Putting on my planner hat for a moment it is worth pointing out that the problems in American public housing weren’t an accident, they were the entirely foreseen outcomes a few design choices. We’ll skip the early experiments and jump right to the Wagner-Steagall act. It set up a few features that would cause ongoing issues. 1) It set lower spending caps per unit than had been the standard for earlier efforts. This resulted in a lot of units having substandard construction, especially in the cities with the highest costs. 2) It let local municipalities make all of the decisions on siting. This was a rocket track path to segregation, both racial and income. 3) It required 1-1 replacement. Public housing didn’t add to units in the market. It just replaced existing slum housing.4) It set really tight income restrictions (This one comes back to bite us later). It is worth noting that earlier public housing efforts in cities like Cleveland were not so starkly economically segregated. Most of the housing went to working to middle class households.
Jump forward to the 1949 act and urban renewal ended up removing more housing units than new ones were built in many cases.
So with those steps in place we also put in place policies requiring the maintenance of the buildings to be covered by the rents and other policies that effectively prevented any two parent households with healthy parents. This meant buildings weren’t getting basic maintenance and anyone who had any option (including some terrible options) left. This vacancy further depressed budgets and on and on. Once you had high vacancy towers then they became centers of the drug trade. It wasn’t just the architecture it was a choice that basically declared we will put our most vulnerable people in a housing system that ensures misuse.
As much as I hate the tower in the park system it doesn’t intrinsically lead to negative outcomes for residents. Remember the 5th avenue apartments are high rise towers facing a municipal green space.
I live outside DC (see the handle). The county keeps min. lot sizes huge to keep more people from moving in. You could probably put 50 houses on 50 acres with out a lot of trouble (and they wouldn’t sell for $750,000 each due to scarcity).
When supply is limited, price rises. Want lower prices? Increase the supply.
Fellow Portlander. What is the state of affordability of the current boom in development? With the intensive development especially of East Burnside, are we getting more affordable units? I’d love to see development in places like the Division corridor set aside lands and public funds to built affordable, extremely efficient units.
Additionally, local governments in many cities already own around a fifth of their city’s land, a figure that excludes public parks. It means that, unlike a private developer, municipalities could have zero land acquisition costs in many cases.
I read this as “the government converts the old school/police/etc… lot into public housing”, which would do exactly that.
The article was far too one-sided in its analysis. It used as positive examples European public housing projects built after the war and filled with middle income people. But that’s not who lives in public housing in the US, it’s not a relevant comparison. The author makes broad assumptions about the amount of publicly owned land that is actually available for redevelopment. Sure the city owns a lot of the land, but that land has schools, firehouses, police stations, etc… sitting on it. The city isn’t sitting on a bunch of vacant lots in nice neighborhoods. Nobody wants housing projects built at the site of an abandoned condemned warehouse near the docks.
This whole plan was seriously underbaked. The author needs to go back and do more research.
Microscopic against the condo boom, and heavily concentrated past the 80’s in East Portland. Private actors are in the drivers seat, and the city is strangled in the crib by numerous state laws restricting public approaches to affordable development (I also happen to think city gov talks a big game and fails to deliver, repeatedly. This has changed somewhat recently- the no-cause eviction extension is a pretty great step, thanks Chloe!)
TLDR; p bad.
Me too. It is too late for division within the 50’s (likely Powell too) and time is running out for the stretch from foster-powell to the felony flats. I’m not holding my breath- I step out my door every day to see it creep ever closer.
I’m not sure what you mean by that, but if it’s stuffing poor people into tiny boxes then I couldn’t disagree more.
So if we’re going to really address housing in the US we have to accept that there isn’t a housing crisis in the US. There are a set of very different housing crises in the US which will probably require different solutions. New York and San Francisco might be helped by public housing, but it would kill Cleveland. Despite some of the cheapest housing in the country, large parts of Cleveland have a housing crisis because incomes are so astoundingly low. Any public housing strategy in Cleveland would recreate the worst aspects of 20th century US housing policy. Cleveland would probably be better served by rental vouchers and a strong income source discrimination ordinance. Detroit has Cleveland’s problems but the housing disinvestment in the core is bad enough that they would probably be better served by subsidizing mixed income housing construction in the core with some type of hybrid ownership structure.
