Housing for the Masses--How?

I can look back to housing affordability from my childhood and now realize fifty years later that we had an affordable housing crisis then.  In New York City the Public Housing Authority owned and operated as landlords a few dozen large multi-story brick housing 'projects.'

If your family lived 'in the projects,' you needed financial assistance to afford the rent.  You couldn't afford market rents if you lived in the projects.

A low-income family was screened if a rental opening occurred.  The federal government gave some funds to the housing authority to be used to augment the partial rents that the family/tenant could be.  This is called Section Eight Housing.  The program is good to increase the number of families that can be helped into decent apartments.  We have a remarkable lack of this type of housing.

There are examples of out-of-control public housing projects.  A couple of decades ago in Chicago a massive housing project, Cabrini Greens, actually had to be demolished because it had developed into a dangerous, lawless venture.  To operate a project the city must make a large financial and police and management commitment to the maintenance of the project.  This doesn't tend to happen years down the line.

I have this idea of quasi-military barracks housing units.  Single tenants without children would be fairly easy to be housed safely and orderly.  Also, like a military base, access for visitors could be controlled.  We need this across the US.

Family housing, like a military base housing, could also be built for very low income families.  When we think of reducing homelessness for families with children, we are not looking to provide facilities like a three-star hotel.  When your family is sleeping in the car when the shelter is filled, a very basic apartment unit is a lifesaver.

What is occurring now in the US is that rich, well-funded/invested REITs, Real Estate Investment Trusts, are doing private money lending deals wherein they buy an apartment building, maybe they buy a senior citizens long-term care facility, and the REIT arranges to obtain government money from some source--federal, city, state, and private sources.  Big lenders negotiate for partial REIT ownership and the three pieces of the financial triad form a structure.  Lots of people make money over a few decades but very few homeless persons/families even get a look at a subsidized rental application.

The funds generate profits but provide few opportunities for housing, although we can read news releases about upcoming projects like this most days.  The current administration indeed recently lowered the federal tax ratio for those who benefit from such REIT projects.

These same REITs could build or refurbish apartment buildings much less expensively per unit than they now do.  It is not uncommon for $250,000 to $350,000 to be spent to ready these units.  To me those are astronomical numbers.  Perhaps for wealthy persons to live in a luxury apartment I can see the amounts here.  But the REITs are taking advantage of GOVERNMENT low-income funding sources.  Therefore, perhaps $100,000 would be an ample amount to purchase and build-in a dozen nice mobile home on an acre or two in town--probably $75,000 would be doable if an organization were serious about stretching government funds and not growing profits.

Tax-free, non-profit organizations are doing this on a miniscule level.