Margaret Thatcher is famously quoted for saying “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” (Snopes) Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, has proved her wrong. The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s houses. The Cambridge Housing Authority provides free apartments with market rents of over $60,000 per year to some families. Others are on a waiting list and receive nothing (rather stark inequality!). Since January 1, 2015, however, even the waitlist is closed.
Where is the Christmas spirit for families who want and/or need an apartment?
[Related: I can’t figure out what the rationale is for free houses plus long waiting list. If a free house is a human right, how can there be a waiting list? There is no waiting list for free food (food stamps). Everyone who is entitled gets food stamps more or less immediately. How can a comfortable taxpayer-funded house be simultaneously a human right and require crashing on a relative’s sofa for 10 years? But if a free house is not a human right, why do taxpaying Americans have to work extra hours every week to fund the millions of existing free houses?]
Also see
- Book Review: The Redistribution Recession (how much less Americans will work when you give them a free house on condition that they don’t earn much)
- Russian welfare: all cash (i.e., we don’t have to turn every part of the U.S. economy into a corner of the welfare system)
At the expense of lowering the value of your own house? Bah humbug. No faster way for politicians to get voted out of office than to lower property values.
http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2016/12/housing-part-191-affordability-is-not.html
“There isn’t one for you.”
Are there really millions of completely free homes available nationwide?
Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937 (42 U.S.C. § 1437f), often called Section 8, as repeatedly amended, authorizes the payment of rental housing assistance to private landlords on behalf of approximately 4.8 million low-income households, as of 2008
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)
The point of positive rights, where you’re entitled to something, cannot be that you actually get this thing. For it to work that way, the right to work should come with the duty to employ, etc. etc. which for obvious reasons it never does.
Some things are in fact cheap enough for the taxpayers to fund them, but that is the exception, not the rule. The rule is that either nothing happens at all except for your nominal right being happily recited at various occasions, or you’re put in a queue, where you often die. Your ex-Russian friends who occasionally appear on this blog can without doubt provide you with colorful details on how these things work.
What then is the point of positive rights? We must ask those supporting them. I once asked a gal who said that it was “unthinkable” that a single mother does not have a place to live. I didn’t ask why she worried about single mothers more than any other demographic, but I did suggest that we immediately find a homeless single mother in the city where the conversation occurred, and invest all of our efforts into providing her with housing, one path being volunteering our labor to cut construction costs. That she rejected this suggestion doesn’t mean that she became any less supportive of positive rights.
It would be pretty easy to house everyone who wants to be housed, for varying definitions of house. And it would be pretty easy to have housing for everyone, but it’s pretty clear not everyone wants to be housed.
For example, according to googles, there were about 5,000 unsheltered homeless in Seattle in January. Give each 125 square feet (size of an 8×16′ trailer) to live in and you get about a 640K square feet, or just 1/5th of Amazon’s new office space in the Denny Triangle of Seattle.
So it’s not like space is the issue, and if we wanted to mass produce tiny houses, or tiny triplexes, or tiny apartments as we did Victory Ships, then I’m not certain cost is a huge issue either. A tiny home now seems to cost between 10K and 50K, so assume mass production of 5,000 225 sq. foot tiny homes brings the cost down to 10K a piece, an ambitious price, but the cost of a used travel trailer. (rvtrader.com lists 4,000 used travel trailers between 10 and 15K) (marianecusato dot com says 125 sq foot katrina cottages can be built by individuals for about 15K)
So housing all of Seattle’s unsheltered homeless is “only” a $50M project, which is less than what the Fed’s gave Washington State to fight homelessness in Washington State (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/feds-award-58m-to-fight-homelessness-in-washington-state/) comments at r/SeattleWA suggests Seattle will get most of that $58M but says there are 20,000 homeless in all of WA, so, we’ll need $200M not $50M to house them all, or get more and cheaper used travel trailers, or get our mass produced katrina cottage costs down even more.
