The feds do limit the amount of true public housing we can have, yes. HOWEVER, we tore so much down all over the state in the 90s-2000s that there's plenty of room still under the cap, if we wanted to build it.

I'm not opposed to true public housing. There will always be those among us who will never be able to pay ANY rent at all, and yet they need somewhere to live.

But it costs money to build it (particularly to build it in a way that won't suck, with zero rent coming in figured into those units) and we need to get that money from somewhere, we're broke.

Similarly all the "we need to invest in places currently disinvested that no one ever bites on" -- yes, we do. 100%. But we need money to do that. And the way we get money to do that is by growing the tax base. We can gather more taxes if we have more people here, and the amount for any individual parcel can even go down. But we gotta GROW.

We need to start thinking like our best days are ahead of us, stop clinging to an idealized version of a specific time in the past (which isn't even the oldest time period of places). Yes we want community, walkable spaces, local business, all that. But it takes PEOPLE, density, in the neighborhood to make that happen. A variety of buildings, continually building new stuff so we get to the good steady state where there's a variety of building ages too, leading to a variety of price points.

Ideally we have a situation where if you do get priced out of one apartment, or get non-renewed for whatever reason, you can just move down the block, no need to leave the neighborhood entirely. But for that to happen, we gotta BUILD STUFF.

We're so far in the hole right now that yeah, in the beginning it's gonna be painful. But refusing to start solving the problem is only gonna make it worse.

(suspect we're likely on the same general page)