A Stitch in Haste

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."
--Jane Jacobs

I've blogged previously about how rent regulation, at least as it is practiced in New York State*, not only violates the most rudimentary principles of introductory economics but also the most rudimentary principles of progressivism. If you love the poor, then you should hate rent regulation, since it doesn't help the poor; it helps renters — who quite often are anything but poor.

But did you know that the same Alice-in-Wonderland logic is also exhibited in New York's other major "anti-poverty" residential program, public housing itself?

The New York City Housing Authority announced yesterday that it wants to raise the rents paid by tens of thousands of its better-off tenants.
...
The proposed rent increases, some as high as several hundred dollars a month over the next two years, would affect nearly 47,000 households with annual incomes ranging from $19,800 to as high as $100,000.
...
The authority, the largest in the country with more than 400,000 tenants, last fixed rent ceilings, beyond which no tenant's rent could climb, in 1989. The aim of those "ceiling rents" was to encourage upwardly mobile families to remain in public housing, cultivating a socioeconomic mix that some say has been crucial to the authority's success.

So the best way to help poor people is by offering public housing to not-poor people? This is a definition of "success," in the same way that the authority running out of money is also a sign of "success"?

And I'm confident that my readers are not so naive as to think that the Politics of Pull plays no role in allocating those "rent-ceilinged" apartments.

How does the saying go? "Great socialism — if you can get it."

If you really want to maximize the housing stock available to and affordable by poor people, then your first, most urgent priority should be to get upper-income people out of middle-income housing and middle-income people out of lower-income housing. And the most straightforward ways to achieve that are, first, by scrapping all rent regulation in private housing and, second, by means-testing public housing.

Either that, or fess up and acknowledge that you don't really care about poor people at all, but merely those lucky few, regardless of income, who win the interventionist housing lottery.

(The idea of homesteading public housing, thereby giving the poor some direct economic empowerment through marketable property rights, is far too delusional utopian for this blogpost. Some other time, perhaps.)

(*Contrary to popular belief, rent regulation in New York is governed by state law, not city law, and there are a handful of rent-regulated apartments in cities like Buffalo and Rochester, not just New York City.)