The biggest thing is to not concentrate them in one area, creating a "slum". Low-income housing needs to be spread out so that every city has a share of it. In California, Newsom is passing laws that are bypassing local city zoning restrictions. This is what needs to happen on a national level, or else you'll just get NIMBYs pushing everything out to the cities least capable of supporting all the low-income residents.

As a Singaporean, the government does much more than what you described for public housing. The government builds a cohesive neighbourhood with commercial malls, schools, public transport stops / stations, parks, etc integrated together. This makes sure people are able to live there, rather than being stuck in some “Low income area” devoid of amenities like the USA. Also the sheer scale of the public housing program cannot be matched, like you said the USA has only 1 million public housing units total, while 80+% of the houses in Singapore are public housing.

The problem is zoning laws. The only way to even be able to build enough housing is to abolish most of the zoning code. Zoning laws have created a severe housing shortage and have crippled the American economy (see Moretti for reference).

In the Netherlands, town and suburban houses are most often row houses, 3 stories high. Now they are building a lot of social housing (our version of public housing) in towns but they keep the apartment blocks up to 3 floors high, so they fit in with the town feeling and look.

I feel like this missed the important "local option" for social housing. Seattle's Initiative 135, which will be on the ballot in November, creates a public developer, owned by the city, which will build public housing for everyone under 120% area median income (creating great mixed income developments for individuals, couples, and families)

My small city has a housing authority for poor people who are disabled or elderly, but not for families. Families usually are left to rely on the vouchers to get pay for rentals. The Housing Authority buildings are universally fairly well maintained, and unlike other "low income housing" buildings, the safety and accessibility features (smoke detectors and elevators) are always functional. This leads me to believe housing projects didn't suck because of poor people but because of bureaucratic mismanagement. Also if crime and drugs were a problem, replacing tall towers with midrises would make these buildings easier to manage and police.

For a country so obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism, it's pretty bizzarre how many restrictions there are when it comes to things that you can build in cities. On a macro scale(R1 zoning) to micro(regulating what the front of your yard has to look like).

My girlfriend lives in public housing in Berlin and actually everyone envy her for her apartment. Rent is incredibly cheap, it’s located in a hip area right in the city center and everything is maintained well. Her dad also found a social housing apartment and it’s very new with a big balcony, quiet neighborhood and good public transportation access. And that’s nothing compared to Vienna‘s quality public housing. This concept works, I hope the US could step away from their fear of „socialism“ and actually implement good policies that make people‘s life objectively better.

What about mixed-use public housing? Basically, it would be retail-commercial on the ground floor, maybe some office space on the floor above, and then three or four stories of public housing units above that. - Businesses that lease the building would share some of the maintenance cost, and they would have a vested interest in keeping the building in good working order to keep their customers. - It would also ensure nearby and readily accessible commercial services for the residents, and jobs available on the ground floor would be open to them if they needed one. - Keeping the housing above ground floor might also decrease the likelihood of break-ins, which in turn would keep the crime rate lower. I realize this would require changing zoning laws, but that aside, I'd like to hear what other people think of this idea.

@City Beautiful you should talk about how social housing works in Vienna, Austria. About half the city lives in social housing that is integrated into neighborhoods with mixed incomes, this practice reduces the likelihood of slums since it avoids concentrated poverty

One of the major reasons that public housing is difficult in the US is because a lot of the regulations and systems meant to "help" people are intentionally underfunded and made inconvenient to access because politicians are under the false impression that if they make support structures good, then people will just rely on them. It's a very old fashioned and damaging perspective.

Good public housing should be mixed in with private housing, and near public transport. Proximity to public transport is one of the biggest factors in an individual's ability to escape poverty, and keeping public and private, particularly middle and upper income private, housing will help ensure services and infrastructure is good quality and well maintained. The goal of public housing should be to put people in a position that they would not need public housing in the future.

Just one word: Vienna. This city is one of the if not THE most liveable cities in the world. With almost half of the residential buildings owned by either the city itself or housing cooperatives, low social segregation and a high standard of living. If you or anyone in the world want to have a successfull example of how things can be done - there it is.

I live in Connecticut and the NIMBYs are terrible. In Westport, for example, the same people who have "All are welcome here," signs in the front yards showed up in droves to oppose a developer trying to build a new apartment building with SOME affordable units. What we really need is a radical change in zoning laws creating far more dense housing, and we need to restrict the amount of luxury apartments. It is especially bad in places like NYC where tons of luxury apartments sit unoccupied because they are nothing more than a money laundering scheme.

