One possible housing crisis solution? Public housing for all income levels

Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I could go for a bigger house, but I like my car as is, and I don't want a yacht or a private jet[0]. So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better?

The thing I keep coming back to again and again is public housing. I would just start buying up land and building public housing. Getting the homeless off the streets would improve not just their lives, but also the lives of the people who already have homes who happen to live in areas with a lot of homeless.

I've also considered public pay-what-you-want restaurants.

If anyone wants to give me untold billions, I will get right on it.

[0] I would totally go for a private train car, though.

> The market rate rents “come to us instead of flowing out to the private sector,” says Marks, allowing other tenants to pay less.

But because of the controlling stake being a government, this seems like it could fail the 14th amendment’s equality clause. Since individuals are being presented with different rent.

I guess it all depends on how it’s structured.

14th amendment regulates governments. Something that would be normal for a private sector participant can be discarded when public money or direct public ownership is involved.

Then again, low income public housing has different rates based on how many dependents you have or earn.

But I wouldn’t assume anything. Maybe the constitutional challenge never happened specifically because only poor people were the tenants. By mixing it with people who can pay market rents anywhere but might want the lower rate, there is a new attack surface to challenge it.

"It created a $100 million revolving fund to dramatically ramp up construction."

I don't see zoning reform mentioned anywhere in the article. Presumably the city's projects are still subject to the same zoning restrictions and regulations as a developer would on their own, but without the difficulty of trying to secure a loan.

This seems nice as an additive but doesn't represent a large fraction of the market. It helps in the first place because they're building more. If cities adopt reforms to help small developers, these projects would be redundant. We have examples of some cities improving in real time.

Lol, this is what they did in the USSR. It doesn't really work unless you trap people in this housing because those with means won't be interested, or will move out once they lived there and experienced living with "mixed income" people. That will make an average resident slightly worse to be around, rinse, repeat. It's not like the old failed public housing experiments failed because they didn't allow richer people to move in... Walter Williams auto-biography describes "the projects" in the 1950ies, when they were still decent public housing. With increased opportunity, people start moving out and the spiral begins.

That will be especially true in the US; given that the US is one of the most meritocratic countries, the non-immigrant US poor as a group are probably the least functional large socio-economic group anywhere in the world. I'd personally rather live next to some Haitians or refugees from Taliban than multi-generational American poor, urban or rural. But if you have a choice why live next to poor people at all?

The term "housing crisis" is a misdirection. That term covers up the real problem and gets us to focus on the wrong problem. In the US fewer and people earn a living wage. If people cannot afford housing because they are not paid a living wage, that is not a "housing crisis".

A similar misdirection is "inflation". Measuring how much prices are rising is meaningless. It is like evaluating your bank account by looking only at how much money comes in. That is why we have bank statements that tell us show starting balance, income, expenditures and ending balance. The only thing that matters is the difference between what comes in to your account and what goes out. Try getting a bank loan for a house by telling the bank only how much you earn each month.

If inflation is low, but the difference between wages and cost is too high for people to afford housing, or food, or health care, or an unexpected $500 expense, then there is bad problem despite the low inflation. The measure we need isthe difference between common wages and common expenses. If the difference between wages and living expenses is growing dramatically, then that is problem. There is not a housing crisis, there is a WAGE crisis.

How does one solve this rather obvious problem? One raises the minimum wage from $7.25 to something that allows people to afford housing. We have not done this, nor is there any discussion on doing this. So now one must ask why we, as a country have not done this?

In legal proceedings a common technique is to ask who benefits. Cui Bono? Who benefits from very-low-wages? Certainly not the common people.

Yet we are supposed to be a democracy and our government is supposed to be one that responds to the people. Is this true? Certainly we can note that common people are more and more distrustful of our system of government. Could this be caused by the people asking Cui Bono, and finding that the answer is not "We the People".

I haven't found any really detailed numbers for the project. Does anyone know more about how heavily subsidized the housing is, meaning how much the public bill will be each year?

