The Cost Containment Factors of Public Housing

Federal funding for a long time was limited to capital construction costs meaning that PHAs had to pay for maintenance and upkeep through tenant rents. In this effort to protect the private real estate industry from the get-go of public housing creation there were really sharp limits on how much money could be spent on public housing construction per unit. This led to site designs that emphasized high rises over low rise development that emphasized cutting corners in terms of construction techniques and in terms of materials used. One of the outcomes of that obsession with cost containment at the front end is that a lot of public housing that was built in the 50s and the 60s was pretty poorly designed and poorly constructed and therefore began to age