Mother Jones, May 2, 2018: The case for building public housing that doesn’t suck—and lots of it
Housing has been one of the single greatest vehicles for building wealth in the United States. Yet the ranks of Americans who can’t find affordable housing are swelling.
Although the problem goes back decades, the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 and the recession that followed made it impossible to ignore how dysfunctional America’s housing landscape has become. Today, nearly half of renters pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing. After declining during the Obama years, the number of homeless people rose to over 550,000 in 2017. According to the Urban Institute, there is only enough “adequate, affordable and available” housing for 46 percent of the roughly 11.8 million extremely low-income households. Nevertheless, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson is touting legislation that would triple rents for some of the poorest public housing residents.
Much of the housing debate has been dominated by arguments over private development. But a new report from the People’s Policy Project makes the case for a massive experiment in affordable, government-sponsored “social housing” along the lines of housing built in countries like Finland and Sweden and cities like Vienna, Austria. The report proposes building 10 million units over 10 years at a cost of $300,000 per unit. That may sound steep, but the entire project could be covered by undoing the recent corporate tax cut signed by President Donald Trump. In addition to bringing affordable housing to millions of people, the report’s authors say their plan would address problems that are closely tied to housing, particularly economic inequality, poverty, and racial discrimination.
I spoke with Ryan Cooper, co-author of the People’s Policy Project report and a national correspondent for The Week, about this ambitious plan.