The place to start is losing the "low income" stigma. *Everybody* needs somewhere to live, regardless of their income. When I moved in 2019 I looked closely at the real estate market here in Kamloops and had a first chat with my bank about a mortgage. Vancouver was out of the question, even for somebody who makes six figures. Kamloops was doable. In the meantime prices have gone through the roof and I'm totally priced out of the market. I live in a (market) rental building instead.

I'm generally in the build housing co-ops camp which is generally ignored. The problem I have with public housing is what happens when you have someone running the system that doesn't believe in the thing they are running? With co-ops, they do need funding from the government, but after they are established, can effectively self financing. Why co-ops would be better is that they would be owned by the occupiers unlike public housing which is owned by a probably disinterested county. Which would give the people there a reason to not ruin the place. Co-ops can already have income limits and generally set the rent low enough to just break even. This is the opposite mentality of a normal landlord which is high rents, low quality housing. A co-op are high quality low cost. We already have a legal framework for this, its called limited equity co-ops where share value is limited to grow at a set formula. So it can be set at cost and capped at some function of inflation plus a set percent. This will mostly help lower middle income people and could help people with lower income with grants or existing rent aid programs.

Over here in Germany (or more specifically in Berlin) a big part housing is public through state owned companies. The buildings are usually in relatively good shape and rents are relatively low.

The question isn't whether public housing is good, it's whether the US is willing to commit to doing it right like other countries have. And sadly I think the answer is a resounding no.

Watching this from Eastern Europe, which is known for concrete, grey blocks I have to admit that those units at 5:47 look freaking horrific. I've seem my share of "projects" and while they might not be terrific they have some greenery in between, so when maintained properly can be liveable. No wonder those American blocks turned into slums if they're slabs of concrete packed back to back...

The United States has a geographical advantage in that we aren't really lacking for space like many other places that need these high rises - we just use it terribly inefficiently and are deluding ourselves for as long as possible before doing what must be done. In my area for instance, I've seen mid-rises just casually going up, corporate businesses at the floor level (grocery store with parking underground) and housing for hundreds of people. Across the street, mid-rise office buildings for other businesses. This area used to be just straight up strip malls. I've noticed very little increased congestion as people can merely walk to the store or dentist nearby. Medium density is the answer and we can just spread it out and not really even notice the difference. The solutions are likely to be found locally and federal funding should probably not go to these big 'government' projects and just to subsidize private/pubic partnerships.

America has plenty of housing for low-income people. We call it prison, and it makes contractors billions every year at taxpayer's expense.

Connecticut General Statute 8-30g gives building developers the ability to bypass local zoning for the purposes to meeting affordable housing requirements. It's not public housing by any stretch, but it has had me building mixed use apartment complexes near transit stations for the last 5 years and shows no signs of slowing down.

Walkable public housing with actual stores,libraries and not just liquor stores 🤯

Greatly increasing the standard Federal tax deduction means that a couple who own their home and make $70,000 usually do not benefit from deducting mortgage interest. People with much higher cost homes do benefit from deducting mortgage interest and people at the highest end of the earned income Spectrum benefit from many other avenues of deductions to taxable income.

I've been binge-watching a ton of these urbanist channels over the past few months, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like there's just no escaping the self-serving dynamics of American capitalism and politics. Even so-called urbanists who proclaim love for their cities for many years will often change their tune when problems around poverty, crime, mixed ethnicities and cultures, higher taxes, etc., pop up in their neighborhoods, and they flee to the suburbs in waves. Any solution that isn't to the satisfaction of the upper and middle classes is just never going to go far. I think transit is the key to getting things like public housing off the ground again, because there are ways to sell the upper classes on the benefits of transit without making it feel like there's a homeless person camping in their back yard. Then we can build up affordable communities along transit corridors so that they remain integrated with existing communities and aren't so locked into poverty.

