I’m listening to a presentation on a gigantic housing grant my city is applying for. (PRO Grant from HUD, if you’re familiar). They’re proposing spending millions on regulatory reform to promote missing middle housing, which, ok fine, that’s a big task in a major city, but that should already have been done in 2023. Other money would go towards vague stuff like an accelerator program for bipoc affordable developers. After all of that, they’re proposing only 120 “deeply affordable” (under 30% ami) units with the grant.
We have a shortfall of tens of thousands of those units in our city, and this multimillion dollar federal grant would fund just 120.
JUST FUCKING BUILD PUBLIC HOUSING CO-OPS
I swear the neoliberal public-private partnership brainworms these people have is beyond terminal. “We have to strategically leverage this potential pot of funding” no you fucking don’t
The Bay Area’s notorious for a push-pull between NIMBYs and YIMBYs, which aren’t as diametrically opposed as you might think because both of them have a “fuck the poor” motivation behind what they want to approve or reject in their districting turf wars.
Housing prices remain obscene, and because that is good for the assholes that already own houses, of course one of the mandates is “affordable housing sounds good but anything near me must remain expensive.”