That is a good idea that requires careful attention to make sure it has near-perfect execution. Because we do that, and they are called 'the projects'.
If the government just went on a building binge of housing to be sold at market rate, or even set an upper bound before qualifying to buy them at a middle class income, it’d work out fine. That’s basically how Singapore does it only they couple it with somewhat aggressive policies to encourage people to downsize their living situations once they’re empty nesting to free up family dwellings for people with families. We probably wouldn’t need to do that second part since we’re not a claustrophobic island, and could just count on natural turnover.
I'm curious to see how Austin will do in the near future by that same metric. More people can afford a place that will let them pay rent, although now at least some of those people will be living in someone else's basement or garage. These may not be very nice places to live, but they may be all some people can afford.
They've also removed the regulation requiring a second way out of a burning 5 story building. Austin faces an increasing number of red flag warnings and has the 5th highest wildfire risk in the US. It remains to be seen what removing that second exit route will cost in the charred corpses of families.
Austin is also cutting corners on permitting which is great news if that was all needless red tape that can be rushed or skipped without cost, but if new apartments built today are (or soon become) deathtraps due to lax code enforcement that could be a major problem down the road.
Austin has already lowered rents which is great, but hopefully it was also done right and it doesn't result in more people being forced into substandard housing or increased deaths. As long as it doesn't, other cities should look into trying some of the same things Austin has done.
This has been well studied. Requiring two stairways significantly increases costs, constrains layouts, and is not actually safer: https://www.pew.org/-/media/assets/2025/05/single-stair_repo...
The real estate industry is in huge support of this particular reform, and they stand to massively profit from it, but the people who are strongly against it include The International Association of Fire Fighters, the National Association of State Fire Marshals, The International Association of Fire Chiefs, and The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. These are the people who are most informed about the dangers and risks involved and in what safety measures are required to save lives and fight building fires effectively.
The report itself does make some very good arguments like how much safer modern construction has become, and also some rather weak ones (for example it ignores the poor quality of data on fire and smoke related fatalities in the US, as well as important differences between the US and Europe) and I'm not even saying that single stairwell buildings can't ever be made safely, but if safety really wasn't a problem we wouldn't see a lack of support from firefighters who are the actual experts in this space. Until they are convinced of the safety of these reforms real estate developers are going to have a hard time convincing me.
Here are a couple of their objections:
https://www.iaff.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/JointStateme...
https://cityclerk.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2025/25-0247_pc_IAFF...
When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data.
Not quite. That's only true if you are housing people who ended up homeless due to bankruptcy or similar reasons (lost jobs, medical issues, etc). If you have people who are homeless due to sever addiction, you just end up with more OD deaths. You have similar issues with people with sever mental illness.
The homeless are not a monolith and different parts of the population need different solution unless you really really don't give a f*ck about them.
There's an alternative approach which mirrors the public healthcare concept of "public option". Instead of restricting government housing to means tested individuals or specific low income populations, you develop a public competitor to drive prices down and to eat costs in regions where housing is needed but the economics just don't make sense yet.
i.e. the US Postal Service model. It works extraordinarily well as long as you don't repeatedly capture and handicap the org/agency (like has been done to the USPS). And even with the USPS despite being severely handicapped it still provides immense value by driving prices down while maintaining the essential service of last mile delivery.
A similar approach could be envisioned for a public construction agency.
Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
Agreed but even despite that they generally are a net positive.
> Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
The same postmaster general who is a longstanding board member at FedEx.
And the US Post was still an extremely effective agency for well over 150 years, only truly beginning to become shackled when Nixon transformed it into the USPS in the 70s, and even then it retained most of its efficacy until the 2000s and 2010s when it truly began to fall onto its last legs.
But also despite being shackled the way it currently is, it's not exactly nontrivial to reform it provided there was any political momentum towards doing so. So it may get its legs back in the days following this administration.