May 24, 2024

New York City's Ongoing "Affordable Housing" Follies

May 24, 2024/ Francis Menton

“Affordable housing.” Who could be against that? Surely an energetic, well-intentioned government ought to be able to come up with some programs or initiatives to make housing more affordable for low and moderate-income residents.
In practice, the State and City of New York have been pursuing the Holy Grail of “affordable housing” through government compulsion for close to a century.
After all that, what we have is the most expensive housing market in the country. Somehow everything they try to generate more “affordable housing” proves only to make the situation worse.

February 12, 2024

A Small Insight Into Why New York Public Housing Is So Costly

February 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

The Mann v. Steyn trial has ended, for now. Post-trial motions and appeals will likely play out over months and years, with little to report on a daily basis. It’s time to return to some of my other obsessions.
Like the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Over the years, I’ve had more than twenty posts on this utterly failed agency, which is probably the best large-scale example of a pure socialist-model economic enterprise in the United States. A few of my prior posts on NYCHA can be found here, here and here.

After starting out with great optimism and hope in the 1940s and 50s, NYCHA began to decline in the 80s and 90s. By 2000 it had entered full socialist death spiral mode. Each year since then, it only gets worse.
One of the ongoing mysteries of NYCHA has long been why it costs the Authority so much more to operate and maintain an apartment than it costs a private landlord.

January 23, 2024

January 23, 2024/ Francis Menton

Read any few articles of your choosing on the status of New York’s residential housing market, and you will quickly learn that it is in “crisis.” The vacancy rate is minuscule, the prices are astronomical, many apartments are small and/or in poor condition, and everyone with any kind of normal job is completely priced out.
The funny thing is that the “crisis” has existed ever since the onset of the post-World War II economic boom in the late 1940s, or in other words for some 75+ years. While other states and cities have let the markets sort out matters of housing supply and demand, our politicians have promised to use the magic of government edicts to deliver better solutions.
The “solutions” they have implemented are all one form or another of government central planning — price controls, subsidies, and mandates. A slight and gradual loosening of these restriction occurred during the several decades from the 80s to the 00s; but the last few years have seen a newly emboldened progressive-controlled state legislature re-imposing and tightening every restriction they can think of.

December 23, 2023

December 23, 2023/ Francis Menton

“Homelessness” is one of my favorite topics because it provides an endless supply of examples of clear, dramatic, and immediate failure of the government programs supposedly intended to assist the poor and vulnerable.
All of the big progressive cities follow some version of the same policies, which in summary amount to spending more and more money to provide “housing first” as the obvious solution to homelessness. All of these cities have rapidly stepped up spending over the past decade on promises to the voters to solve the homelessness problem with more subsidized housing; and all of them have then seen homelessness rise relentlessly along with the spending.
It’s almost impossible to believe that nobody can learn from this experience.
For today I’ll provide the latest update from Los Angeles, as well as look at how a very similar approach has worked out in the smaller (but equally progressive) city of Madison, Wisconsin.

July 15, 2023

July 15, 2023/ Francis Menton

There’s always something new to report on New York’s housing follies.
The accepted housing paradigm here in blue-model New York is that elite public policy geniuses with access to infinite taxpayer funds will create housing solutions to provide perfect housing fairness and justice to all. Somehow, they keep falling short.
Nowhere is this more evident that with the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. NYCHA is the ultimate socialist-model low income housing provider, by far the largest such housing authority in the country. It owns and manages about 180,000 apartments in what are known as The Projects, home to something in the range of 400,000-500,000 people, or about 5-6% of New York City’s population. (In most other American cities, HUD-supported projects house about 1-2% of the population.) For decades, as housing authorities in places like Chicago and St. Louis were forced to dynamite many of their failed low-income projects, NYCHA was held up as the great success story of the genre.
But was the apparent success real, or was NYCHA just more artful than its compatriots in covering up its failures?

May 23, 2023

May 23, 2023/ Francis Menton

From time to time I like to check in on the latest from the New York City Housing Authority. NYCHA (along with many other municipal housing authorities) is one of the purest examples in the U.S. today of socialist-model economic organization.
When we last looked back in 2018, NYCHA had just been sued by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for failing to maintain “decent, safe and sanitary” conditions, including failing to remediate lead paint, failing to control mold and vermin, and failing to provide consistent heat, hot water., and elevator service. NYCHA had promptly settled that lawsuit with a Consent Decree in which it promised to spend some $4 billion of New York City taxpayer money to fix the identified problems.
In the intervening close to 5 years, NYCHA has been mostly out of the news. Surely, the large infusion of funds has turned things around, and all is now going smoothly?