….public houing is like all social policy and no innovation is possible in social policy of any ilk ever because social policy is social policy and as we all know, social policy is bad on its face.

I am extra crabby because I’m having biopsies done and they hurt like a mother, but yesterday I finally deactivated Twitter forever because once again, I got sucked into the same conversation I have been having since 1995 and I’m sick of it.

This conversation goes like so:

Me, somebody who teaches social policy and thinks about it all the time: I think we could use some social policy here to make people better off in this instance.

Some economist who thinks about social policy every 10 years: “BUT THAT’S INEFFICIENT BORK BORK BORK.”

All the smartest policy boys in the room: ” It didn’t work very well in this instance and as we know, that one time represents always and forever what social policy can be, whether it’s rent control or community land trusts or any policy that doesn’t begin and end with “get rich white people things.” BORK BORK BORK BORK bork MOAR SUPPLY LET’S TALK ABOUT SUPPLY YOU FORGOT TO CENTER YOUR EXISTENCE ON MY PET POLICY LISA WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?

And I try to say that no, we should learn from bad implementations in prior decades, and what we might do instead, but I can’t be heard over the BORK BORK BORK BORK and pants wetting that public policy isn’t entirely focused on giving things to rich white people.

And then I get tired and give up because firehosing social policy is practically an Olympic sport among US economists and economist wannabes.

Yesterday’s topic was me DARING to suggest that we might want to use some public housing in high amenity areas. WHAT LISA? PUT HIGH-RISE WAREHOUSING UP HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED OF ALL THE CHILDREN POISONED BY New York PUBLIC HOUSING? CABRINI GREEN? PRUITT IGOE? DO YOU HAVE NO SOUL? NO BRAIN?

Look, the US chooses to be bad at delivering public housing the same way it chooses to be bad at delivering public transit and public schools, except when it doesn’t choose to be bad at those things (i.e., well-to-do places.) So spare me the grand policy-tool-by-policy-tool insights on how certain policy tools “don’t work” because I’ve heard them all, and none of those are credible in a world when we’ve had 50+ years of tax cuts for rich people, one after another, with tax cuts being a policy that never gets the same firehosing or skeptical treatment as the mere mention of social policy, even though our tax cut commitments have been a) expensive and b) not particularly effective at anything besides further enriching a global class of billionaires who only think about *really feasible* policy things like terraforming Mars for their people and letting the rest of us burn, unlike the pipe dream of a carbon tax or having some publically owned housing units that don’t suck. (Unless you are Jeff Epstein who gets to use his bajillions to buy an orgy island and produce child porn. Thank God the gummint didn’t take too much of his precious private hoard and deprive the world of all that utility.)

So here’s the actual idea: in very expensive, high-amenity locations, the cities just purchase units in new buildings at cost for allowing the developer additional units, and the city retains the units. So you apply for 70 units, you sell 10 to the city, you get 80, and the city rents their units at affordable rates to people they want in residence there: teachers*, police, seniors, etc. (I have an argument for the seniors I’ll post up another day; it boils down to: expecting seniors to downsize if it means they leave their community means that a lot of them are not going to and are going to rattle around in houses too big for them.)

And no stupid nonsense about poor floors or poor doors or keeping those residents from the amenities of the building, FFS. This is a mixed-income building, period. And the developer is out of everything once the sale is done.

Do I think this is as cost-effective** as vouchers? Not even close,, but as useful as vouchers are, they don’t do everything, and there are two things that I’d like to think about with my idea: First, retaining people who really should live locally in markets where they are getting pushed out. Second, letting cities cash in on real estate the way everybody else does. Property taxes are the END OF THE WORLD, apparently, but cities could benefit from having a portfolio of holdings they can borrow against and sell the way everybody else does since ALL THE SMART POLICY BOYS tell me that land value capture is IMPOSSIBLE and now is not the time to discuss such infeasible things.

And frankly, I fail to see why disastrously underfunded voucher programs are A MIRACLE while disastrously underfunded public housing is A TERRIBLE SIN instead of being two sides of the same problem, which is the “disastrously underfunded” part. Vouchers and publically owned units, yes, house people, but with two really different secondary aspects: helping people stay in a place or helping people achieve mobility, both of which strike me as good ideas depending on the need. Yes, you can use vouchers to keep people in place, but I don’t think that’s by default easier or cheaper to do with vouchers, not when the full cash flow is factored in. And I actually dream about public policy that treats people who need help with housing, including black women and their little ones, like actual people who are welcome and necessary instead of a problem that we are trying to solve on the cheap and keep away from the rest of us.

I think that until we resolve that last sentence, any policy approach is going to be plagued by half-assed attempts at everything, from 10+ year waits on vouchers to public shelters that become death traps.

*Cities could also start paying teachers proper salaries instead of screwing them, either way works for me.

**Cost effective strikes me as a better term than efficiency to describe situations where public policy has a multi-faceted goal and captures the idea that we might be able to attain that goal at a lower cost using more cost-effective tools. Efficiency arguments tend to include the goals themselves in my experience.