urbanism

public-private partnership

Looting the nation to stave off a profitability crisis, i.e. neoliberalism. And we’re running out of things to loot

Hey, you know what? Fuck it, federal rent cap pegging rent to 1/3 of monthly social security payments.

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.

not even coming close is their job

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!

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.

Yeah I support public-private partnerships: where the public sector takes all the money of private investors and in exchange they get to live.

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

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”

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."

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.

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.