Quote:
Originally Posted by mojiferous
Re-read any analysis of Gautreaux and what caused the collapse of post-war projects. "The problem was not at all economic isolation or lack of opportunity" is a take disconnected from every reasonable analysis of public housing.
Section 8 is not public housing. Section 42 is not public housing. These are programs to encourage private investment in low income housing and subsidize rent. They were designed to peel away investment from actual public housing and encourage private investment and better housing options for low income families, but in today's housing market they aren't very successful.
And putting an exclamation point on 3000 units in Queensbridge is the chef's kiss. The estimated need for public housing units in NYC is over 500,000 by 2030. The small number of units we're building today is not even close to what is needed.
And Wong - that failure was built into the projects. Even in Denver. Curtis Park, La Alma, Westridge, Sunnyside... all involved tearing down existing communities, placing a poorly-designed grouping of projects in the middle, and not encouraging any economic growth. Anyone who could afford to move left when they could and the economic decline accelerated.
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I don't think we disagree on too much and you make many good points, but it is disingenuous to say that public housing locations weren't proximate to opportunity. The jobs didn't leave the city centers en masse until the 1980's. The thing that left was white people to the suburbs which caused a whole sheeeeeeet storm of issues - many of which I assume you're basing some of your comments on (rightfully so). Much of the legacy public housing in big cities was quite literally surrounded by concentrations of blue collar jobs. Folks can debate why that was or wasn't sufficient opportunity for folks in public housing, but the jobs were there and proximate. Now if you're referring to how all of the housing authorities essentially segregated all of the public housing, then we're in perfect agreement as to the Gautreaux analysis.
It's also puzzling to hear you say LIHTC and Section 8 vouchers aren't successful. LIHTC, to your point, admittedly creates a drop in the supply ocean for how much affordable housing we need, but that's because the program isn't unlimited. Should Congress expand the LIHTC program, it could produce significant amounts of additional affordable housing. Section 8 vouchers reach at much greater scale than LIHTC housing. Some say it creates a cycle of housing dependency while others say it helps the most at risk with housing insecurity among us. To say either program isn't successful though, I can't understand why you'd think that. In lieu of zoning reform at a grand and seemingly unachievable scale, those are the tools we have to chip away at some scale for affordable housing creation at this time.
My point about Queensbridge is the concentration of those units in one tiny place. The market would never go and cluster 3,000 units of the same product on one closed off site. Interspersed on blocks in a neighborhood, yes. The government built a bad product at Queensbridge and many other places and almost universally across the country the outcomes were not positive and many of those housing developments are still in a pickle 60, 70, 80 years later.
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