Vienna has one of the best social housing policies in my opinion and i think the U.S. government could replicate it fairly easily. 1. Social buildings are interspersed instead of concentrated in one location. 2. The buildings look normal instead of like ugly towers so they don't stand out. 3. Everyone can apply for social housing, this removes the stigma of being a "poor people house" because even middle-class families, students, elderly etc. can get to live there. 4. Social housing must be rented for a regulated lowest possible price. 5. In case the government makes profits from renting social housing it is required to use that money to build more social housing, which not only saves tax money because the social housing can pay for itself over time, but also makes sure new social housing is build constantly. 6. The city of Vienna owns around ~25% of all housing in the city, this keeps private developers in check because they can't buy up all the housing and artificially increase prices. I probably forgot a few things but Vienna shows social housing can be incredibly successful if done right.

Another thing that can help is Social Housing. Vienna apparently has it, where the gov't rents the units to both low and middle income tenants, both paying different rents. The idea is interesting as it means the medium income renters are subsizing the lower income ones. And since you have middle income ppl living there, there is no "concentration of poverty" problem. The lower income ppl can piggy back off of the political power the middle income ppl have to make sure the area is kept invested.

I don't think that LOW income towers work, I think that they will always fail. You are concentrating way too many low income residents in one location and you also disconnect the residents from the neighborhood. Upzoning areas is much better without any of the massive downsides of towers, you still increase the amount of housing available, but instead of concentrating all the low income residents in one location you spread them out which reduces the negative impact that they can have. (For example not having enough money to fix their houses so their houses slowly deteriorate.)

It's so interesting how all the problems of the last 100 years of city planning compound one another. The housing crisis is exacerbated by poor city planning and design (that is, privileging suburbs and car development over compact city spaces that folks can live in). Poor city planning is exacerbated by elite capture and NIMBYism, which itself is a byproduct of suburbanization and the way that homeownership is intimately tied to wealth building. All of it is a function of how bad capitalism is at addressing concrete needs. The solution to the housing crisis isn't just Soviet style public housing, it's fixing everything. Hell, democratic political reform is necessary to make any of this happen.

As always, there's no magic bullet. But I'd love to see quality public housing in our cities. Here in the Washington D.C. area, there's a desperate need & there's plenty of land open to it. The above-ground Metro station areas would be great places to develop into mixed use, mixed income structures, instead of giant parking lots. I know there's been some talk lately about doing something like that, but knowing this area, it'll be nothing but tiny, one-bedroom places that start at $700,000 and still come with two parking spaces, even though they're built above Metro stations/transit hubs.

1. Let the free market do as much as it can. Eliminate minimum parking requirements, restrictive zoning, height restrictions, red tape, etc etc. 2. Remove all policies that favor and subsidize house ownership over condo ownership. Housing is housing. 3. Universal housing allowance in the form of tax credits. Basically, a subsidy for the low income people and a tax cut to everybody else. Potentially additional assistance to a few. 4. Public housing if supply is still too low. Public housing in the model of Vienna and Singapore. Mixed income, meeting diverse needs, well maintained.

How about starting with relaxing zoning? More often than not developers want to build but can't. The next step would be to implement Georgism (taxation of land instead of real estate) to incentivize using land instead of holding on to it.

Helping people stay poor is what we are #1 at in the World!

In NYC, there are 40k apartments sitting empty because they are unlivable, and yet because they sit under rent restrictions, there's no financial incentive for the landlords to renovate, or investors to purchase and rehabilitate. In this case, I believe the public sector is failing the public. If you release those 40k apartments to the private sector to rent at market rate, that's 40000 apartments that can drive the price of rent down. You could even allow a one-time market rate adjustment followed by rent stabilization (which NYC loves to do but does not manage effectively), but that's still 40 thousand household opportunities that would effectively cool the demand and drive prices down, even if every single apartment was redone to the t's. the NYCHA is the biggest landlord in the city and it is consistently rated as the worst. in most big cities, the government just does not know how to handle being a landlord, governments and bureaucracy move way too slow for something such as the housing market.

Thank you a lot for another informative and useful video about urban planning. Please make a video about infill projects too.

Because it is too means tested… My idea is that even executives could apply for public housing as long as they don’t have any other places to live. It could be smaller but that’s it.

What if we build the high rise building with a mixed income population, 30% in the lowest segment, 40% for middle class, and 30% the upper floors luxurious apartments?

