[bearcobra]

It's really encouraging to see these kinds of success stories. I really hope people who are concerned about affordability start to view things from more of a "yes and" point of view. We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development

One of the NIMBY lobby's greatest wins was putting these options on the ends of a policy spectrum.

They're not. They're complementary. If it's cheaper to build, it's cheaper to build social housing. And if you have a vibrant construction sector, you can build more public housing faster.

[tptacek]

They're not always complementary. For instance, IZOs are a social housing intervention, and work against the goal of increasing supply.

[JumpCrisscross]

> IZOs

This [1]?

[1] https://dhcd.dc.gov/service/inclusionary-zoning-iz-affordabl...

[tptacek]

Sorry, yeah, IZO/IHO --- rules requiring some margin of AMI affordable units in new developments (which makes new development harder to pencil out, while giving warm fuzzies to locals who want to genuflect to affordability while still fencing out new neighbors).

[AnthonyMouse]

Probably the best thing you could do in terms of social housing construction would be to have the government put up some capital to buy land and build new housing on that land, then immediately sell it and use the proceeds to do it again and again with exponential growth because it's actually profitable.

But that's also what construction companies would be doing regardless except for the subsidy, at which point you might be better off doing something like exempting construction companies from property taxes for two years if they at least double the number of housing units on their land in that time.

[larsiusprime]

Could also just exempt the value of the buildings from taxation