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IMO, the option that appears to be the most effective for controlling rent is to have housing that is publicly owned, and non-profit. When it's done well--and it is done well in NYC, for instance--it creates affordable, high-density housing that's decently maintained. Such housing remains affordable because there's no profit motive involved in the building or maintenance. On the other hand, it can also be done badly, such as with all of the public housing projects that were built in the 60s and 70s in Chicago; then you have horrible, crime-filled slums that are owned by the city, but have zero maintenance.
Obvs. private industry hates public housing, because they can't compete with it. But overall, it's likely the most effective way to ensure adequate housing in urban areas.
I hate public housing because it typically declines in quality, and crimes spawn from that. I have not seen NYC and how they did it, but I have seen Cabrini Green, and that is what we need to avoid. It became a wasteland.
Cabrini Green, and the other housing projects in Chicago, seem to have been the exception rather than the rule. There are a fairly large number of housing projects in NYC, and most of them are quite decent, far better now than Cabrini Green and other CHA projects were at their best. Ultimately, the issue seems to be Chicago in particular, rather than housing projects in general. The decline in quality is almost always because of a lack of willingness to do basic maintenance. That was certainly one of the major issues that dragged Cabrini Green down; there were smoke stains on at least two of the buildings due to fires that had burned out apartments, and the city had just boarded those apartments up rather than renovating.
The CHA still has housing projects in Chicago, but they're mostly mixed-income now, with a certain number of units allocated for housing choice vouchers (AKA section 8), with the remainder being market rate; the market-rate units end up covering the maintenance costs for all of the units. The ones I'm most familiar with were built across the street from Cabrini Green, right in the Gold Coast area, and, last I knew, were doing quite well. But, to bring it back around, those were started under Rahm Emmanuel, not one of the Daleys.
Pruitt-Igoe enters the chat.
Glenny Drive
Father Panik
The large projects they built in the past always failed. The new model is smaller, spread in normal neighborhoods that seem to work much better.
It wasn't a willingness to do it; it was a lack of money. The rent charged should cover all expenses. The average person think landlords just roll in cash but the truth it, it is expensive to maintain a property.
That's the same thing when you're talking about public housing. A commercial landlord is operating as a profit-centered business. Gov't is operating as essential services. Gov't shouldn't be making a profit; housing for the poor should be treated as a public good, and something that's paid for through taxation, much like infrastructure and public schooling. So it is fundamentally a lack of will to spend the tax dollars necessary to maintain a thing.
So why don’t the democrats want to maintain them? These are democrat run cities with largely democrat tax payers.
That's a good question, and I don't know. I know that NYC manages to make them work very well, and some other places have not. Public housing works quite well in other countries as well.
I would suspect it was a combination of funding from local, federal and state sources.
The feds love to offer money then take it away.