Public housing doesn’t need to be uniform or boring… that was mostly a result of the ideology of urban planners of the mid 20th century when most public housing projects happened. The government can contract a private developer to make a nice building, that is well located, and is not just for poor people. That seems so obvious, but it seems people are stuck by their own ideology and can’t even think a bit outside of what is, or has been.
And I’m not talking about subsidised, I mean PUBLIC. Owned by the government or by coops, councils etc. Built using federal money. Just having this around would decrease overall housing costs so much… the market would have to compete with the no-profit, cost only, rents of public housing.
And Amazon has done a lot of research and found you only need to control 8% of a market to control the pricing. The government just has to build enough public housing in major population centers facing rent crisis to own 8% of total housing there. And that’s it. Rent cost crisis averted. And thousands of jobs and GDP generated because of all the construction (add in extra infrastructure for better access to the public housing, and you got a real economic boom cooking — hint hint, it’s literally what China did lmao).
Obi