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
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.