Is there any reason you couldn't have mixed income public housing, where the top tier is market-priced?

Isn't that already a thing in some places?

Does anyone do it on a sufficient scale? I know here there's a 3-5 year waitlist for housing vouchers.

I don't know. I don't even know if they are still doing it, but I'm pretty sure it was a thing back in the 90s.

Not in the US. Plenty of other countries, though. OECD data, and I think Singapore and Hong Kong would be sky-high on this metric.

Reading about the Grenfell Tower disaster was oddly inspiring for me here in the US. All the coverage seemed to have a basic premise that the local government has an obligation to provide housing for people and it's the specific people in this local government who are to blame for negligence, and they need to do better. If that happened here everyone they could find to give quotes about it would say "Well, once again we see that public housing is inherently a bad idea. Without the magic of the free market nobody has an incentive to make it anything other than a deathtrap. Once again bleeding-heart liberal policies are backfiring."

I strongly recommend the book, "Public Housing that Worked," by Nicholas Dagen Bloom. A comprehensive history of NYC public housing, it does an outstanding job of showing how NYC weathered challenges that destroyed public housing in other cities. It will provide a great illustration of challenges faced over time (and how those challenges themselves change in different time periods) and ways that public housing may still be the cornerstone of a humane property-owning democracy.

There was a lot wrong with the coverage of Grenfell, see this exhausting/exhaustive article

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n11/andrew-ohagan/the-tower

which contains its own pointless lie: Andrew O'Hagan could not have visited the elderly Norman Hardy, former captain of HMS Forfar, and heard the disgraceful truth about how his (O'Hagan's) grandfather behaved when the Forfar was sunk, because Hardy went down with his ship.

If that happened here everyone they could find to give quotes about it would say "Well, once again we see that public housing is inherently a bad idea. Without the magic of the free market nobody has an incentive to make it anything other than a deathtrap. Once again bleeding-heart liberal policies are backfiring.

That was basically McMegan's take on Grenfell, with bonus "don't regulate fire safety".

That was basically McMegan's take on Grenfell, with bonus "don't regulate fire safety"

Presumably because it will prevent innovation and not give people the choice of trading off rent against the risk of being burnt to a crisp.

In America, we say "burnt to a chip".

Passing over the viability of "traditional" public housing as a concept: mixed-income developments are what we do now in the US, and have been doing, for several decades, both under the aegis of Public Housing Authorities (funded by HUD) and by state and municipal housing agencies. There are tax credit incentives to encourage developers and investors to put together projects which set aside a percentage of the units for families with significantly below-median incomes.

When I say mixed income developments are what we "do" I'm passing over housing voucher programs, which is where the REAL impetus has been in some form or another. The flavor of the decade in HUD and federal funding is a new program called Rental Assistance Demonstration (yes, RAD), which allows qualifying PHAs to convert their public housing stock into project-based vouchers. The willpower to invest in public housing qua public housing, as opposed to finding ways to offload property management onto the private sector, just hasn't been there for years.

The link in 7 is basically a short book: it took me forever to finish. Ajay, I got the impression that O'Hagan got/is getting reamed out from all sides for that article; were there any significant positive responses?

I have my own mixed feelings about the critique of the firefighting strategy. I spent a lot of this year in training with fire crews and, as a human being of reasonably advanced age, I know that basically sound principles can lead to exceptional catastrophes. One thing I noticed in my training was that the fire fighters were generally in awe of structural engineers. (Well, and another thing I noticed, because you couldn't miss it, was that every department was understaffed and undersupplied and running on a shoestring budget.) There were innumerable horrible details in O'Hagan's article, but the fact that no one noticed the cladding beginning to wick up flames after the initial fire was "put out" in the kitchen stands out for its awfulness.

(Note to more sensitive readers here: the first section of the article may be a wee bit hard to take.)

I guess my take is, public housing is a great thing we need a lot more of - make housing plentiful enough to be effectively a right, put a floor under the market that keeps private landlords from gouging people, etc. - but the solution seems to be purely finding the general fund money both upfront and routinely to make it work, and I don't have great ideas how how to get there from here, other than obviously organization/advocacy, especially in assuring the investments keep up over the generations. When I look at other countries the only difference I see in this area is politics, not institutions.

And to preempt nitpickers, not to say that institutions in other countries are identical, rather that I don't think there's any consistency in the differences.

fire fighters were generally in awe of structural engineers
?

