06/21/2019
Housing Industry: No industry in America greater demonstrates the inadequacies of the capitalist market place to provide adequate service. It starts with a necessity of life--housing--and then turns it into a commodity in which profit, not need determines what type of housing is available, and to whom.
Like other industries, governments (local, state and federal) have intervened to regulate how and what is offered. There are Building Codes, construction standards, tax incentives, smattering of rent control, and rent subsidies. Unfortunately, most of these have either been woefully inadequate--only 3% of all tenants in the USA receive a rent subsidy, for example, compared to 40% in Sweden--or actually encouraged the availability of affordable housing crisis we are now suffering.
Greatest example of the failure of government to ameliorate the inadequacies of the housing market for the bottom 50% of Americans is the collapse of public housing. Huge, impersonal high rise housing was built as bunkers for minorities and the poor, rather than integrating poorer tenants into the larger community. In response to a lack of funding and lack of imaginative policy and hopelessly corrupt bureaucracy, public housing became a blight on the community instead of havens against the rapacious capitalist marketplace.
So, what was the response to this? Coming up with ways to actually provide affordable housing to millions? No. High rises are torn down and the tenants are scattered to the wind with false promises of adequate subsidies for better housing.
Chicago is great example of this housing failure. Despite anti-discrimination laws, housing remains dramatically racially segregated by neighborhood and sides of town. Tearing down the segregated high rise public housing projects has not changed that, as was promised.
Partially due to rental costs, and due to discrimination by landlords--in violation of city ordinance--against Section 8 voucher holders, Chicago has exported tens of thousands of poor people to poor suburbs, and even out of state.
In the past several decades in Chicago, even during booms in real estate development, nearly all housing construction has been in either pricey condo buildings and/or luxury single family homes, or expensive high rises located in or close to the Loop. No one is building multi-unit, reasonably-priced apartment buildings. There have been very few of them built since the 1920s. Fortunately for Chicago's tenants, many of those buildings are still standing and serviceable.
Not only was this a failure by the city, state and federal governments; it was their planned policy. Political decisions were made by administration after administration to skew tax laws to benefit rich developers and not poor and working class tenants.