Blocks and blocks of purely residential public housing just creates concentrated poverty and deserted wastelands with no commercial aspect and often sketchy streets at off-peak foot traffic times of day; instead, why not build mixed use buildings with light commercial at the base, and mixed residential with some low and some middle income targets? This would create some additional jobs to the residents, keep the streets feeling like a community rather than a wasteland, would diversify the neighbourhood crowd and feel to something more natural, and importantly for government funded housing, the commercial at street level would partially fund the building's upkeep.

cities could just develop their land themselves with midrise buildings with loads of apartments and some retail space for rent. intentionally set the rates a bit below market rate, keeping people from falling through the crack in the first place while expanding supply enough to stabilize the private market back to something almost resembling sanity. even keep the rents which would be more income than just the taxes on that land in private hands

In Europe there are many good examples for public housing. For example Vienna has a lot of public housing mixed into the city. Other cities in Europe are similar and at the moment we are building a lot of public housing because the demand is so high and prices in the cities are skyrocketing.

This system has to be combined with social security safety net systems in general, including health insurance etc. Public housing does not necessarily mean "dirt poor", at least here in Europe it does not. Thousands of families live in city-owned apartments which are very much "middle class", or at least both have jobs and some social benefits to it, and rent is regulated. The ONLY situation when a ghetto like situation occurs in my country is when PRIVATE owners of basically boarding houses offer their studios to families of four and cash on subsidies from the city (i.e. they have certain rent and no debtors).

Concentration of poverty is a serious issue with this concept and that needs to be addressed. creating mixed housing mandates surrounding the building of new large scale developments forces real-estate developers (who almost always get state money and tax exemptions to develop) to take care of some of the problem, and building codes could enforce that low/No income apartments have to be intermixed with units and cant be more than 10% of all units in the building. More over, creating housing priority rules for the affordable units that always put families with children, elderly and disabled first in line (or only in line) would help prevent the social problems from making their way into housing units. That being said, i would agree that perhaps many Americans still have a bad taste for the HUD housing around their cities and towns, and it may not be as deserving as it once was....but not for great reasons either. Since the disparagement of poor communities of color, large amounts of unmarried men have ended up in legal troubles. this puts them in jail and when they get out, they are unable to qualify for public housing even if they have kids and their significant other wants to take them back in. The long term effect means that, HUD units are primarily occupied by families with children (mostly women led families), the disabled, and the elderly. As a result, current HUD communities are still concentrated and low quality of living, but they tend not to be the center of community issues. The low income residential areas are where things get rough and dangerous, maintenance goes down and abandoned Houses and other buildings create decomposing communities. These are the rough neighborhoods that would make anyone unaccustomed to the deterioration and chaos, feel very uncomfortable if they found themselves lost in the area. If your city has a Crime map, you can almost always locate exactly where these run down residential areas are and its usually dead smack central neighborhood between two main roads with lateral streets connecting and away from the public housing that sits adjacent along the edge of the same neighborhood. This has a potential upside. Increment development minded people can help make public housing better and use those areas as platforms for urban renewal since they have lower crime. I've seen examples in my own neighborhood, and the end result is that a mixed income neighborhood forms as nicer community amenities make the low priced residential homes appealing to the young and hip. over time, the increasing value of homes makes large developers interested and the open land from torn down homes leaves space for occasional mid to high income lofts. the final product is a community with high/mid/low housing all in close proximity and a safer more equitable and diverse community forms.

It's wild that US public housing is so drastically different than even public housing up here in Canada. You hear about some individual buildings with bad reputations, but in general public housing's reputation isn't that bad, not nearly as bad as SRO NOAH units on the private sector for example.

in Oakland, CA there's a bunch of 4 story 'low income' housing projects that had to be built practically incognito else they would "accidentally burn down"

A problem not mentioned about federal vouchers (section 8) from the landlord's perspective is the headache that comes with it. I've had personal experience working for property managers that participate in section 8 and their units are routinely neglected, destroyed, and abandoned without notice by the tenant. They end up losing money from the loss of rent and the cost of rehab. It only takes a few bad experiences like this to scare landlords away from the voucher program as a whole.

Public housing isn't necessary if we just get rid of zoning laws

The government should be a "supplier of last resort" to plan, build, and sell or lease housing at cost to the general public if a shortage exists.

Germany has interesting models too. The gov't leaves construction and renting out to private investors. Building permits on high-value land (city; very very seldomly suburbs) are only given out if x% of the units to be erected are specifically only offered to public housing use. x=30 is targeted. It leads to a deconcentration of poverty that 1970s highrises have a bad reputation for. If the building owner cuts maintenance short, even the wealthier residents may be affected - and they would figuratively revolt if that were to happen. The other element is that buildings are generally less than 6 stories *because* of the bad reputation of the high-rises.