11: We just redid our land development code, and it definitely does not incentivize mixed income housing, although the city council is independently working on affordable housing strategies. Basically there are plenty of zonings with a floor of square footage/comfy density. We did have a couple zonings with the opportunity to be mixed income, but it was pretty dismal.

I'm fairly sure we purchased a boiler-plate code which was then tweaked through a community process, but I can't be sure. But definitely lots of things were baked into the structure of the code which were not really responsive to public comments because the city staff didn't seem to have the wherewithal to do anything but explain why things weren't feasible due to the structure of the new code.

You should change the code to incentive cob building, unless you have a flooding problem, in which case maybe cob isn't a good idea.

16: Oh, I absolutely didn't mean to imply that the weight of all public opinion and relevant regulation was in favor of mixed-income developments; it isn't. But within the world of people who explicitly worry about affordable housing first, that's where the development action has been, and there are tax credits to make it financially possible. The actual resistance of people to letting you build anything useful remains a near-insurmountable obstacle in many locales.

15: I think they wanted the ability to quickly size up and assess the scale of structural damage, or the risk of greater structural damage, in situations other than the most obvious whole-building-tilting-sideways cases. A lay person's intuition is good but not perfect.

After living in Europe for a while, I think that government in the US is just sort-of broken. Partly it's because the Republicans are breaking it, but government works poorly enough that people don't trust it. Governments in Europe are good and bad at different things, but generally you can see governments a) decide to do something and b) do it. The closest comparison to the US is Italy, and even Italy has managed to build high-speed trains. I think in recent years Rome has managed to build more miles of subway than New York, and every time they try to tunnel under Rome they find another priceless archeological site.

"All the coverage seemed to have a basic premise that the local government has an obligation to provide housing for people and it's the specific people in this local government who are to blame for negligence, and they need to do better"

Though this is only true to a point - there was some coverage in the aftermath that questioning whether there should be public housing in such areas at all, as well as some coverage on the temerity of the un-housed looking for new accommodation with terms that matched their previous accommodation (including length of tenancy, guarantee of cost etc).

The other thing to bear in mind is that for all the outrage expended, the responsibility in such cases has been diffused to the point where it'll eventually be ruled that it's everyones/no ones fault and meanwhile the families affected get to fight with bureaucracy to the point of weary capitulation to a suboptimal outcome.

New York City had all sorts of public housing at various income levels. There are the income qualified "projects" which the city owns and rents at wage adjusted rates. There are the Mitchell-Lama building which are built by private developers, but get loan subsidies and tax abatements in exchange for renting a affordable levels to the income qualified. My niece lives in a Mitchell-Lama subsidized co-op, so she technically owns a share of the building and operating company. She isn't making big bucks, but she can afford the mortgage.

The housing authority has about 180K units and Mitchell-Lama accounted for as many as 100K, but is now closer to 60K. Still, that's a quarter of a million units, at two people per unit, that's half a million people. Of course, there's a lot less land available for infill in New York City than there used to be.

Walt's #20 is basically where I'm at. Which makes it all the more depressing that Austria's new extreme-right government is now determined to tear down all the enlightened topless European awesomeness.

Hopefully Vienna can resist the coming awfulness, because it really is amazing, especially re: housing policy: "Today, 62 percent of all households live in subsidized housing, and the city itself owns 220,000 rental units-- about 25 percent of the total housing stock. Another 200,000 affordable rental housing units are owned by limited-profit housing associations." A nice Guardian article about it

Apparently it's famous. There was a recent exhibit (which came here from Vancouver) on "the Vienna model " of public housing.

Don't turn around. Der Public Housing Kommissar is in town.

24: Yes, the exhibition has a website here, including a 50m (subtitled) video. There's also a 40-page sample of the (bilingual) exhibition book.

(I'm actually watching the video now instead of working -- very cool; direct Vimeo link here.)

Oh yeah, Austria nationally is #2 Europe-wide at social rentals as percentage of total housing stock (only outclassed by NL) per my link in 3.

Interestingly, Germany is below even the US. I guess they do it differently.

Ireland is dreadful at public housing - such stock as we did have was largely sold off in a copycat of Thatcherism. Somehow when we were an impoverished country we were able to do stuff but now we just tinker ineffectively at the corners with "family hubs".

Our social housing obligations are all being dealt with by subsidising private rentals with poor security of tenure, at far greater cost than actually building housing. One not much talked about issue is that the local authorities hate being responsible for housing maintenance so just don't want to build any.

There aren't enough properties available to rent, either. So we have homeless people in hotels and tourists on AirB&B in the private apartment stock.