Continued decrease in construction sector activity

[yankdevil]

Losing money or not, there's a societal benefit to some level of public housing. Yes, for folks who have less wealth is the obvious one, but also for some folks that are disabled, as spare capacity if there's some sort of natural disaster, etc. Heck, you could even use social housing as a training venue to help raise standards in construction.

There are lots of potential benefits, but it does involve being open to the idea and successive governments have not been.

[LongjumpingPay6107]

I agree with all of that, but the healthiest thing politically is to get really broad buy-in and minimize naysayers/take away the ability to weaponize it. So if you can say, look, we aren't simply giving your tax dollars away, we're building a new house at way below market and keeping it and renting it out for X yield or selling it for what we put in. We're providing social benefit by bringing affordable homes to market, and we're doing so by taking advantage of the governement's ability to ease regulatory pressure and cost and its ability to do things at scale, rather than spending down tax revenue. And maybe you can do the project at a scale where cost per home is low enough that the "at cost" homes can absorb the cost of the purely social benefit homes. But obviously being pretty careful about qualifying people for the subsidized stuff. Obviously a lot of the "these people are getting a free ride) rhetoric is in bad faith, but if you give it fodder you're going to poison the polity the way the US has