Public housing or no public housing. Tower blocks and condominiums are designed like hotels, they are poorly designed for families and discourages meeting neighbors and building that community. Compared to Asian condos, North American condos makes you hate condos.

Here in France we have 4.5 million social houses or apartments with 10 million people living in it. Plus, it is admitted that way more is needed and there are public policies being forcing cities to build more of them.

Thank you for the video.

There is a LOT going on in Turkey that's wrong at the moment, but when I visited years ago I was impressed with their public housing. At the time the government was building high rises and you could apply to buy a condo in them. You'd get a special 30 year lease at 0% interest (this is now pegged to inflation) and once you paid it off the condo was yours. I'd love to see something like that available here, like a special FHA loan where you don't need a down payment to buy in a mid-rise condo building, and where the HOA could be regulated but ultimately controlled by the homeowners. You could even have a mix of premium and affordable units so there's less cost to the taxpayer! Ah, dreams.

Land Value Tax only (Georgism) sounds like it would also work. It steers the market towards using land to its best economic value.

You can't just "allocate" more dollars into something that produces lesser returns.

To add some background information for the clip at 3:07. That’s in Oklahoma City and was caused by a truck driver who ignored the height restriction and drove right through the bridge. The city, itself, acted quickly and got the bridge repaired fast.

As someone moving from a 1000 a month shack to a slightly bigger 1600 a month apartment with AC... I just want to be able to afford to live. We only qualified for the new apartment because my roommate has 3 official jobs and I have great references and we applied RIGHT BEFORE my credit score tanked because I had to spend all my money on deposits and fees missed some credit card payments... (We literally couldn't stay in our previous place any more. The wiring was poorly done and have the place didn't have power at all and we couldn't cook or turn on certain lights without shorting out the place. All other places in our city, Houston, were even more expensive and required even higher income (despite the fact that me and my roommate make the AVERAGE for our city) for 2 beds and 1 bath not even near downtown, like we'd want to live near it anyway)...

Projects like Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe got lots of headlines but were NOT representative of public housing as a whole. I have known friends who lived in public housing projects in Seattle which ARE NOT high-rise slums. When I lived in Oakland, some of the BEST housing in West Oakland (obviously the best-maintained) was public housing.

F nimbys. Rezone single family housing. The market will solve the rest

The issue in nyc is every multi family development has to have a certain number of “affordable units”. These “affordable units” still cost like $2,500 for a one bedroom. Too many loopholes in the affordable housing scheme

Love these videos, would love to also learn about rural areas, can we have some Rural America side episodes. I want to know about unincorporated towns, how these places function.

In Hong Kong, 30% of housing are public housing, but very unfortunately we still don't have enough of those (waiting time for that is ~5 years in average and more extreme case is that you need to wait 10+ years). Really the poorest people are eligible, however there are other program to fill the gap between public housing and private market, say selling the flats by government at discounted rates, similar to those in Singapore's HDB flat

I feel like public housing (both building new and managing what we have) is just another thing that could be funded if only the rich paid their fair share of taxes. As for getting the land for that housing, it's become clear that a lot of office type work can be done from home, so there don't need to be office complexes for that, and such buildings could be repurposed for housing. When it comes to NIMBYs, they don't want this housing near them not only because they just simply don't want it there, but they don't want to be reminded of the systemic issues that lead to the necessity of public housing and prefer to have those issues be out of sight and therefore out of mind.

I really like your videos!! Greetings from Argentina!

So here a re a few cents. Public housing investment and management needs to take place on a local level like municipal. Federal management never works in these cases, since these entities are too remote to know local demand and needs. They can however contribute to financing. Selling off units to people that are already considered poor might only contribute to their own debt spiral, so rent controlled leasing would work much better. Combining this with redeveloping city centers to be more liveable might also be a good idea, since the will probably be less resistance by residential NIMBYs from the suburbs.

"government shouldn't be in the business of X" is a fancy way of saying "X is not a right". This applies to food, education, housing, health care, etc.

Can They at least look nice... please

One time i changed a flat tire on my car... but i didnt put the lug nuts on tight enough and they all came off. Therefore changing flat tires is a failed policy that is always doomed to fail. I just drive around on flats all the time now. I am very intelligent and forward thinking.

Great video.

