“Despite Vow, Mayor de Blasio Struggles to Curb Homelessness” is a New York Times story in which some of the nation’s leading experts on housing are interviewed. It seems that the great American minds featured can’t comprehend why it would be challenging to provide unlimited free housing in one of the world’s most expensive cities (and one that is expensive because it is a desirable and interesting place to live).
4 thoughts on “Great American minds can’t figure out why providing free housing in New York City is challenging”
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Not so different from the ideas in Stockholm, Sweden:
“Some of Stockholm’s homeless population are set to be offered permanent accommodation in the city centre, as part of efforts to help them reintegrate into society.” [..]
“This could be large families, homeless people, addicts,” Green Party councillor and social affairs spokeswoman Ewa Larsson told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
She added that the move was designed to avoid concentrating these groups in social housing projects in the Stockholm suburbs.
“We’ll take a greater responsibility, we want all locals to have an opportunity to stay in their city,” added housing commissioner Ann-Margarethe Livh. [..]
“But the move is a controversial one in a city where in some areas tax payers are facing a 20 year wait for rental accomodation. This has resulted in a strong subletting culture, with prices spiralling in recent years despite rules designed to cap rental increases.”
Source: http://www.thelocal.se/20150326/homeless-to-skip-rental-queues-in-capital
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There is also an interesting definition of “paying rent like everybody else”:
“They pay the rent like everybody else, although sometimes that comes from benefits.”
Usually they just force the rich IE land owners to subsidize the poor’s rent using rent control. PhilG, you may find it interesting that Cambridge MA was one of the few cities that had rent control then it was abolished on a statewide measure. It’s practically the only real world case study that shows how rent control hurts the people it most wants to help. Do you have any thoughts on Rent Control?
Rent Control in Cambridge? The city was a slum, basically, as a typical building was 50-100 years old and left to run down. People who had rent controlled places sometimes kept them after moving to NY or DC because if they wanted to come back and visit one weekend per month it was cheaper than paying for a hotel. There was a lot of litigation, e.g., a person who bought a condo would be sued by the city for trying to occupy it personally instead of renting it out at $200/month or whatever the rent controlled rent was. The theory was that an owner shouldn’t be allowed to reduce the stock of rental housing. So everything predicted by Econ 101 happened.
On the other hand, the city today is kind of a mess. The meltdown of the U.S. transportation system (more cars, no congestion pricing) has put a huge premium on real estate like Cambridge (walkable to jobs and/or a fast subway line). People with ordinary jobs cannot afford the market-based rents so they live in squalor in Somerville. Rich people (dentist, medical specialist, etc.) live in places formerly occupied by graduate students, albeit now they have new bathroom tile and a Viking range in the kitchen. And then you have a subset of the population that doesn’t work at all and gets to live in, say, a $1 million apartment for free (but of course though they can live there forever as a ward of the state, and their children can inherit the free apartment, there is no way for them to get hold of the $1 million and move to the Midwest and not be poor anymore).
Love the hashtag “housekeysnothandcuffs”! That’s the way to tell ’em, homeless folks!
Demand free everything, forever.
Personally, I find it interesting that (similar to our current administration in Washington) Mayor de Blasio blames most everything on the FORMER mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg.
I wish that tactic would work in everyday life, then I could blame my shortcomings as a husband on my wife’s ex-husband.