The idea that such projects are so popular and aren't necessarily meant to help only those most in need is confusing in what is usually considered somewhat of a free market. Why aren't these types of projects being built privately if they are so successful? And how do you justify subsidizing housing for those making at or even above the average household income level?

What if you took land profit out of the equation ?

- Eminent domain land

- lease to builder for 99 year leases

- tenants not owners

- in 99 years local government has another shot

There are more people wanting houses that we can build, especially with onerous regulations requiring running water, fire doors, external shrubbery, etc.

The only solution for the housing crisis is to build more houses. If supply increases and overtakes demand, the cost should decrease (I am no economist). The government(s) should go a bit more heavy handed on breaking up zoning laws and NIMBYism, and on setting a higher standard of living / housing at lower cost.

I'm of the opinion that big apartment blocks are a quick way to add more housing, even though a lot of people think back on communist-era mass produced low quality concrete apartment cells. But it doesn't have to be like that. Construction is scalable, and (to appease the capitalists), a good apartment building is at least 100 years of guaranteed recurring income (assuming rent instead of buy, but the post is about public housing), and the investment will be earned back relatively fast.

That said, affordable housing should be available for everyone. When I was looking for a house, I didn't need anything fancy, two bedroom apartment would be more than fine for me. But by then I was earning too much for social housing, meaning there was a huge rent gap to the free market where I could get something equivalent but starting at twice as expensive per month. Not that it matters, the wait list for social housing was 15 years at that point.

For a long time the general advice was to spend at most a quarter or a third of your income on housing, but for most people this isn't viable and they have to pay more.

Public housing starts out nice when the masonry is new, its operations are freshly funded, and every initial tenant passes a basic credit check.

Will it stand as a shining example after 10-20 years, when poorer tenants are in arrears or move in unauthorized people, United States union mentality workers or overpriced contractors do the bare minimum for upkeep, and people who can afford to move out do?

I don’t think this would work in the US. Not in much of the country anyway.

Eastern European style commie blocks, though rudimentary (eg no elevators in many) solved a pressing housing problem post war in that part of the world, in societies that were quite collectivist even before collectivisation.

Compare to the reality of housing projects in the UK and US, constructed around the same time but which were demolished, or became synonymous with urban blight.

This is just a step away from UBI. I appreciate the universal approach but prefer universal solution instead of only to “housing” offering public housing to people who can afford and choose to live in higher quality is a fake universal solution. UBI sends money, even Jeff Bezos will benefit although negligibly from 1k per month. “Oh but Jeff Bezos doesn’t need it” you miss the point. Universal removes a TON of beauracrocy and issues that come with qualifications. And by giving direct money this solution helps literally all fiscally related problems (not mental health or education). Food deserts will still be a problem. Places without affordable housing will still exist. But people will have some real and immediate help in affording the solutions and also help in moving out of those locations to ones without those problems.

There is no “solution” to “solve” any of these things 100% the idea of universal housing is not realistic considering current government housing and HUD is known for its unsafe, low quality, overpriced and corruptible attributes. UBI is a real implementable “solution” that will “improve” the problem.

We need HouseX instead of SpaceX!

I can't speak for the US but in the UK you have the issue of deciding where to put the public housing.

If you try to stuff it all into somewhere like London then you end up either with huge overcrowding (it's really hard to double the capacity of 150 year old infrastructure) or with people living so far out of the centre that commute costs really start to bite.

If you build new towns then you have to be really careful to somehow distribute the wealth properly otherwise you just end up with slums.

I actually think that for the most part what people aren't willing to accept is that the capitalist model actually does allocate housing fairly well according to need, it's just that if you're on the wrong side of that equation then it feels terribly unfair to be asked indirectly via the market to move to a cheaper area.

They tried this in the communist countries when they were still around. Sure, people had affordable housing and didn't have to worry about homelessness, but at what cost? That's not a rhetorical question.