this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Anything is bad if you do it badly. It's ridiculous to dismiss an entire concept because you can name examples of when it was done wrong.
Bad drivers exist so no more cars. Bad laws exist so no more laws. Bad governments exists, so no more governments. It's an asinine way of arguing.
Unless you can formulate clear arguments as to why government management of rentals cannot work as a concept, you should not dismiss it as a solution.
It's not that it cannot work as a concept, it just has not worked when it's been done so far. Typically the issues come down to funding. Politicians have to be elected, and politicians control funding. In order to get elected, politicians cut taxes--because everyone wants lower taxes, right?--which means that they have to cut funding. Typically the funding cuts are to the most vulnerable populations. So you'd have to create a system where public housing couldn't be systematically de- and underfunded. I don't know that even a constitutional amendment would be sufficient (see also: the entire history of 2A, Ohio trying to block the amendment to their constitution re: reproductive freedoms, etc.)
I'm generally opposed to continuing to repeat the same mistakes and expecting different results. If gov't funded housing has always resulted in shoddy, run-down, and unsafe (both in terms of structural integrity and in terms of crime) housing, then we need to fundamentally rethink how we're going about it to ensure we aren't repeating the same problems, rather than just throwing more money at it.
Big, BIG "citation needed" on that one chief. Just speaking from my own experience growing up in England, council housing schemes were fantastically effective at getting people into housing with reasonable rental costs. And similar schemes have been successful all across Europe. I'm told there are similar success stories in the US as well.
I think you're just picking one or two bad examples and just treating that as the whole dataset because it fits your prior assumptions. It's easy to do, because people complain when government efforts don't work (and often they complain even when they do; there are plenty of "bad" government programs that are actually fantastically effective, people just moan about their imperfections to the point where everyone assumes they're broken) but rarely celebrate the successes.
I can't speak to every single city in the US, but in Chicago, Detroit, and near me in Atlanta--all areas that I've lived in--public housing has been badly underfunded, has been allowed to decay by the city, and is often so bad that the buildings end up being condemned. Most US cities seem to trend more towards public-private partnerships, where the private company mismanages the property, and the city fails to take enforcement action. One of the largest public housing projects in Atlanta has finally been condemned and seized after something like two decades of mismanagement and lack of care in enforcement from the city. (And yes, Atlanta is nominally a Democratic city, although I sincerely hope that Andre Dickens and the entire city council that's supported Cop City all die in a fire.)