My goodness, where do I start?
Now, Devout Centrist seems to imply that these government-built, government-owned units will still charge rent, which I think is.... absolutely precious.
Tenants in public housing are still charged rent, albeit rent proportional to a percentage of the median income in the area.
The idea of the government being your landlord-- effectively the landlord for the entire state-- is practically feudal.
This is patently absurd and I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say here. Most public housing in the United States is administered by local and state housing authorities, with additional funding provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These authorities are usually municipal corporations with oversight organized by the city.
There is nothing even halfway feudal about this situation, unless you want to define any system that charges rent as feudalism. In which case, I have some bad news...
In a system of private property ownership, you're at least able to shop around for good deals and weigh the pros and cons.
Why can’t public housing coexist with private homeownership? Never did I suggest that we abolish the private market for rental properties. Unless you’re saying private property should be the only way to go. In which case, there’s no incentive for developers to build properties for the poor and working class.
With a "housing guarantee" however, you're probably stuck with whatever unit the bureaucratic panel assigns you. Applying for a housing change would probably require wading through a sizable amount of red tape, and even then it's a crap shoot whether or not you get the location/type of unit you actually want.
Mm, not quite. Our current system is needs based. Meaning that, you qualify for public housing if your income is below a certain threshold. This creates housing developments that are occupied by mostly poor people and working class families, concentrating poverty and crystalizing resistance to public housing.
By eliminating the needs based requirement and by constructing more public housing units, you are providing more options to working families, young people, and a variety of other renters. This is not assigning a person to a unit and forcing them to live there. You are giving them the option to live in affordable public housing or private rental properties.
And if DC's system comes into being, and people are actually forced to pay rent on their government housing (which, as far as I can tell, negates the whole "housing is a human right" mantra automatically-- what other "human rights" are you charged a fee for?),
Housing projects charge rent. Section 8 properties charge rent. Public housing in this country is subsidized, yes, but it is not free. Now, granted, there are housing vouchers but those are used to pay for private rental properties.
then tenants will still be incentivized to maintain a bad economic situation for themselves because their rent is based on their "ability to pay," a nebulous concept that is ultimately wholly arbitrary without the presence of a price system to establish concrete relationships in value.
If ‘ability to pay’ is defined as a proportion of a person’s income, where’s the disincentive to work? Say, for the sake of argument, you have a tenant who makes $1500 a month. Let’s say rent is capped at a third of their income for this particular property. They would pay $500 in rent per month.
Now let’s say you have a tenant who makes $3000 a month. Under this system, the maximum rent paid would be $1000 per month. Proportionally the same, but they have $2000 in remaining income after paying rent. There’s no incentive to ‘remain poor’ here.
Secondly, I provided a brief outline of an idea. As I said, I am not an expert on housing policy or benefit cliffs or whatever else. However, I think this is a worthy area for further research.
Of course, you might say "Hang on a minute, John. Nobody wants to live in government housing. People will still be incentivized to work their way out of these state-controlled slums."
What are you on about?? I just said public housing should be integrated into the local community. Not exclusively built in one neighborhood and left to rot!
The "townhouses and apartments" DC is describing sound pretty nice. Of course, you could let them deteriorate, or build them crappily, or not include certain essential features like kitchens and bathrooms-- all of these approaches would provide powerful incentives for people to move out.
Let me get this straight. You are suggesting that the government should seek to build public housing as poorly as possible so that the poor will have ‘incentive’ to move to better accommodations? Am I understanding this correctly?
But then of course, you violate the all-important "habitability" thresholds put in place by lefty pearl-clutchers who want to make sure that everyone has a "right" to an electric stove,
Averroes already broke down the issues with your boarding house idea, but surely providing electric stoves won’t bankrupt public and private housing developers.
a 42-inch TV, a two-car garage, and a condo in downtown San Francisco.
These are not, in fact, habitability requirements in downtown San Francisco.
If the quality of these government units is anywhere close to that of the rental properties on the market, even middle-income people will feel a powerful incentive to take advantage of their newly-declared "human right."
This is not a problem if you charge rent as a proportion of a person’s income. Although I should point out that middle income people in public housing is a net positive, as it reduces economic segregation and creates more competition in the broader rental market.
This isn't even mentioning what will happen to the landlords. As more and more tenants move to government-guaranteed units, property owners will see their checks disappear and their assets depreciate in value.
Again, these people still have to pay rent in public housing. Nowhere did I advocate for government guaranteed, free housing.
More competition will result in lower rents, yes, but isn’t that a net positive? The vast majority of people do not own rental properties.
The blindly vindictive crypto-Maoist coalition of the progressive left will surely see this as a massive success-- despite the fact that many landlords are simply middle-income elderly people who purchased property to rent so that they could pass some assets to their children.
Your own insecurities about college students aren’t my problem! This has quite literally nothing to do with my post.
But now that rents are plummeting, those investments will be worth next to nothing, and the growing government housing bureaucracy will purchase those depreciating units for pennies on the dollar.
This is quite an apocalyptic scenario. The amount of government investment in public housing needed to bankrupt the private rental market would be gargantuan.
Generations of accumulated familial wealth (aka the backbone of the middle class) will evaporate as the market responds to the sudden shortage of demand for housing. Families will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Elderly people will go bankrupt.
Most middle class families do not own or operate rental properties. It’s quite a small proportion of the total middle class.
And as financial problems compound for the middle class, you'll see even more applicants trying to get their hands on a government-owned unit (a commodity that, at this point, will surely be in short supply).
Since rental properties are in short supply, wouldn’t this lead to higher rents? Which would, in turn, increase rental income for property owners?
Of course, so long as the public is united in a common misery, the activist left will be happy. This is because progressive policies are just as much about enacting vengeance as they are about helping people. A senior citizen losing their life's savings in a housing market crash is ok, because old people are lame. Ok boomer! Lol! No one cares about your stories about the Dust Bowl; you were born in the 1920s and so you're probably a racist, rich old white person anyway. Now the capitalist oppressor class will be forced into squalor along with the rest of us!.
More gratuitous, self serving nonsense. I don’t think I need to dignify this with a response.
Rather than work to improve my own situation, I'd prefer to drag everyone else in the world down to my level. Only then can I feel comfortable telling myself that the fault lies in "the system," not in me
Well if your boarding house idea ever gets off the ground, we may all be dragged down to your level soon enough!
