Development Board. Day-to-day management of public housing communities has largely been delegated to Town (local community) Councils. Most of the residential housing developments in Singapore are publicly governed and developed. Most of the residents in public housing are tenants under a 99 year lease agreement. Since most Singaporeans reside in public housing, public housing in Singapore is not generally considered as a sign of poverty or lower standards of living as compared to public housing in other countries where land constraint is less of an issue and property pricing may be significantly cheaper. Property prices for the smallest public housing can often be higher than privately owned and developed standalone properties such as townhouses and apartments in other countries after currency correlation. Main article: Modernist Housing Estates
Between 1925 and 1930 Germany was the site of innovative and extensive municipal public housing projects, mostly in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Frankfurt am Main. These Siedlungen (settlements), were made necessary by the dreadful living conditions of pre-war urban tenements. The right to a healthy dwelling was written into the 1919 Weimar Constitution, but few dwellings were built until economic stability in 1925. These settlements were low-rise, no more than 5 stories, and in suburban settings. Residents were provided access to light, air, and sun. The size, shape, orientation and architectural style of Germany’s public housing were informed by the recent experience of the Vienese and the Dutch, the anti-urban Garden City Movement in Britain, by new industrialized mass-production and pre-fabrication building techniques, by the novel use of steel and glass, and by the progressive-liberal policies of the Social Democrats. Architect Martin Wagner (with Bruno Taut) was responsible for the thousands of dwellings built in and around Berlin, including the Horseshoe Siedlung (named for its shape), and Uncle Tom’s Cabin Siedlung (named for a local restaurant). But Wagner was second to the city planner Ernst May in Frankfurt. May was responsible for the construction of 23 separate settlements, 15,000 total units, in five years. He ran his own sizable research facility to investigate, for instance, air-flow in various floorplan configurations, construction techniques, etc. The Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky applied the principles of Taylorism to the kitchen workspace and developed the Frankfurt kitchen while working for Ernst May. Beyond technical research May also published two magazines and embarked on a significant public-relations project, with films and classes and public exhibitions, to make Neues Bauen acceptable to the public. In the late 1920s the principles of equal access to "Licht, Luft und Sonne" and the social effects of a guaranteed ""Existenzminimum" became a matter of lively popular debate all over Germany. One indirect result of this publicity was the American housing movement: a young Catherine Bauer attended one of May’s conferences in 1930, and wrote her seminal "Modern Housing" based on research done in Frankfurt and with Dutch architect JJP Oud. Increasing pressure from the rising Nazis brought this era to an end in 1933. A majority of the German public housing experts had Social Democrat or Communist sympathies and were forced out of the country. In the Netherlands, the rent for the cheaper rental homes is kept low through governmental oversight and regulation. These types of homes are known as sociale huurwoningen. In practice this is accomplished by non-profit private housing foundations or associations (toegelaten instellingen). Due to frequent mergers the number of these organizations dropped to around 430 (2009). They manage 2.4 million dwellings. The majority of the low-rent apartments in the Netherlands are owned by such organisations. Since the policy changes in 1995 the social housing organizations have become financially independent focusing on their role as social entrepreneurs. In most Dutch municipalities there came to exist a certain minimum capacity of social housing throughout the last decades. In many cities such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht the percentage of social housing approaches or even passes 50 percent. The public (financial) supervision is done by the central fund for housing (Centraal Fonds Volkshuisvesting). The Dutch housing policy is based on a concept of universal access to affordable housing for all and the prevention of segregation. Former Soviet Union Main article: Khrushchyovka
In the Soviet Union, most of the houses built after World War II were usually 3-5 stories high, with small apartments. In these boroughs, the goal was saving space and creating as many apartments as possible. Construction starting in the 1970s favored 9- and 16-story concrete panel municipal housing in major cities, 7-12 stories in smaller urban areas. North America Main article: Public housing in Canada
The St. James Town high-rise neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. Four towers are public housing, while the rest are private apartments In Canada, public housing is usually a block of purpose-built subsidized housing operated by a government agency, often simply referred to as projects or community housing, with easier-to-manage town houses. Canada, especially Toronto, still maintains large high-rise clustered developments in working class neighborhoods, a system that has fallen into disfavor in both the UK and US. However, Toronto Community Housing, one of the largest public housing agencies in North America, has a variety of buildings and communities ranging from individual houses to townhouse communities and mid-rise and high-rise apartments in both working class and middle class neighbourhoods. They house immigrants, refugees, and low-income Canadians. Following the decentralisation of public housing to local municipalities, Social Housing Services Corporation (SHSC) was created in the Province of Ontario in 2002 to provide group services for social housing providers (public housing, non-profit housing and co-operative housing). It is a non-profit corporation which provides Ontario housing providers and service managers with bulk purchasing, insurance, investment and information services that add significant value to their operations. 