I think a big part of the reason why public housing is so unpopular is that the public housing that was built from the 50s to the 70s were for the most hideous eyesores. Had the governments of that time built public housing that was aesthetically pleasing and human-scaled (townhouses up to five story apartment buildings), public housing would probably have a better reputation in the U.S. and would thus be more commonplace.

This is extra painful as a Canadian, and more specifically as a resident of Vancouver Island. We have no supply…it’s so squeezed that housing is doubling in cost every two years. It can’t keep going like this. All the home owners here think they are investment geniuses just for being born sooner and buying homes. They expect it to appreciate and would rage if it did not. Yet in Calgary where I was born, housing values are largely flat over the last ten years because housing is just shelter, not your main investment vehicle/commodity.

Great video

Although use has issues (hard to get a mortgage, the program is optional, recent shortgages/increases in the market), Section 8 has something called the homeownership program. It is a really great program for people with Section 8 Rental

Here in São Paulo we have a PPP, (Public Private Partnership), wich is an ideia were a conpany cunstruct the house and, because of that, has the right to administrat the the stores in the ground floor.

I wish more rich people understood that the anti-poor policies they support are what ends up driving America further into the ground.

One giant Government "solution" is never the answer. Because unless we are willing to go whole hog, it will just never be enough. Private developers and individuals are the only way you're going to get the necessary scale. Unfortunately Governments at all levels have made it too difficult to build at scale, and have disincentivised the expansion that would be needed. Many of the regulations on the books are probably reasonable on their own, but stack on top of each other, it just because unfeasible. Until we can fix the incentive structure and allow the private sector might to fill out, no amount of money thrown in the pit will make a dent.

Most rental housing is public, or as we call it, social rentals. In my hometown Groningen, the Netherlands, every new housing project has to build a minimum of social rentals to make sure neighborhoods are socially mixed.

Throughout the video I had trouble with volume changes, could you normalise volume? Other than that, everything is great.

Why is this unlisted?

"we can't spare the $70 billion needed to fix what exists" ... meanwhile "here you got Pentagon, $840 billion!"

My country (Australia) has lots of 50yrs plus semi retired and retired communities, which deliberately sells their housing units for below market value, if they were to sell in any area but a retirement village. My thought is that this concept could be used for first home buyers, to give people a foot in the door of the property market and allow communities of young families to develop. They don't need to be the two or three bedroom free standing homes that many retirement villages are. They can even be apartment buildings with parks, shops, public transport and schools located as close to them as possible.

There is nothing wrong with the public housing structure. The problem is the people’s behavior living in them.

Get rid of single family zoning too

Good stuff y’all

i love that you have a traintrackr in the background

Renters are naturally negligent. Even in the luxury housing market, there are plenty of renters who neglect basic maintenance like changing a filter out of an AC unit.

The solution is to build new housing which some agency runs. Basically make a portion for vetted low income people who have stable jobs, raising kids, perhaps people like teachers etc. The others should be rented out at market rate. Use the profits to subsidize the lower earning ones. That creates a mixed neighborhood. Make them medium density. People will tolerate a % of the people being from more humble backgrounds. Allow all trouble makers to be ejected. Have a time limit for the low income families so they have incentive to move up and out and others get a shot.

Unfortunately, this is one those areas with no easy solution. NIMBYism aside, housing is very expensive to build, so the cost of enough public housing to make more than a tiny dent in the long waiting lists would be gargantuan to the taxpayers. On top of that, the construction of public housing would consume land and building materials, driving up the cost of housing for everyone else, increasing the number of people that need public housing to begin with. Then, there's the problem of dealing with bad tenants who break rules and pose a safety risk to those around them. A profit-motivated landlord has a strong economic incentive to get rid of them as quickly as possible (it increases the value of the rest of the units, and is necessary to attract tenants with non-poverty-level incomes who have other options). A government agency, on the other hand, has no such incentive and, if anything, would likely be encumbered with bureaucratic red tape that would make removal of problem tenants next to impossible. And, of course, once someone finally does secure a spot in public housing, they can never move without going back to market housing and tripling their rent, so residents often get forced into long commutes, or even turning down better-paying job offers in other cities. The section 8 avoids some of these problems, but it has its own drawbacks. For one, it doesn't actually increase the housing supply, so offering money to a few tenants to outbid others for whatever housing stock exists simply pushes someone else into the "needing government assistance" category, and isn't actually solving any problems. Again, this is a problem without easy solutions. But, my instinct is to remove unnecessary red tape that makes investing in the low end of the housing market unprofitable for the private sector. Zoning laws which attempt to mandate "middle class standards" for every dwelling unit should be eliminated. It should be legal to build units without parking, or units which are only 300 square feet and share a kitchen and/or bathroom with a neighbor. Of course, there are certain categories of people for whom this wouldn't help. People with no income to pay any sort of rent would continue to be locked out, as would people with criminal records for whom housing them in a communal environment would be too risky for others living in the same building. But, it's at least a start.

