The Mystery Of The Dog That Didn’t Bark — Social Housing

a strange statue masked in various places including muzzle and spray painted
2014-06-21 11.31.35 photo by oddharmonic is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
A complex solution to an indefinable, complex problem.

‘The dog that didn’t bark’ is an important clue pointing towards the solution of a famous Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Likewise, the ‘dog that didn’t bark’ can be considered a metaphor for one clue that is seldom if ever offered to explain how to solve the mystery of affordable housing.

A recent review of Conor Dougherty’s new book Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, describes the author’s approach thus: “No matter which way you look, the housing crisis confounds simple solutions.”  This aptly describes Dougherty’s approach, one of telling “the story of housing in all its complexity.”

Welcome to the clue of the dog that didn’t bark. Can you not hear it?

There is one approach to creating large amounts of public housing, which is elegant in its simplicity. Government supervises the funding, design, and building of sturdy low-rent housing for low income citizens on government land that is held off the free market and so does not increase uncontrollably in value due to investor speculation.

Here is the dog that didn’t bark. It’s called social housing, or public housing. You will find it pretty much not barking in books like Dougherty’s, in articles and opinion pieces everywhere, like that of Nicholas Cannariato which follows.

How come? Yes, in America social housing has a reputation for everything from bad funding decisions, bad design, bad construction, bad management, as well as the bad genes of an entire degenerate underclass of American citizens.1

But social housing is far from dead in America. And while it has been sick, cities are speaking up for funding to help heal it, so important has it become in staving off even greater depths of affordable housing crises.

And yet we seldom hear bark of it. Curious.

Read a review of a book all about the almost insoluble complexities of affordable housing in which a dog of simplicity simply doesn’t bark: at NPR: Author Says ‘Mixed Solutions Can Feel Like A Cop-Out’ But May Solve Housing Inequity

Footnotes

  1. For an article that points away from conventional wisdom of blaming tenants and puts government mismanagement in the spotlight, try An Improvement to Ben Carson’s Public-Housing Proposal 

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