Construction of the new Woodward’s development in Downtown Eastside, Vancouver Recently, there has been a move toward the integration of public housing with market housing and other uses. Revitalization plans for properties such as in the notorious Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and Regent Park and Lawrence Heights in Toronto, aim to provide better accommodations for low-income residents, and connect them to the greater community. In Toronto, for instance, the aims of the reconstruction plans of Regent Park are to better integrate it into the traditional grid of streets, improve leisure and cultural amenities, and construct mixed-income buildings. However, the residents of these communities have had little effective input in the plans and have had mixed reactions to the construction. A plan to house Vancouver’s homeless is taking shape on the drawing board of a local architect. It calls for the rapid erection of temporary villages assembled from the same type of modular units that mining companies provide for remote workers. "Stop Gap Shelters" is what architect Gregory Henriquez calls it. "All of us in this community have long been advocates for permanent housing," he said. "But we’ve gotten to the point where the numbers of homeless are so staggering that I’m left wondering if we will ever catch up doing it that way. I don’t think we can. I think there has to be a stop-gap measure. And that’s what this is." Henriquez drew up plans for a motel-like village, with 48 suites clustered around a central courtyard. The colourful compound includes a managers’ office, a covered patio, and a second storey meeting room all within a typical 120-by-200-foot city lot. 
Tlatelolco’s Plaza 
Miguel Aleman With the end of the Second World War, Mexico, enriched by US inversion, and an oil boom, the country had its first demographic boom, in which Mexico City was the first destination for province immigrants. To develop one of the poorest part of the city (Santiago Tlatelolco, that was becoming a slum), it was in charged to Mario Pani Darqui the favourite architect in that time in Mexico to build its first big scale project, the Conjunto Urbano Tlatelolco Nonoalco, but after a while, instead of giving the flats to the exresidents of Tlatelolco, the project was twisted and given to state employees. After this, Pani was in charge of the Multifamiliar Presidente Alemán, another states’ men housing, this time in a new suburb south of the city. But after all, Mexico has had experience of housing projects since Porfirio DÃÂaz’s regime, one of those, still remains and is the Bario of Loreto in San ÃÂngel, ÃÂlvaro Obregón, D.F., that was a project for a paper factory workers. Main article: Public housing in the United States
Bushwick, Brooklyn’s twenty-story John F. Hylan Houses In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, government involvement in housing for the poor was chiefly in the introduction of buildings standards. Atlanta’s Techwood Homes, built in 1936, was the nation’s first public housing project. Most housing communities were developed from the 1930s onward and initial public housing was largely slum clearance, with the requirement insisted upon by private builders that for every unit of public housing constructed, a unit of private housing would be demolished. This also eased concerns of the establishment by eliminating or altering neighborhoods commonly considered a source of disease, and reflected progressive-era sanitation initiatives. Moreover, public housing along with the Federal Highway Program demolished the older, sub-standard housing of communities of color across the United States. However, the advent of make-shift tent communities during the Great Depression caused concern in the Administration. Public housing in its earliest decades was usually much more working-class and middle-class and white than it was by the 1970s. Many Americans associate large, multi-story towers with public housing, but early projects were actually low-rise, though Le Corbusier superblocks caught on before World War II. A unique US public housing initiative was the development of subsidized middle-class housing during the late New Deal (1940–42) under the auspices of the Mutual Ownership Defense Housing Division of the Federal Works Agency under the direction of Colonel Lawrence Westbrook. These eight projects were purchased by the residents after the Second World War and as of 2009 seven of the projects continue to operate as mutual housing corporations owned by their residents. These projects are among the very few definitive success stories in the history of the US public housing effort. There are also many New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) efforts that have provided in-demand and inexpensive public housing for decades, see "Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century" by Nicholas Dagen Bloom for a rigorous examination of the U.S. public housing management agency with the country’s most extensive holdings. Bloom’s "Public Housing" dispels common U.S. public housing myths while detailing advances made by NYCHA, see also NYCHA’s own website "Fact Sheet" for elucidation of the magnitude and scope of their work since 1934. Public housing was only built with the blessing of the local government, and projects were almost never built on suburban greenfields, but through regeneration of older neighborhoods. The destruction of tenements and eviction of their low-income residents consistently created problems in nearby neighborhoods with "soft" real estate markets. Houses, apartments or other residential units are usually subsidized on a rent-geared-to-income (RGI) basis. Some communities have now embraced a mixed income, with both assisted and market rents, when allocating homes as they become available. Public housing in the US has been overhauled in recent years after criticism that neglect and concentrated poverty have contributed to increased crime. HUD’s 1993 HOPE VI program addresses these issues by funding renewal of public housing to decrease its density and allow for tenants with mixed income levels. Projects continue to have a reputation for violence, drug use, and prostitution, especially in New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington D.C as well as others leading to the passage of a 1996 federal "one strike you’re out" law, enabling the eviction of tenants convicted of crimes, especially drug-related, or merely as a result of being tried for some crimes. Other attempts to solve these problems include the 1978 Section 8 Housing Program, which encourages the private sector to construct affordable homes, and subsidizes public housing. This assistance can be "project-based", subsidizing properties, or "tenant-based", which provides tenants with a voucher, accepted by some landlords 
Public housing high-rise in Collingwood, one of 40-45 such buildings in Melbourne Main article: Public housing in Australia
Public housing in Australia is usually provided by departments of state and territory governments, with funding provided by both state and federal governments. There are over 300,000 public housing dwellings in Australia, consisting of low-density housing on master-planned estates located in suburban areas, and also inner-city high-rise apartments in Melbourne and Sydney. In recent decades, rooming and relief housing for the homeless has been privatised, and in recent years this housing has been sold off to avoid maintenance costs and capitalise on sales in a booming property market. In Melbourne, public housing stocks have been in decline for some time. Main article: State housing
In New Zealand, public housing, known as state housing, was introduced by the Government in 1937 for citizens unable to afford private rents. Following WWII, most local authorities also started providing social housing, mainly for elderly people with low incomes.
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