Public-Private Housing Partnership

Public-private housing partnerships typically involve collaboration across different sectors of the nation's political economy, including federal, state, and local governments and/or nonprofit and for-profit investors or institutions. For any given project, these collaborations may involve all or a share of these actors. Such partnerships have become the dominant mechanism in the United States by which housing for those whose incomes are inadequate to purchase shelter themselves are provided aid. Profit-seeking individuals and firms offer the largest share of dwellings of all types in the United States, except for this subset of the housing market. This entry suggests the major reasons for this orientation to public policy in the United States, while outlining the central conditions it creates for housing provision for the poor.

Three underlying factors have been largely responsible for this policy scenario in the United [Page 575]States. Foremost among these is the value among Americans that public policy not work will undermine incentives for individuals to pursue work and to support themselves. This attitude has been traced widely to the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601 in England, which viewed poverty as the result of character flaws or inadequate individual efforts. Many Americans still embrace that core claim, and it therefore continues to influence U.S. social policy, which remains characterized by debate concerning whether public support to the poor might undermine individuals’ willingness to work. That fear has revealed itself in lower income housing policy by the imposition of strong requirements that individuals demonstrate a willingness to work if at all possible if they are to qualify for public assistance. This value played a central role in the national government's decision formally to remove any entitlement to income assistance for the poor in 1996 after 60 years of contrary public policy. Housing assistance to the poor has been shaped by the same abiding concern.

A second value that has influenced housing policy for those in poverty and that underpins the nation's reliance on partnerships for its provision today is Americans’ general reluctance to undertake government policies that would unduly interfere with the workings of the marketplace. In this view, the marketplace is seen as typically the most efficient and effective provider of services to the nation's citizens. This attitude dates to prior to the country's founding and has been reinforced in recent decades at the national level by the federal government's attempts to minimize governmental involvement in the market, thus favoring private sector (for-profit and nonprofit) action. When governments do act, this orientation favors doing so via nongovernmental actors or by indirect means such as tax policy.

Neoliberal claims are in turn tied directly to a third core American value, suspicion of government. That concern is itself aligned directly with enduring apprehension that public actions not undermine individual incentives to work. Neoliberals have sought to reduce the role of government at all levels and particularly in its provision of assistance to the poor on the view that such support, except for the most afflicted, has historically proven inefficient and unwise. As a result, national support for public housing for the needy was reduced sharply during Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980s and has essentially been stagnant or declining relatively in real terms since. Advocates of this view and its accompanying reduction in direct federal support have argued that the nation can obtain more effective housing provision for the poor by encouraging nonprofit and for-profit actors to collaborate with government at all levels, especially the states and localities. The result has been a curtailed direct national role in housing provision accompanied by a stronger role in providing tax incentives.

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