I'm listening to a presentation on a gigantic housing grant my city is applying for. (PRO Grant from HUD, if you're familiar). They're proposing spending millions on regulatory reform to promote missing middle housing, which, ok fine, that's a big task in a major city, but that should already have been done in 2023. Other money would go towards vague stuff like an accelerator program for bipoc affordable developers. After all of that, they're proposing only 120 "deeply affordable" (under 30% ami) units with the grant.
We have a shortfall of tens of thousands of those units in our city, and this multimillion dollar federal grant would fund just 120.
JUST FUCKING BUILD PUBLIC HOUSING CO-OPS
I swear the neoliberal public-private partnership brainworms these people have is beyond terminal. "We have to strategically leverage this potential pot of funding" no you fucking don't
The solution was, remains, and will always be public housing.
The number of conversations I've had with even "progressive" people who have somehow been convinced that public housing won't work is startling. But tbh, even I am unsure if a neoliberalized empty husk of a government would even be able to do it today without dumping money into public-private partnerships which would fail to accomplish anything but lining their pockets with cash.
The frustrating thing is all the extra time and work that goes into setting up public-private partnerships. It would be cheaper and easier for a given city to just commission a construction company to build something on the land they have. Spending money is spending money, private or public. Local governments really have to go out their way and put a lot of work into spending money ineffectively.