public housing – Lone Candle

Zohran Mamdani’s Socialist Housing Plan Could Crash New York’s Rickety Rental Market

Posted on October 26, 2025October 26, 2025 by Lone Candle

“The city has the nation’s most regulated housing sector and the largest stock of government-owned and subsidized housing, and yet progressives blame its real estate troubles on the free market.

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These buildings are falling apart, with an estimated $78 billion repair backlog, including “non-functioning smoke detectors, antiquated electrical components, damaged interiors, missing child guards…deteriorated roofs, deteriorated pumps, and leaking pipes,” according to a recent report. The system for making repairs in New York public housing is rife with corruption. Heat and hot water service are routinely interrupted. The elevators, which are crucial in multistory buildings housing elderly residents, are constantly breaking down.

When public housing was created, it was assumed that the residents would be two-income, working families whose rents would cover upkeep. That plan failed as stable families opted for home-ownership. Today, only 2 percent of New York public housing households include two adults with children, and just a third of households report income from wages.

The perverse incentives of public housing help explain why the city is perennially plagued by shortages. According to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), fully 30 percent of the city’s public housing residents are “overhoused,” meaning single adults are living in 3- or 4-bedroom apartments. About 10 percent of residents have lived in their units for more than 40 years.

This problem also applies to rent-regulated units: Artificially cheap rents mean tenants don’t vacate after their kids grow up and move out, leading to inefficient use of a limited stock.

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The “affordable housing” program championed by Mamdani will likely take the form of new private apartment buildings setting aside units for lower-income families, whose rents are subsidized by the federal government. These programs require developers to navigate extensive red tape, which adds cost and slows housing production. The system allocates units via lottery, so it’s based on luck.

Similarly, rent-regulated units in Manhattan go to tenants lucky enough to get them, or, in some cases, inherit them from their parents or grandparents. Since New York lawmakers have made it so hard to evict tenants for nonpayment of rent, landlords are incentivized to pick high-earners to inhabit this scarce resource.

As mayor, Mamdani would select the members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets price increases on nearly 1 million apartments. According to Census data, turnover in rent-regulated units is half that of market-rate units, which is one of the reasons the city’s overall turnover is 46 percent lower than the national average.

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thanks to a 2019 law that made New York’s rent regulation laws far more stringent. Some 200,000 rent-regulated apartments, many in need of ongoing maintenance, don’t generate enough income to cover basic operating expenses, according to Mark Willis of New York University’s Furman Center. He also noted that “such rent shortfalls are likely to continue to grow over time, potentially exponentially, jeopardizing the long-run economic sustainability of these properties.””

https://reason.com/2025/10/20/zohran-mamdanis-socialist-housing-plan-could-crash-new-yorks-rickety-rental-market/

Public housing didn’t fail in the US. But it was sabotaged.

Posted on March 3, 2025March 3, 2025 by Lone Candle

“the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.
So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?”

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“efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn’t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.

The Housing Act of 1949, which had a goal of providing “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” bolstered America’s public housing plans by heavily investing in the construction of new housing units. But by then, the federal government had already undermined its own stated plans by capping construction costs (which encouraged using cheap materials and discouraged modern appliances) and allowing racial segregation. Congress had also doomed public housing authorities’ ability to raise revenue through rents in 1936 when it passed the George-Healey Act, which established income limits for who can qualify for public housing — making mixed-income public housing models impossible for federally funded projects.

As housing projects started to draw more Black residents, white people who lived in public housing started leaving, especially after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s banned racial discrimination in housing. This was partly because the Federal Housing Authority pushed for more people to own homes and expanded its loans mostly to white people, helping white families move out of the projects. Black families didn’t receive the same opportunity.

“You saw a change in the racial composition, which simply added to the stigma and the pattern of administrative neglect that characterized many housing authorities,” the historian Ed Goetz told The Atlantic in 2015.

Starting with President Richard Nixon — who declared that the US government had turned into “the biggest slumlord in history” and suspended federal spending on subsidized housing — public housing started facing serious austerity measures and never recovered. Federal investments shifted away from building new public housing units and toward housing vouchers and public-private partnerships.

In the decades that followed, public housing started declining in quality, and Congress funded a program to demolish dilapidated public housing units and replace them with newly constructed or renovated mixed-income developments. But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, those demolitions were an “overcorrection”; public housing simply needed more funding and better management.”

https://www.vox.com/policy/390082/public-housing-america-policy-failure-poverty