Only Public Housing Can Save the Housing Market Now

Mathew Gordon Lasner writes a history of public housing, while also making an impassioned plea for cities to build a coalition of support for new, "deep" subsidies for public housing in the future. Lasner weites of the housing affordability crisis that is striking cities and towns of all sizes and in all geographic areas of the country.

Tax credits, low-interest loans, land trusts, zoning, and other land-use regulations have all been deployed in the service of lowering the cost of housing for increasingly rent-burdened Americans. Yet amid these myriad offerings, the one remedy capable of providing the quantity and quality of affordable housing we need is not even on the menu: deep cash subsidies for construction and/or operation of buildings.

Lasner is essentially arguing for a return to a mode first implemented 140 years ago, with the first subsidized apartment complex in the country—Home Buildings in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The bulk of the article is devoted to tracing a details history of the rise and fall of subsidized housing.

That history all leads up to Lasner's present appeal: "what if people in cities suffering from housing inequality all over the country joined forces to begin pushing for this solution together?" Noting the understandable concern about the past failures of public housing, Lasner notes that "[p]Public housing could look and feel very different today than in the past, adding "[t]The key difference would be that we would have a lot more of this nonprofit-developed housing than now, and it would be a lot more affordable."