
Historically, the most effective way of creating new social housing has been national government-funded construction upon land removed from the free market.
Sustaining that housing has been another saga altogether. Various techniques of managing, maintaining and replacing social housing have been employed around the world, some with spectacular success (e.g. Singapore), others a sad failure (e.g. USA).
Many, if not most, national social housing programs have had solid in-between success providing truly affordable low-income housing for many decades. This has often been accomplished in spite of small-government conservative (“Thatcherite”) attempts to divest any national responsibility for housing their nation’s lowest-income citizens.
One near-universal experiment that has demonstrated comprehensive failure in free-market economies is bribing/coercing private developers to include social housing in mixed income housing developments. These public/private partnerships have failed everywhere to provide a substantial source of permanent, and much-needed, social housing units.
Undaunted by the failure of public/private partnerships to provide that new, permanent social housing, the American federal government has doubled down on Thatcherite wishful thinking. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has extended the unfulfilled promise of public/private partnerships through the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD).
With a nightmare of uncontrolled rent increases across the nation, RAD is presented as the “only way” of preserving America’s increasingly precious resource of existing social (a.k.a. public) housing. Once written off as disgraceful haven to degenerate tenants, the demand for low income public housing far outstrips its supply.
RAD offers no encouragement for creating new social housing to meet that rise in demand. Instead, it generates funds to repair and furbish a portion of the existing stock of low income housing while sacrificing the remainder to the free market.
So what’s wrong with RAD? A great deal, according to some. Read more in the New York Daily News: RAD Is A Raw Deal For Public Housing: Well-Intentioned Program Actually Hikes Rents, Empowers Landlords And Fuels Evictions