But really we aren’t going to fix the housing problems in the US until we seriously talk about mammoth structural reform and I haven’t seen any real suggestion that we are ready to talk about what it would take to convert the single largest store of household wealth and investment into a simple commodity item. We would have to fundamentally restructure our economy and while it is needed any attempt that missed the mark would cause economic dislocation at a scale that is frankly hard to imagine.
From the point of view of a San Franciscan, that sounds like a better problem to have than the one we have currently, and one that’s a lot easier to remedy.
The article is in correct in stating that YIMBYs just want private development housing. The YIMBYS are in favor of just building housing period, regardless of who is doing it. YIMBYs support social housing, affordable housing, and market housing (especially in San Francisco, where the shortage is so dire) in the face of neighborhoods and local laws that make building of any sort next to impossible, especially in the wealthier neighborhoods. (for example, local neighbors just shut down 150 units of housing for homeless/low income seniors here.The YIMBY position is that that should not be allowed, if the project is 100% affordable and meets all local zoning requirements. They’re even sponsoring a ballot initiative to that effect).
And on a similar point; It’s well worth contrasting the differences between eastern-European tower block life and western-European tower-block life.
In 20th century England (for example), a rich western-European country, tower blocks were dumping grounds for the poorest. They were filthy, broken down and plagued with petty crime - but they also had thriving social communities. Communities who were ruthlessly exploited by various political parties and suppressed by various civil services, well into the current era of massive gentrification and widespread homelessness in the UK. Example: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/10/another-social-tenancy.html
In Poland, a former Soviet-bloc state prior to 1990, tower blocks were homes for everyone. They were clean, well-maintained and often ordained with civic artworks. Creches, clinics and public transport were ubiquitous services.
And it’s important to remember - those homes were provided by the state. They were free to citizens of Poland (albeit with waiting list requirements and for sure, there was some corruption in allocation) and the state employed people to maintain them.
So, under Socialist economics, the Polish state took care of its citizens. Not 100%, but better than the UK at the time.
It’s unfortunate that politics wasn’t removed enough from economic theory during the Cold War, that we could honestly evaluate which economic systems actually worked best.
East Germany vs West Germany would have been a perfect experiment, if the East German government hadn’t behaved like stupid petty shitheads.
Gentrification in my city is a weird thing that people argue isn’t happening. Cleveland’s prices are so low that even in the hottest neighborhoods most of the movement comes from external forces. So everything is really spotty. As an example there are homes on my street going for pentuple what I paid two years ago and homes going for a few % over what I paid with almost no difference in the houses.
Cleveland and New Orleans also have large housing first programs. New Orleans’s program is veteran focused and Cleveland’s is too new to really know outcomes.
It is a matter of quantity.
Take an example from Germany.
They have public housing. A lot of public housing. A f***ing lot of it.
It is not a thing for poor people, it’s just affordable housing (and i think a low margin operated “business”, but that’s my guess).
As a consequence of that housing in general (rent and sale) is quite cheap in Germany.
On top of that i’d put another public structure that gives handouts to those in need to pay for public housing (no idea how the germans do it).
On the other side, if you want to see how not to manage public housing, come here in Italy.
Oh, for god’s sake: There’s not a problem like this for which the solution doesn’t already exist and has been proven to work. All that’s lacking is a minimum of awareness and a will.
I think for a valid analysis we need to concentrate on just one city for now, if only to cut down on the number of variables. Detroit has a different housing problem than Austin, for example.
So let’s just look at Austin for now, and maybe someone living in the area can pipe in? If someone does take me up on this offer I can provide comparative anecdotes from Munich in Germany, where the influx of new residents has been straining the housing market for over a decade now.
The housing market in Germany is a little lopsided at the moment, which is why the previous government tried to implement corrections such as the ill-fated Mietpreisbremse law.
It is especially of interest to me here in Munich, where the city has been accused of dropping the ball in past decades, and, well…
Yes, you’ve put it into words better than I did with my one-line piece of tripe: it’s a big flaw in city democracy, that the sort of public housing we need cannot be built if the public gets a say. NIMBYism creeps in, funding gets cut, crony-ism sees poor construction and the gradual parring down of amenities until what you are left with is exactly what you didn’t want in the first place - a huge block of bland, cramped housing in a place no one wants to live.
