Back in the sixties, when “affordable housing” – i.e. having places more or less fit for human habitation to put the poor in – became a thing, America (like the UK) went on a binge of building it. It was awful – Soviet-style high-rises, or endless blocks of cheap townhouses and low-rise buildings, with brutalist architecture and inhuman landscapes…
…and that was when they were brand new.
Which wasn’t for long.
The results are a roll call of failure: Cabrini Green; Marcy Homes; Riverside Plaza; “Council Flats”. Places where generations of inmates, bereft of any free-market desire to improve things, didn’t; buildings that fell apart around their inmates, because they were “affordable” housing in markets that were growing more expensive by the year; places that became synonymous with crime, addiction, mental illness, bottomless despair.
Ilhan Omar wants to bring all of that back:
The “Homes for All Act” will invest $800 billion over 10 years and invest an additional $200 billion in a Housing Trust Fund, according to a release from the congresswoman.
In all, the bill aims to create 8.5 million new units of public housing with the $800 billion and 3.5 million private, permanent affordable housing projects for low-income families with the trust fund money.
The act repeals the Faircloth Amendment, which will allow the federal government to invest in new public housing for the first time since the 1990s.
Omar’s office noted the bill will make public housing expenses mandatory in order to “prevent future investment bias.”
“Making this spending mandatory ensures that the funding needs of all current and future public housing are fully met and cannot be cut in the event of a budget crisis or a change in Administration,” reads the release. Omar compared the mandatory spending to that of Social Security and Medicare.
On the one hand, what was that definition of “insanity” again?
On the other hand? The Twin Cities media won’t cover this, either.
“Making this spending mandatory ensures that the funding needs of all current and future public housing are fully met and cannot be cut in the event of a budget crisis or a change in Administration.”
Tell me again why they call themselves Democrats?
Tell me again why they call themselves Democrats?
Because if they called themselves “Communists”, they wouldn’t get re-elected!
You have posted the definition of insanity, and therefore you have the only and complete explanation needed. What is missing is permission from our snowflake society to simply call this what it is.
One thing that’s worth noting is that Omar’s goal appears to be to increase the supply of public housing units by a factor of 10, and that at a….rather low cost estimate of about $85000 apiece. Suffice it to say that I’m guessing the actual cost would be closer to $5 trillion, not $1 trillion.
It is also worth noting that if she gets her way, the end result will be effectively to put a huge portion of those currently providing low income housing out of business, with disastrous results for poor neighborhoods. We are talking about repeating Detroit and Gary a hundred times over.
Lets build another Cedar Square West now renamed Riverside Plaza.
Renamed because it was a public housing hell hole.
This has no chance of enactment, much less being introduced in even a D controlled house committee (cuz its so beyond the pale retrograde lefty…). What it is, is bill writing as campaign messaging, bill writing as vision statement….
As vision statement, its astonishingly dumb. And I know that she’s dumb, and that she’s literally a communist, but still… You’d think a lefty being in support of brutalist, small s soviet public high rises is just a caricature the righties make up and project… Not with her.
Thing is, its a recipe for white flight and minority ghettos….
BB- I agree the costs will be at least 5x budget. Especially if they decide to fence it off like Cedar Riverside.
Maybe they could begin buy rebuilding some of the projects they tore down in the 80s and 90s.
I was reading last nite’s ONT at Ace’s place and came across a paragraph that reminded me of this post and comments.
I wish (and I’m not even kidding here) that we could transplant all of those Hongkongians here, they’d make excellent Americans, while at the same time replacing them with all of the wannabe Marxist trash we’re stuck with, so they could live out their dreams of life under a Communist regime. Win/win.
“White flight and minority ghettos.”
Depends where you build the low income housing, JK. The old model was to build low income housing on cheap land in inner cities, next to public transportation. That created densely populated areas of poverty and crime but left other neighborhoods alone.
The Obama administration had several ideas to desegregate poverty, spread it out to other neighborhoods and towns.
One idea was to pay higher Section 8 in certain towns so poor minorities could afford to live in nice townhouses in places like, say, Woodbury. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/trump-hud/538386/
Of course, individual private landlords aren’t required to accept Section 8, so the Obama administration planned to use taxpayer dollars to build low income housing projects in places like, say, Woodbury.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/11/obama-set-force-affordable-housing-affluent-commun/
Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to head HUD, stopped all that.
Obama saw the world through race-tinted glasses. Not enough Black people living in Woodbury? Build projects and dump them there. But Woodbury isn’t about keeping out Blacks, it’s about keeping out trash of all races. Blacks can live anywhere they can afford, and being able to afford it means being an educated, employed, responsible citizen just like everybody else in the neighborhood, regardless of color.
Putting Ben Carson in charge of HUD was a stroke of genius. America dodged a bullet. One more thing to be grateful to Trump for.
Of course, individual private landlords aren’t required to accept Section 8.
Yet.
Joe picked up on most of what I was going to say, but we would be remiss not to observe that we have plenty of evidence of what happens when you spread thuggery around; civilized people leave.
When you keep the criminal element restricted to preying on themselves, it’s a controllable situation. Yeah sure, the fire department won’t go in, but hey, so what? Let the animals out of the reservation, and you get Detroit, Oakland, Kansas City KS & etc. Chicago has kept it’s head above water through sheer size, but the island of civilization is shrinking. Soon it will be downtown and the Gold Coast, with desolation and ruin in between.