New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an avatar of the progressive Left, recently shared her vision of how America’s housing shortage should be addressed in a New York Times op-ed cowritten with Senator Tina Smith of New Jersey. Ocasio-Cortez’s vision resurrects the debunked Great Depression-era argument that the private housing market is fundamentally flawed and must be replaced by a government-directed version—an approach deeply at odds with the do-it-yourself ethic of most American homeowners. Let’s hope that Kamala Harris doesn’t share these views.
Were the AOC approach to become the norm, it would effectively end the housing market as we know it, to the detriment of those who prefer small homes, traditional neighborhoods, and collaboration with neighbors to keep properties desirable. The New York congresswoman touts as a model Co-op City in the Bronx, a cluster of 35 high-rise “tower in the park” buildings with 15,000 apartments. As it happens, my wife and I have spent time in Co-op City, bringing Passover food to Jewish shut-ins, many of them Soviet-era refugees who might feel right at home in a complex with all the allure of a socialist “paradise.” To call it soulless would overstate its allure. It has no cross-streets with small shops; instead, groceries must be sought in nearby malls. Nor is there true homeownership here; one owns a share of a huge apartment complex and must hope, as with public housing, that it is well-maintained, lest the value of the initial investment fall. One indicator of the popularity of AOC’s vision: at a time of sharply rising housing demand, median prices for Co-op City units last year fell 43 percent. Still, Ocasio-Cortez hopes to see this model replicated in “big cities and small towns across America.”
Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Smith have dressed up their proposal as “social housing,” in European parlance. But it’s just a rebottled version of America’s failed experiment in public housing—a New Deal-era idea, based on the belief that the private housing market could not meet the needs of most Americans. Like Co-op City, this model envisioned institutionalized living set not in a neighborhood but in a “campus” or a “city without streets,” as modernist architect Le Corbusier extolled. The details of the Ocasio-Cortez vision actually mimic those of public housing. Her housing projects would be financed by federal borrowing and managed by nonprofits, including local governments. Rents would be limited—just as in present-day public housing—capped at 25 percent of household income.
Leave aside how Americans have shown no desire to live in these sorts of modernist complexes. These buildings looked good back when Franklin Roosevelt cut the ribbon on the first major complex in Atlanta. By capping rents, the local housing authorities that managed the projects—already inefficient, and many corrupt—found themselves starved of maintenance monies. The result was deferred maintenance on a tragic scale, such that, by the 1990s, Congress authorized the demolition of thousands of units of “severely distressed” public housing.
In promoting a new version of government-financed and managed housing, Ocasio-Cortez has to ignore the failure in her own front yard: the New York City Housing Authority. That authority, home to at least 360,000 tenants in more than 177,000 apartments, needs an estimated $80 billion in repairs to deal with rampant leaks, mold, and rodents. The authority has also long been plagued by corruption. Last month, the New York Times reported that NYCHA, over the objection of its own board chair, contracted to pay a politically connected security-consulting firm $154 million to station guards to be on the lookout for fires, apartment smoke detectors notwithstanding. Ocasio-Cortez would no doubt argue that public housing has been deprived of federal funding, but that claim ignores the stubborn fact that, when public housing was originally built, resident rents were expected to cover maintenance costs.
To realize AOC’s vision, the government effectively would have to abolish local control of key zoning and planning decisions, lest local residents oppose the new projects. The government would also have to seize private lands to site the new projects—another fatal flaw of the original public-housing initiative, which required the demolition of hundreds of low-income neighborhoods. Progressives derided these neighborhoods as slums, even as they hosted numerous small businesses and owner-occupied homes and possessed rich local histories.
Ironically, Ocasio-Cortez and Smith get to the heart of the problem, if only in passing: “For decades, thanks to restrictive zoning and rising construction costs, we simply haven’t built enough housing,” they write. Now they’re onto something! The solution, of course, is not to get government to replace the private housing market—which has enabled 65 percent of Americans to become homeowners—but for government to stand aside and let the private market work.
Photo: formulanone from Huntsville, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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