When it comes to “affordable housing,” politicians love selling the public on more mandates, larger subsidies and ever-more government “solutions” to the crisis.
However, in reality, those are the very types of policies that caused much of our modern troubles with home affordability in the first place.
In this episode of “Free to Offend,” Howard Husock, author of the new book The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It, discusses the way government has systematically destroyed “naturally-occurring” forms of affordable housing. From early Soviet-style housing projects to today’s mix of subsidies and mandates, government intervention has a long history of wiping out the kind of housing options that used to be available to families of modest means.
