‘Therfor bihoveth him a ful long spoon/ That shal ete with a feend,’ thus herde I seye.’ (Canterbury Tales: The Squire’s Tale, c1386). In more up to date English: ‘He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.’
A recent Dissent Magazine article explores in depth how the real estate market has created a modern, largely segregated America. It’s a fascinating and bitter account, well worth a read.
The article tracks the essential role of public/private partnerships as a corrupting influence on governments.
Why is this of interest to people everywhere, not just in the United States? Public/private partnerships have become a solution of choice for attacking the growing affordable housing crisis in many countries. The results everywhere have been disappointing, offering no hope of stemming the tide of unaffordability, let alone turning it.
Meanwhile, governments have bought into construction industry propaganda that focusses handfuls of ‘affordable’ housing attempts on middle class and even luxury housing that the private sector would most prefer to build, given its profitability. The challenge of building houses for those most in need passes largely, if not entirely, beneath the notice of the house-building industry.
The Dissent Magazine article proposes that governments, in their zeal to hand over as much government responsibility as possible to the private sector, become partners not only in projects such as affordable housing, but in the morality of their private sector partners.
Inevitably forced to defend the wisdom of their partnerships when apparently inevitable legal, moral and ethical failures taint the work of profit-driven private enterprise, government partners become indelibly corrupted by their “supper with the devil.”
For more on this profoundly disturbing vision of how government moral responsibilities to its citizens can be eroded by its partnerships, wade into this article from Dissent Magazine: How Real Estate Segregated America
