Technology

But what is the cost of housing?

Land, labor, and materials.

Where do the materials come from to build the housing?

Via natural deposits of resources.

Where does the labor come from to build the housing?

Via expertise accumulated by individuals through education and practice.

And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market?

No. Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay.

Again, no. That's not how public housing is allocated or valued.

And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

Areas become desireable through their improvement. Public housing transforms vacant real estate into a desirable place to live.

On the flip side, residents do a poor job of maintaining housing when they lack the time, the expertise, the resources, and the energy to keep it up. This is not unique to public property by any stretch. Private homes also fall into disrepair when the owners lack upkeep skills or the money and time to provide proper maintenance. State and municipal governments pay enormous sums to affect "Slum Clearance" in order to evict and renovate low-income housing into property desirable for high-income investment. And federal governments subsidize the financial wing of real estate even more heavily.

We're happy to spend absurd GDP-buckling sums to financialize real estate to the benefit of a handful of magnets. Surely you can see the virtue in paying a fraction of these sums to mobilize a professional workforce capable of maintaining property at-cost.

Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world.

It is exactly the opposite. Given the political authority and the financial resources of a major metropolitan city, providing at-cost housing and maintenance is downright trivial. But acquiring that political capital is the challenge, as you are fighting the economic propaganda of a thousand fiscal parasites who have all grown fat off privatization.