[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.