| > Because governments don't want to be landlords. Plenty of governments do want to be landlords. If yours doesn't then perhaps you should consider electing a different one. > They don't want to have to orchestrate painting, drywall, gutters, electrical, plumbing, evictions, improvements, picking out tile. Why not? Governments ultimately want to serve there electorate. If there electorate wants decent quality affordable housing, then why would a government not want to provide that. Conceptually it's no different to the government running say a police force. > providing services that tenants grouped together with limited income might need like domestic abuse resolution and support, job training, food box distribution. Then don't group together tenants with limited income! You don't necessarily even need to group together government owned/run properties at all. There's no reason why a regular house on a regular street couldn't be government owned/run, mixed in with others that are privately owned. Why are you assuming that government properties or tenants of government properties would be any different to privately owned properties or tenants of private landlords? That's only the case when the government only provides housing as a last resort, but if the government took a wider role in housing many of those problem would go away as the tenants would just be the general population. |
This model was tried in the 70's by institutional affordable housing real estate developers. IMHO this is a great model. Refugees and middle class engineers living side by side sharing schools and pot lucks. It is now anathema to the affordable housing model. I don't know why, but where large affordable housing portfolios had 100s of such properties in their portfolio, they now have 5. Don't know why.