Obama's Housing Subsidies Left Thousands in Squalor
Chicago's efforts to do something about its public housing nightmare are a very, very big deal, involving 25,000 units of housing, huge numbers of public housing residents, enormous sums of money, and vast tracts of land, some of it quite desirable. Any project of this magnitude is going to have a whole lot of moving parts, and it will operate under a lot of constraints: political, financial, and so on. Especially in a city with a reputation for, um, interesting approaches to public management, I would be astonished to find that absolutely everything had gone swimmingly. What I would really like to know, therefore, is: how many of the projects went bad? Whose projects were they? Is the number better or worse than one would expect? And why, exactly, didn't they work out?
Moreover, one way to look at the results is to notice that no solution to this problem looks particularly enticing. As I noted above, the government didn't do a good job of running public housing. If the cases cited in the Globe article are representative, public-private partnerships weren't all that great either, though they'd have to get a lot worse before they rivaled some of Chicago's old projects. But vouchers also have problems -- see this Atlantic article, which argues that when public housing residents are dispersed using Section 8 vouchers, crime often follows.
Before I'd be prepared to criticize someone for supporting public-private partnerships for affordable housing, I'd want to know what alternative the critic has in mind, and what reason there is for thinking that it would be better. It's not enough to say: gee, this didn't work so well, if nothing else works better.
Olmstead
Among those tied to Obama politically, personally, or professionally are:
blah,blah,blah
Among those tied to McCain personally, professionally, AND politically are George Bush and Dick Cheney and the rest of the republican party. An incurable political condition.
