I’m listening to a presentation on a gigantic housing grant my city is applying for. (PRO Grant from HUD, if you’re familiar). They’re proposing spending millions on regulatory reform to promote missing middle housing, which, ok fine, that’s a big task in a major city, but that should already have been done in 2023. Other money would go towards vague stuff like an accelerator program for bipoc affordable developers. After all of that, they’re proposing only 120 “deeply affordable” (under 30% ami) units with the grant.
We have a shortfall of tens of thousands of those units in our city, and this multimillion dollar federal grant would fund just 120.
JUST FUCKING BUILD PUBLIC HOUSING CO-OPS
I swear the neoliberal public-private partnership brainworms these people have is beyond terminal. “We have to strategically leverage this potential pot of funding” no you fucking don’t
public housing fails because it is criminally underfunded
“See, this is why government is bad and we need the free market”
not even coming close is their job
The solution was, remains, and will always be public housing.
The number of conversations I’ve had with even “progressive” people who have somehow been convinced that public housing won’t work is startling. But tbh, even I am unsure if a neoliberalized empty husk of a government would even be able to do it today without dumping money into public-private partnerships which would fail to accomplish anything but lining their pockets with cash.
The frustrating thing is all the extra time and work that goes into setting up public-private partnerships. It would be cheaper and easier for a given city to just commission a construction company to build something on the land they have. Spending money is spending money, private or public. Local governments really have to go out their way and put a lot of work into spending money ineffectively.
Yeah I support public-private partnerships: where the public sector takes all the money of private investors and in exchange they get to live.
I assume it’s relatively more or less the same everywhere but in my city, it is COMPLETELY 10000% controlled by Real Estate and investing.
Because they are almost entirely funded by property taxes, the actions of City governments make way more sense if you think of them as a joint-stock company owned by local land owners. There is selection pressure on elected city officials to govern in a way that increases the property value of homeowners and property developers. Not only do those officials get the support of those land owners, but taking actions that increase property values also have the effect of bringing in more revenue, which in turn gives them more freedom of action to do things that improve their support among their base of support among land owners. That’s the fundamental reason why supply-side YIMBY approaches to creating adequate housing are doomed.
