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-private partnership
Looting the nation to stave off a profitability crisis, i.e. neoliberalism. And we’re running out of things to loot
We’re at the “knocking out the drywall and stripping the copper wiring” phase of neoliberalism and our politicians and journalists are all
What a splendid time to be alive
Honestly I’m one of the people who thinks neoliberalism is over and we just haven’t named/identified the new economic mode yet. The coppers been stripped and a new profitability crisis presents itself
You are correct that neoliberalism has already ended. Check out Samir Amin if you haven’t already https://piped.video/watch?v=EEq8OK4BUyM&t=0
“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.” - Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Hey, you know what? Fuck it, federal rent cap pegging rent to 1/3 of monthly social security payments.
liberals are so confounded by the words “rent control” they generally don’t have a canned response even
Usually, the canned response in my experience is just “controlling prices is evil communism and no one will rent a house!!!”
I totally remember reading articles about how rent control will make things worse a few years back. I can’t remember the arguments but even as a lib they seemed pretty hollow and very “just trust me bro please bro no rent control trust me man”
Lmao: “The economists are right, and the populists are wrong.” Jesus fucking Christ can we just house people for fucks sake god fucking dammit.
it takes like 2 seconds to find price controls of some variety in the jurisdiction tho, so its easy to needle in on why they think housing specifically shouldnt be.
my favorite helpful fact with price controls is the french revolution (which overturned feudalism and instituted a capitalist system in france) has had price controls on bread ever since
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.
not even coming close is their job
no no no, they’re actually allies and advocates for potential pathways to human dignity
Oh no, they are
They keep on insisting that allowing private developers with 3% of units being aFfOrDaBlE hOuSiNg (read: 1% under market rate for the area) will eventually lead to housing prices going down by a process that is NOT TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS so please don’t call it that or I’ll get very mad bc thats what REPUBLICANS do >:( not me a smurt libraul, but also I cannot point to a single example of this happening in any meaningful capacity so just trust me bro, just one more luxury housing development bro cmon just one more luxury housing development.
And no we can’t have public housing like Vienna and Singapore which work incredibly well >:( bc thats authoritarianism or something and we need that money for the 50% of the city budget that goes to the cops!
NOT TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS
“It’s called market filtration sweetie and it takes time”
Im sure itll filter in aaannnnnny day now
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.
The ‘supply side’ answers to this problem are completely empty platitudes. Developers will continue to tell us that building more units will drive down prices but we also need laws that these need to be kept at a certain price and must be filled with people who need housing.
In so many major cities, these luxury units are being built while sitting unoccupied. Does not help anyone
BC we know how much landlords enjoy lowering rent when faced with reality
Very very occasionally I see headlines like, New affordable units with rent partially covered from [CITY/STATE] in [LOCAL AREA]
and buried in the article it tuns out it’s only, like, five new units. Usually out of a few hundred that exist in the same building.
public housing fails because it is criminally underfunded
“See, this is why government is bad and we need the free market”
Charitably, if it’s a grant from the feds, they probably wouldn’t be selected if the application indicated that it would be used to build public housing.
You’re probably right. But the city could still be using it’s own funds to do so literally any time. It’s a matter of priorities.
Agree, but a lot of places put huge restrictions on public housing in the 20th century. I know in California it’s unconstitutional to use public money to own and/or operate new public housing.
What if it was a “private” company (local collective) that was given grants from the city to build “private” (rented at-cost, i.e. property taxes + maintenance + staff salaries + building insurance) residential units?
Yeah. This is often what happens, but replace collective with non-profit.
The Bay Area’s notorious for a push-pull between NIMBYs and YIMBYs, which aren’t as diametrically opposed as you might think because both of them have a “fuck the poor” motivation behind what they want to approve or reject in their districting turf wars.
Housing prices remain obscene, and because that is good for the assholes that already own houses, of course one of the mandates is “affordable housing sounds good but anything near me must remain expensive.”
The conservative decades long campaign to eliminate any and all forms of housing has worked so well that even city planners and administrators who want to build public housing are prevented by mayors and city councils. The failure of Pruitt Igor, which was caused solely by racism, will alway outshine the extremely successful public housing projects in the mind of the median voter.
