Affordable Housing

The stalwart progressive Katrina vanden Heuval has pointed out that we have a gargantuan housing problem in the U. S. We have great numbers of people who are homeless, living in substandard housing, or for whom rent eats up an inordinate amount of their income. How do some countries deal with the housing problem? In Vienna, “two-thirds of people live in social housing –– housing built by the government where renters are charged ‘cost-rent’, or the cost of building and maintaining their units.” We could offer options like this in our country, and we would if it weren’t for powerful rich people for whom every measure for the common good is decried as rank socialism, a menace that threatens liberty, decency, and virtue of every man, woman, and child in our great land.