The Brookings Institute is a respected centre-left think tank, so when it pipes up with an opinion that squelches America’s faint but slowly growing calls for public housing, lefty affordablehousingaction.org is bound to take notice.
Being in favour generally of the benefits of public housing, both old and new, we are rather inclined to want to debate the article point by point.
However, we think it should stand on its own merits, with three passing observations:
First, in other countries committed to the development of new affordable housing,1 local councils have been disappointed over the last few decades with the inability of private-enterprise led schemes to produce meaningful quantities of truly affordable housing.
As a result, they have been turning back towards public housing in which government supervises the development and construction, as well as guaranteeing tenant rents in an otherwise free market economy. If not in America, then elsewhere, public housing would seem to continue to have an important future, notwithstanding the caveats expressed by Brookings.
Second, the Brookings article chooses to take quite a narrow view of public housing as an enterprise strictly “in-house” to governments. From such a perspective, hands-on government control of all aspects of public housing is exactly as described — a foolish and wasteful pastime for untrained politicians and bureaucrats. But from its earliest days, governments have employed individuals, non-profits, and for-profit companies to build and manage public housing. Why should a narrower definition of hands-on government involvement stand as some kind of indictment to the myriad potential forms of truly low income housing?
Finally, Brookings offers alternatives to public housing which have proven themselves to be quite spectacular failures. One example: the Section 8 voucher program. Yes indeed, the flaws in such alternatives to public housing may be fixed. But then, so might flaws that have historically been evident in public housing itself.
Ultimately, it may be useful to imagine public housing in a Churchillian sense, taking license with his famous praising of democracy with faint damnation: “No one pretends that public housing is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that public housing is the worst form of truly affordable housing except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
And in that spirit we recommend a careful consideration of the Brookings document, which offers some important perspectives on how to proceed . . . or not . . . with the creation of new public housing.
Read more at Brookings: Four reasons why more public housing isn’t the solution to affordability concerns