So I don’t think cost or space is actually the issue.
And arguably, housing people who wish to be housed would make them function much more effectively in society to the point where housing them would be a positive ROI investment at least in terms of reducing costs of caring for them in other ways, reducing the effect on property values, turning them into higher wage employees, etc.
More worrying is what happens to the market when people who bought a $100,000 – $250,000 home in Seattle want to sell it for a $10,000 katrina cottage.
There are a couple of problems with building 20,000 Katrina cottages, starting with where do you put them all? What makes more sense is to build large apartment buildings but when this was tried in the past, having so many dysfunctional people all in one place led to even more dysfunction. Also, as you can see from the actual results, our system is more geared toward building 1,000 $200,000 units than 20,000 $10,000 units.
Keep in mind that travel trailers depreciate much faster than houses – you might be lucky to get 10 years out of one before it falls apart. Also if you force 4 or more people to live for years in a 250 sf. unit they will kill each other like rats in a cage. You can do this for a 2 week vacation but not year after year.
A lot of the cost in a house is not a straight function of square footage. You need a certain basic complement of appliances, fixtures, etc. whether the house is 250 sf or 1,000 sf. Even in framing, the old saying is that the cost is in the corners – making a house a few feet longer and wider adds very little to the cost.
@Brian
According to the article you linked to households receiving Section 8 housing vouchers generally pay 30% of their income toward rent so they (apparently) don’t provide “free houses”.
Neal: Most people I know who have gotten into the Cambridge public housing system don’t feel the need to get up at 0600 every weekday and work. So their income is roughly $0 and they pay roughly 30 percent of $0. In reality it may be as much as $50/month. See http://www.masslegalhelp.org/housing/rent-public-housing.pdf for how the minimum is between $0 and $50/month.
(One thing that is interesting about the above-referenced document is that child support counts as income for the purpose of public housing. If a plaintiff earning $50,000 per year in child support goes to family court after having a second child, her income is considered to be $0 and child support is computed based on her $0 income. But if she is getting a taxpayer-subsidized house, she is treated as though she earns $50,000 per year (though of course her spending power is higher because her $50k/year is tax-free.)
>Most people I know who have gotten into
>the Cambridge public housing system
Not a random sample; extrapolating nationwide may not be valid.
If anyone think the “free housing” that Cambridge provides is to help the needy, think again, it is not.
Cambridge does this to boost its standing in the eye of Liberals to show that they are diverse in all aspect of life: both culturally and economically.
If it wasn’t for Harvard and MIT, Cambridge would be in bankruptcy.
Phil,
I own numerous real estate investments in a southern state and can state with 100% certainly that the percentage of “Section 8” renters who leave their subsidized housing is close to 0 (as far as our properties are concerned).
I can recall two tenants in 27 years (out of scores of properties) that opted out of Section 8. One was a drug addict who couldn’t function and the other was a single black female who declared that she was tired of the “requirements” that Section 8 subsidies burdened her with. Namely, that she tried to sublet a portion of her home to other renters and discovered that doing so got her booted from the program.
Other than those two instances, I cannot recall anyone leaving Section 8 once they climbed aboard. It is the real estate version of winning the housing lottery for many citizens. And there are very little incentives for tenants to actually venture out and buy their own place.
Ambition?? Bah humbug!
PS
My tenants pay anywhere from 0 to possibly 15% of their gross monthly rents. The rest is paid by you and me.
A 28-year old single mom acquaintance of mine has been on the waiting list for a Section-8 voucher for three years. The other day she told me that she is no. 156 on the list. About once every three years, this FL county accepts applications to merely get on the waiting list, otherwise applications are not even accepted. And the county gives out about about 30 new Section-8 vouchers each year. So, my 28-year old single mom acquaintance has about five more years to wait.
Smartest Woman on the Internet,
Maybe the lady could consider earning more income. I guess that’s out of the question.
God bless America.