Washington Built the Projects. Then It Blew Them Up.
I sell homes for a living. So I hear it every single week.
“Amy, how is anyone supposed to afford a house here?”
It’s a fair question. And politicians always have the same answer. More government.
We’ve tried that. It didn’t work. A new book by Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute tells the story.
It’s called The Projects: A New History of Public Housing. Historian Rainer Zitelmann just reviewed it for the Institute of Economic Affairs. Both are worth your time.
Back in the 1930s, a group of planners and architects decided the free market had failed at housing. They knew better. So they bulldozed whole neighborhoods.
Poor neighborhoods? Sure. But they were full of churches, barber shops, corner stores and working families.
In one cleared area alone, more than 10,000 homes came down. So did 137 food stores, 118 bars and restaurants, and 80 churches.
What replaced them? Towers. No shops. No businesses. No ownership. Just rent.
At first the new buildings looked great. Then the rent didn’t cover repairs. The bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. The Projects became slums. Often worse ones.
Even Catherine Bauer, a top champion of public housing, eventually admitted it. “Life in the usual public housing project just is not the way most American families want to live.”
By 1973, President Nixon said the subsidized approach had failed and hit the brakes. Hundreds of thousands of units have been torn down since.
So what’s that got to do with Nevada? Plenty.
Nevada is short roughly 124,000 housing units. Carson City’s answer? Spend.
In 2022, Gov. Steve Sisolak rolled out “Home Means Nevada.” It was billed as the largest single affordable housing investment in state history.
The price tag was $500 million in federal COVID money. The payoff was about 2,800 new units, plus rehab on more than 1,000 existing ones.
Do the math. Half a billion dollars. A few thousand units. A shortage of over 120,000.
That’s not a solution. That’s a drop in a very expensive bucket.
Now some lawmakers want rent control.
Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui’s bill to cap rent hikes for seniors has been vetoed twice by Gov. Joe Lombardo. And lawmakers just approved a bill draft to try it again.
Lombardo got it right. He warned the cap could cause “ripple effects that disrupt the rental market as a whole.”
Cap the price of something and you get less of it. Less building. Less fixing. That’s not politics. That’s Econ 101.
Housing advocates will say subsidies help families who’d otherwise be stuck. Some do. But they don’t fix the core problem.
And the core problem is land.
More than 80 percent of Nevada is owned and managed by the federal government. Las Vegas is boxed in by federal desert on every side.
Now watch what happens when government gets out of the way.
In September, the Bureau of Land Management sold nearly 940 acres to the City of Las Vegas for $94 million. That land is headed for a planned community of up to 6,000 homes.
Think about that.
The state spent $500 million for about 2,800 new units. One land sale put $94 million into government coffers and could deliver 6,000 homes.
Built by private developers. Not run by bureaucrats.
And there’s room for a lot more. An AEI study found 1.5 million homes could be built on developable BLM land within two miles of Las Vegas city limits.
That’s the answer. Release the land. Cut the red tape. Let builders build.
The planners of the 1930s thought they could design a better life from behind a desk. They were wrong. Nevada doesn’t have to repeat their mistake.
We don’t need more government housing. We need more housing. Period.
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