Hey! How About We Fix All Of The Public Housing So People Can Live There Without Getting Sick?
Always so full of crazy ideas, Wonkette!
We have a housing problem right now. We have a lot of people who cannot afford to live anywhere. The rent is too damn high! Now, sure, we can ponder why that might be: Do people just really love living outside and having no money or food? A suspiciously larger number of people than before rent became very unaffordable practically everywhere? Are poor people being paid too much? Is it the avocado toast? But at the end of the day, pondering these things is not helping anyone. You know what will? Housing. Public housing.
That is why, on Monday, Elizabeth Warren reintroduced the Public Housing Emergency Response Act in the Senate. The bill was initially introduced in the House by Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-New York), and aims to fix some of the existing issues in our public housing system.
We need a lot more public housing than we currently have. There are only 34 units available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households that need one. But before we get to building the units we need, we have to fix the ones we already have — many of which have fallen into a serious state of disrepair — because that is the responsible thing to do. Many of these units are literally dangerous, they have infestations, lead, black mold, lack of heat and other things that are not great for one’s overall health. Seems like it’s probably just more efficient and less expensive overall to eliminate those problems than to deal with their aftermath!
"America's affordable housing crisis has hit families everywhere hard, but it has hit the lowest-income households the hardest — it is time to stop nibbling around the edges and fix the problem," Warren said in a previous press release about the initiative.
Can I just say here that if ever there were a succinct explanation for why I just really love Elizabeth Warren, it is that she is, at her core, an “it is time to stop nibbling around the edges and fix the problem” person. I know and understand that a lot of people just feel more comfortable with baby steps and Rube Goldberg machines, but I think sometimes you really just have to do the thing that’s actually going to work from the outset … especially if black mold is a factor.
Warren was joined by an ideologically diverse set of co-sponsors including Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), Alex Padilla (D-California), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). Well, maybe not overly ideologically diverse. We do see one missing sector.
“Public housing that leaks, lacks proper ventilation, or that contains lead or mold causes serious health conditions. Decades of underinvestment in public housing has led to substandard living, and that is unacceptable. The Public Housing Emergency Response Act gets us closer to making the large-scale public investment necessary to ensure everyone has a decent, safe, and affordable place to live,” Senator Markey said in the latest press release.
This seems like a far better and more economical solution than just straight up demolishing dilapidated public housing developments and then never replacing them, as was the hot trend at one point.
It would be fabulously convenient if the solution to poverty were to “motivate” people by demonizing things like public housing and making them less available. This has been tried, for decades, and it works so poorly that one might be inclined to think that people were not actually trying to help out the poor with “tough love.”
The reason it’s not going away is because we actually need people to work the “extremely low-income jobs” that qualify them for public housing. No amount of motivation, no hard work is going to change that.
That being said, this project will also create jobs, likely good, union jobs, that actually will lift people out of poverty.
The chances that it will pass both the House and the Senate are not great, especially given that Republicans currently control the House. It is, however, worth bringing up as much as humanly possible, because it is a thing that needs to happen whether those people like it or not and because it is going to get more expensive to fix and to deal with with each coming year. Right now it costs $70 billion. Who knows what it could cost next year?
PREVIOUSLY:
Good luck. I’ve shared a conference room with the chair of the NYC Housing Authority and got such a contact high of corruption I wanted to scrub myself with bleach. The system is permafucked.
At this moment Albany is preparing to tear down one of its’ last remaining public housing projects to build a satellite campus for one of my Alma maters, which has abundant space across the river.
People say Jimi Hendrix died from substance abuse, but he really died from a lack of care.
The same can be said of decent public housing.
Give people affordable (or free) housing and the entire economy will take off like a rocket. How could it not?
Isn't that what capitalists want?
I'm beginning to think it's the cruelty, combined with a (false) sense of societal superiority, that REALLY drives these assholes - not the money.