0:53 Hey that's my town of Toa Payoh in Singapore! :D

And here's the numbers from a more reasonable country: 22% public housing, 21% rented, 7% Cooperatives and 49% owned. Welcome to Denmark. This includes everything, normal houses, apartments, rooms, weird shit and so. Also, Public Housing are usually non-profit associations, any profits are either saved up for renovations and improvements or outright used for improvements.

The "free market" has failed us on housing as it has failed us in every other sector. Every major U.S. city has a housing shortage and when altruistic developers deign to build, they always opt for luxury apartments, unless they are legally required to include a few affordable housing units. I've lived in countries with robust, liveable, thoughtfully-designed public housing and the same could happen in the U.S. if we rearranged our budgetary priorities.

The fact that single family detached house only zone exist in the first place is proof that it exists for a reason that is either currently popular or no longer popular, even in f the reason was always bad. My best guess is that people don’t want to share a wall with their neighbors. Those think that sharing a wall with your neighbors means living inside an apartment building, even if the apartment building has exactly 2 different units, and even if neither of them are stacked above or below each other. However, when I was 10 years old, I lived inside a single family attached house. That means back then, I shared exactly 1 wall with my next door neighbor, even though my home was a 1-unit building. I know this because there was never an HOA, and the roof of my childhood home is not shared with the other home.

maybe housing shouldn't be treated as a for-profit commodity...shocking, I know

NIMBYism may be the single biggest root problem in the US.

I think we need to be far more flexible in what we provide as public housing. For example, I would like to see publicly opperated dorms with shared kitchens (and potentially washrooms) to provide very low cost rooms offered at a few hundred dollars a month. These would disproportionately be used by students, but it would open up current rentals they occupy. Fannie Mae directly fund construction, and provide loans for coops. Although, tbh, you could solve the majority of the issue with upzoning and shifting taxes off of building value and on to land value to push time property costs and increase return on capital.

As someone who lives in NYC's public housing, I believe we need new affordable housing but in a way its livable and not in dire need of repairs such as the ones here, I am quite surprised to hear you've lived in public housing too, I wish i can know more about your experience living as a public housing resident.

I am a 50 yr. old male from the northern suburbs of Chicago, I remember the projects well from the news as well as driving past the Robert Taylor homes. They mainly housed black residents. You can't force everyone to live together in the same area. That is why people think that Chicago today feels segregated. Mixed income may work with mixed results.

If they want to build public housing, make sure it has: - Local shops, maybe 1st floor - Transportation connection - public services like education, fire, etc. - parks, greens and spaces

0:28 "If the private market can't provide affordable housing, then the government needs to step in." Bah. The problem is zoning, not the free market. There's a housing crisis because current housing supply is not enough to house everyone. If we build more medium-to-high density housing, then we might be able to have more housing and cool down prices to affordable levels, but we can't do that when so goddamn much of our cities is zoned for single-family residential only. You can't blame private developers/the market when they literally are not allowed to build anything else in the vast majority of our cities' land. Unfortunately, we're so invested in the single-family house now that it's difficult to re-zone and re-develop because our cities are so reliant on car-centric sprawly infrastructure and NIMBYs shit their diapers whenever their area gets re-zoned.

The government taking land is never going to work but I would love to see the vacant buildings and lots that stay empty for years and years used for something. Maybe they could be "encouraged" to lease the land to the city to develop some Singapore style leasehold condos and rental units. At least the new units would be located in the heart of existing neighborhoods instead of planted out near the highway somewhere.

They need to change their promotion strategy. Instead of saying low-income housing, it should be said that this is middle-class housing. I think it would be more acceptable for NIMBY. Also, I think it's a bad idea to concentrate a lot of people with low incomes in one place, it creates bad neighborhood and high crime. Instead, low-income people should be evenly distributed throughout the city.