Thinking Citizen Blog — The Rise and Fall of Public Housing in the United States
Thinking Citizen Blog — Tuesday is Economics, Finance, and Business Day
Today’s topic: The Rise and Fall of Public Housing in the United States
Public housing has worked in other cultures. Not in the US. Many idealists had high hopes back in the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s. And public housing projects proliferated. But by the 1990s there was a bipartisan consensus that the experiment was an abysmal failure. Bulldozers were called in to raze the dilapidated, rat-infested, crime-ridden reminders of the difficulty of eliminating poverty. Today, an attempt to assemble a representative sample of arguments as to why this dream crashed and burned. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE ARGUMENTS FROM THE LEFT
1. Not enough money was spent. To quote a recent article on the topic from the New York Times, “the government didn’t provide enough funds to maintain the buildings and allow tenants to live with dignity.”
2. The buildings were segregated.
3. The buildings were low quality — “grimly impersonal monoliths” designed to separate neighbor from neighbor.”
NB “Legislators have gutted the federal housing budget repeatedly, halving the capital fund between 1998 and 2018. The repair needs of New York City’s deteriorating public-housing system could be as high as $68.5 billion by 2028.”
THE ARGUMENTS FROM THE RIGHT — the wrong incentives are toxic
1. Public housing is a cause of poverty. It rewards the wrong behaviors.
2. “When low income serves to qualify households for subsidized housing, that provides an incentive for, say, the formation of single-parent households — which dominate public-housing and housing-voucher programs and have no reason to seek a second income, whether by marriage or just taking in a roommate.”
3. “Higher income actually disqualifies households from getting into subsidized housing, leading to higher rents for non-subsidized units.”
NB: “Federal housing programs enacted in the name of the poor have harmed, not helped, their ability to climb the economic ladder. Biden has adopted a laundry list of ideas from the regulation advocates who are often the true beneficiaries of federal programs. But such programs have failed for decades. It’s time to dial them back, not double down on them.”
THE PROBLEM WITH CROSS NATIONAL COMPARISONS
1. Relative ethnic heterogeneity in the US versus elsewhere.
2. Relatively stricter behavioral restrictions (as in the oft-cited Singapore example). The first image above is of a Singapore public housing project. The second is of one in New York City. The third is of one in France.
3. Relatively unstable families in the US versus abroad.
NB: Relatively higher crime rates in the US.
FINAL WORD
As health care and education are inseparable, so are housing and education. And education is about economic and cultural literacy as well as reading, writing, and arithmetic. And economic and cultural literacy are inseparable from historical literacy. And historical literacy is about understanding how cultural, economic, and political forces work together to cause catastrophes like the public housing experiments of the last 50 years. This literacy is something of an impossible dream but I’m working on it day by day.
Opinion | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Knows How to Fix Housing
Biden’s Housing Plan Doubles Down on Decades of Failed Government Policy | National Review
Subsidized housing in the United States
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a.) the coolest thing you learned this week related to business, economics, finance.
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c.) anything at all related to business, economics, finance.
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