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Americans ought to be able to earn enough money to pay market rent. Giving people food stamps and even subsidized health care ought to make this possible for everyone.

“Affordable Housing” Another Lynchpin of Liberal Lies



Affordable Housing Another Lynchpin of Liberal LiesWant to become unpopular? Announce you oppose “affordable housing,” one of the new Liberal Lies, such as Climate Change and Medicare for All. If Liberals and Democrats favor affordable housing, rest assured it has to be bad. Affordable housing is about as affordable as Obamacare, whose official name was The Affordable Care Act.
Nobody seems anymore to question government intervention in the housing market, a feature of American life since President Franklin Roosevelt created the Federal Housing Administration in 1933 as part of the New Deal. The FHA provided loan guarantees to banks to allow them to lend again and spur economic activity in the distressed times of the Great Depression. Before then, nobody would have ever considered allowing the government to interfere with the private contract between a borrower and a bank to purchase a home. Maybe the FHA was a good idea then. But are the conditions of 1933 the same as 2019, when we have near full unemployment and a robust economy? Of course not, so why do we still live in a world of Liberal housing policy? Especially since we also have experienced another liberal housing disaster: government (public) housing? Affordable housing is the new public housing, the Liberal innocuous term for government-owned housing, which is socialism. Under President Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society programs of the 1960s, Democrats in big cities accelerated the “Urban Renewal” of the 1950s, when mostly minority housing in America’s cities was razed to create various public amenities. Add welfare into the mix, and soon public housing became riddled with violence, despair, and other social pathologies. Public housing is even despised by its own residents, who simply say that they live or lived in the “projects” to describe their personal horror. Children with parents who could send them to Catholic schools often escaped the projects, but many others found jail or premature death from gangs or drugs as their future. Go visit these “projects” in New York City where I live and you will observe that there is nearly no economic activity in their environs. Public housing projects are urban reservations that not only interrupt the normal street pattern, but are ugly institutional-looking buildings. The public housing residents are warehoused in cradle-to-grave social welfare programs to ensure they are wards of the state forever. Public housing is so discredited, that never would anyone ever propose building new projects. So what does a good Liberal do? Rename the program as affordable housing!

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Affordable housing and public housing take property off the tax rolls, and wastes hundreds of millions of dollars. The New York City Housing Authority bureaucracy has a $3.35 billion budget, and unabashedly says it now does both affordable and public housing business. Get it? Public housing is no longer acceptable, so let’s call it affordable housing. Global Warming is no longer provable, so let’s call it climate change. Single-payer health care sounds bad, so let’s call it Medicare for All. It’s all Liberal marketing and branding. In addition, NYCHA also facilitates access to critical social services to residents in their communities, i.e., more welfare and public assistance. Public and affordable housing programs perpetuate a two-tier system: people who pay market prices for housing, and those who don’t. This creates resentment all around. The Liberal solution is to control and warehouse people as much as possible with public schools, Medicaid, and even prisons. The Bible says in Isaiah 58:7 that we are commanded to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but not to build houses for poor people, only to bring them into our homes, and certainly only temporarily. Unfortunately, it will be nearly impossible to unwind completely the American Welfare State, but we can find one area to allow economic freedom to work: housing. We must get the government out of housing as much as possible, except for preventing discrimination. As Norbert Michel, a data analyst with the Heritage Foundation wrote in a recent article, the government need not guarantee every mortgage in the United States, which would reduce the risk of too much debt in the financial system, which was a main cause of the 2008 financial crisis. Michel said that the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agencies should only back modest-sized loans, so that only truly poor people would benefit. Second homes and investment properties also should be outside the purview of Fannie and Freddie, Michel said.

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As conservative icon William F. Buckley wrote in his 1950s classic, Up From Liberalism, if there is going to be government intervention in people’s lives, the money ought to go as directly as possible to individuals, and not to government agencies. Getting the government out of housing would make all housing more affordable. A friend in my neighborhood who lives in an “affordable housing” apartment twice the size of mine pays only 70 percent of my rent. But my apartment does not have water leaking through the living room ceiling as hers does, because my building management company can afford to make needed repairs and hire excellent staff. My friend living in subsidized housing? She is afraid to complain because she knows that if she complains too much, she might be asked to leave, and someone else would receive her place. Worse, people often commit fraud about their incomes and wealth to win public and affordable housing in New York. Americans ought to be able to earn enough money to pay market rent. Giving people food stamps and even subsidized health care ought to make this possible for everyone. Let’s get the government out of housing and turn public housing into private housing that will re-establish regular street patterns, create an economic boom for builders and communities, and increase the supply of housing, which will bring down rents by the law of supply and demand. Privatizing housing is readily doable and the right thing to do.


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Daniel Wiseman -- Bio and Archives

Daniel Wiseman is an independent political commentator, who focuses on national and international affairs. He spent nine years as a professional journalist in Wyoming before working in fund-raising, non-profit management, and is now working in New York City. Wiseman focuses his writing on how to bring the United States back to its Constitutional moorings.  He writes exclusively for Canada Free Press.


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