March 22, 2024 - 6:30pm

Flanked by her fellow progressive legislators, House New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled a sweeping set of proposed reforms yesterday under the banner of a “Green New Deal” for public housing, reviving a favourite if outworn slogan of the Left.

On the heels of President Joe Biden’s announcement of housing affordability as a policy priority in his State of the Union address, AOC is looking to advance a pet cause of many progressive housing activists, namely the repeal of the “Faircloth Amendment”, which prohibited the Department of Housing and Urban Development from funding public housing. Though as a policy analysis at the centre-left Brookings Institution has shown, repeal of the amendment would likely have little effect on America’s capacity to construct new homes at scale, public or otherwise — other than perhaps as a symbolic gesture — because the real obstacles come in the form of restrictive local zoning laws coupled with a perennial lack of investment.

Even if AOC’s bill envisions more such federal funds to bolster construction, to the tune of up to $234 billion, it is difficult to see where that funding will come from or how it can be sustained, given the fiscally hawkish mood in Congress. In any event, the bill is less a serious legislative prospect and more of a way for the Left to recover its waning relevance as a political force in America.

This begs a larger question: what happened to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which went from a serious insurgent threat when Bernie Sanders was a presidential candidate to nothing more than a sectarian ideological rump? The answer lies in the morally confused state of the activist culture that animates the contemporary Left, in which an insular class of college-educated professionals continually makes the mistake of believing that its particular worldviews are a stand-in for those of ordinary Americans, and are thus universal, when they are anything but.

For instance, terms used by AOC such as “environmental justice” mean little to working-class citizens looking for shelter in overpriced, mostly liberal-controlled big cities, where this kind of abstruse environmental rhetoric is often used to justify Nimby rules that block new housing. There is also no way to reconcile AOC’s embrace of housing with her virtually open-border stance on migration, which in Democratic bastions like her own New York City has exacerbated an already severe housing shortage and caused extensive social chaos. What’s more, polling shows that homeownership is still overwhelmingly the goal for struggling Americans in the Gen Z and millennial cohorts, who would likely be alienated from the Left’s public housing fixation.

Ultimately, US progressives should remember that the postwar housing boom was made possible by a spirit of radical pragmatism that called on both private and public influence to realise mass homeownership as a bedrock of the middle-class dream, rejecting both laissez-faire and socialist dogmas as untenable in America.

Far from the spirit of the original New Deal, this latter-day version dispenses with all pragmatism and experience in favour of woolly-headed idealism and ideological rigidity — something that could be said just as well for the American Left more broadly.


Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.
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