[mullingitover]

Better yet, we can just copy Singapore or Vienna's public housing systems and actually have desirable public housing.

Arguably, the reason we don't already have this is because a large contingent of the voting public has been conditioned to believe that if the government does something well, it's communism, so the government should do anything well.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The reason we don't have it in the US is that many cities tried and failed to make it work in the 50s and 60s, to the point that we have a slang term "projects" memorializing the failure. Public housing can't be desirable unless it's safe, and it's not clear whether anyone knows how to run a crime-free public housing project in the US.

[mullingitover]

If you fail a test and the rest of the class doesn't, it implies that you were just unprepared for the problems the test is not in fact impossible.

Just because the US made some poor decisions (e.g obviously cramming 100% poor people into vertical concentration camps doesn't work, you need to have mixed incomes to have a healthy community) in its rollout of public housing many decades ago doesn't mean it's an unworkable idea. Singapore and Vienna are two examples demonstrating this point.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Sure! But the fact that it's possible in principle doesn't automatically prove that you should trust your local city planners when they say they're totally gonna get it right this time.

It's not like public housing has gone completely extinct in the US. Chicago is working on a couple of mixed-income projects, and if they succeed at creating safe units where people who have a choice might like to live, presumably that will boost the popularity of public housing. But given the historical track record, I'm not holding my breath.

Part of the problem, I should note, is that the "100% poor people" thing is very much a live issue. Many American advocates of public housing continue to argue that housing developments _should_ contain 100% poor people, arguing that mixed-income developments are gentrification and/or a handout to developers. In San Francisco, for example, both locals and government officials routinely insist (https://missionlocal.org/2022/06/plaza-east-residents-demand...) that mixed-income projects don't make sense because the market rate units could instead be given to a poor person.

[mullingitover]

> In San Francisco, for example

Haha, yeah let's exclude SF from any cities we're going to use as examples of good planners, unless we're talking about "How to slowly convert a city into a giant museum." 99% of the city's purist concern trolling is purely to prevent development, not about doing it equitably. Indeed, any city that's setting unrealistic development goals in the name of equity is likely doing it as an excuse to block development/solicit bribes/transfer wealth to existing property owners.

[seanmcdirmid]

We don’t have it because we aren’t a city state. In Singapore, you have a few choices, but they are all in Singapore. If the public housing system came to the USA without any local residency requirements, everyone would want to live in a few hot cities and the system would just fall apart. Not only that, once residency restrictions are in place, people will be stuck in places due to their public housing, they won’t be able to just move to Seattle for better job opportunities.

[__loam]

This is bizarre reasoning.

[seanmcdirmid]

It really isn’t. It’s simple game theory. People want to live in nice places. So they will all want their public housing in a nice place, but people generally like the same places, and that doesn’t really work for 380 million people. Someone will have to live in Mississippi, but then that also locks them down since we aren’t using market anymore to determine who gets to live where.

[mullingitover]

Public housing doesn't have to mean free housing for everyone, it can merely mean subsidies are in place to ensure that real estate market failures like the ones that exist nationwide today don't result in extortionate housing costs and growing slums.

[seanmcdirmid]

Subsidies without new supply mean we can just throw even more money at existing housing stocks. We could also go with the current system in place now where some people win the housing lottery and get an affordable place to live, but it doesn’t really scale.

[mullingitover]

When I say subsidies I'm talking about new construction that is funded by subsidies, not merely throwing more money into a supply-constrained market.

[rangestransform]

a large contingent of the voting public, the same contigent that support public housing and are against private housing, see enforcing nuisance and public order laws as (race|class)ist. until enforcing laws against disadvantaged minorities in their own homes and neighbourhoods becomes acceptable again, public housing with under-market tenants will continue to rapidly degrade into hovels like NYCHA.

[mullingitover]

I don't think anyone beyond extreme outliers is 'against private housing,' and disadvantaged minorities themselves want police protection in their own communities. What they don't want, and what nobody wants, is bad policing. So if you build mixed income public housing and do policing right, it just might work. We should try it.

[pc86]

It's less a belief that the government shouldn't do anything well, and more a belief that it can't.

[pchristensen]

There are plenty of motivated actors that are terrified that the government will do a good job, and so they work to sabotage it so it won't be effective competition.

[mullingitover]

Right, and I'd argue that the belief that it can't do things well frequently comes from the government being deliberately handicapped by those who believe it should't do things well. For example crippling (or outright trying to destroy) the US Postal Service out of the belief (or vested interest) that private delivery companies shouldn't have to compete against a publicly subsidized service.