Allow city to build public housing

Prop K allows the city to build public housing.

Public housing is one of the worst ways to spend public funds. Since it is always oversubscribed, it’s allocated by lottery, leaving people on waitlists for years or decades. People who want to be considered often have to apply for each new opening, getting their hopes up for almost-certain repeated rejection. There’s also evidence that public housing generates anti-immigrant sentiment, since it’s such a visceral, tangible zero-sum assistance policy.

Since Prop K doesn’t raise any revenue, it takes money away from better policies. For example, for the $500,000 or so it would cost to build a single public housing unit, San Francisco could expand its basic income pilot to an additional 100 artists. For the cost of four units, it could reopen its Working Families Credit, a cash transfer for low-income San Franciscans, to all 8,000 families who qualify, not just those who haven’t claimed it in prior years. For the $5 billion it would cost to meet author Dean Preston’s goal of 10,000 public housing units, it could become the first jurisdiction in the continental US to offer a child allowance, giving $300 per month for each child in the city for more than a decade. These broad-based transfers don’t rely on lotteries or waiting for approval and hodgepodges of funds, they simply reduce poverty and inequality in an empowering way.

Reject Prop K to force city officials to invest government resources in more productive ways.