iStock photo

That darling of progressives everywhere, AOC rose to national prominence with her pie-in-the-sky Green New Deal.

Now Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is turning her attention to the nation’s housing crisis with a similar mix of partisan zeal and fanciful thinking.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Ocasio-Cortez offers both a diagnosis and a grand solution to what may be the country’s biggest challenge, out-of-control housing costs.

Sure, there’s a single line about calling out rising construction costs and restrictive zoning rules as the reason for the housing shortfall.

But given the rest of the congresswoman’s argument, it’s pretty clear what she sees as the main problem – greedy real estate investment firms and developers driven by the profit motive.

“Outsourcing development to the private market leaves affordable housing subject to the boom-and-bust cycle of private investment,” Ocasio-Cortez writes with Sen. Tina Smith, of Minnesota and a fellow Democrat. “The result is a housing market where corporate landlords make record profits while half of America’s 44 million renters struggle to pay rent.

And Ocasio-Cortez’s solution? You guessed it: removing the profit motive, in this case by funneling who knows how many hundreds of billions of dollars – it’s not spelled out – to nonprofits around the country.

A Redirect of Fannie, Freddie Funds?

Armed with bucketloads of federal dollars, all these little groups and local housing authorities would preserve or build 1.25 million housing units, the New York representative and the senator from Minnesota write.

Where exactly all this money would come from is another matter – it’s not spelled out in the piece.

But there’s a clear hint at the potential source – the “up to $150 billion in [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] financial backing” that flows “to the multifamily rental market every year.”

And “much of it,” the piece notes, goes “to large, corporate landlords” – progressive code for evil money-suckers.

You don’t have to be a housing expert or an economist to spot the flaws in this vision for spurring a massive surge of home and apartment construction across the country.

Federal, city and state governments have an atrocious track record when it comes to maintaining public housing projects, a sad record on display from Boston to San Francisco.

Myriad little municipal housing authorities across Massachusetts haven’t done much better with the tens of thousands of units they oversee, with a significant number so decrepit now that bulldozing them seems like the only viable option.

Of course, federal investment in public housing fell off a cliff in the Reagan years and never recovered, while in Massachusetts, local housing authorities have been starved of funds by Beacon Hill for years as well.

Yet even with that caveat, the track record has been less than inspiring.

Scott Van Voorhis

Public Actors’ Poor Track Record

And when it comes to building new affordable and public housing units, there are some real horror stories there as well.

Just take the nearly $1 million cost that the Cambridge Housing Authority spent over the last few years to build the Jefferson Park public housing project, per the Cambridge Day.

And there were no land acquisition costs for that project, either, since the city already controlled the site.

All that said, there are a lot of community-based nonprofits in Boston and across the state that have done a fine job of building affordable housing.

But they are also relatively small players in a very large market and unlikely to have the capacity to build the huge amounts of new housing envisioned by Ocasio-Cortez and Smith.

There’s certainly a place for these builders, and for state and local housing authorities developing some of the new housing we need.

But to count on them alone to build the millions in new homes, apartments and condominiums we need across the country, both affordable and market-rate?

Not a chance.

For that we are going to need the scale and expertise of all those big, for-profit “corporate landlords” that progressives love to hate on.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.