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(For a Twitter discussion because I don't want to make lots of tweets.)
Trickle-down isn't *entirely* wrong: if you give rich people money, they'll spend some, which goes to other people. But you'd do more good by giving the money directly to poorer people. Supply-side econ, the idea that cutting taxes on the rich will do more good via trickling than spending the money on public goods, is factually incorrect in USA contexts.
The filtering of housing (or cars, or cell phones) from richer initial purchasers to buyers of 'used' housing etc. is factually observable, at socially significant scales. Just because it sounds somewhat similar to trickle-down doesn't mean it is similar, especially when the choice is whether to build housing for rich people or not build housing at all, which is what most US cities face. A trickle-down analogy would be if our own choices were to print money and give it to rich people or to not print money at all.
Whole neighborhoods have 'filtered' from the middle or even upper class housing of yesteryear to lower class housing of today. The physical structures of housing tend to depreciate, after all, while lasting for decades longer than it takes to pay off the initial financing of their construction.
Now, you might say "wait, wouldn't it be better to build and give housing directly to poorer people?" And it could be, and YIMBYs commonly support more public housing as well as upzoning. But...
If you just give them housing to own, and it's nice, they might well turn around and sell it to richer people, filtering up instead of down. Not necessarily a problem but not what you expected.
If you make rental housing income-limited, the more common approach, then then you risk making poverty traps, where people have to move out if they become more successful. So, there are complications.
Also, for tight housing markets in the US, you have to build a lot lot of housing, costing a lot of up front money, and US governments doing that well, or at all, seems... unlikely. Especially when almost all the land has already been filled by low density private lots; it's a lot easier to make land and money available by saying "you can now build everywhere to four stories and no minimum lot sizes" than by a government exerting eminent domain and building its own projects. (And even then, you're in a US public housing project; Vienna may have nice social housing, but no US city is Vienna.)
And finally, even if you can push through getting a bunch of new public housing, why not upzone as well?
Trickle-down isn't *entirely* wrong: if you give rich people money, they'll spend some, which goes to other people. But you'd do more good by giving the money directly to poorer people. Supply-side econ, the idea that cutting taxes on the rich will do more good via trickling than spending the money on public goods, is factually incorrect in USA contexts.
The filtering of housing (or cars, or cell phones) from richer initial purchasers to buyers of 'used' housing etc. is factually observable, at socially significant scales. Just because it sounds somewhat similar to trickle-down doesn't mean it is similar, especially when the choice is whether to build housing for rich people or not build housing at all, which is what most US cities face. A trickle-down analogy would be if our own choices were to print money and give it to rich people or to not print money at all.
Whole neighborhoods have 'filtered' from the middle or even upper class housing of yesteryear to lower class housing of today. The physical structures of housing tend to depreciate, after all, while lasting for decades longer than it takes to pay off the initial financing of their construction.
Now, you might say "wait, wouldn't it be better to build and give housing directly to poorer people?" And it could be, and YIMBYs commonly support more public housing as well as upzoning. But...
If you just give them housing to own, and it's nice, they might well turn around and sell it to richer people, filtering up instead of down. Not necessarily a problem but not what you expected.
If you make rental housing income-limited, the more common approach, then then you risk making poverty traps, where people have to move out if they become more successful. So, there are complications.
Also, for tight housing markets in the US, you have to build a lot lot of housing, costing a lot of up front money, and US governments doing that well, or at all, seems... unlikely. Especially when almost all the land has already been filled by low density private lots; it's a lot easier to make land and money available by saying "you can now build everywhere to four stories and no minimum lot sizes" than by a government exerting eminent domain and building its own projects. (And even then, you're in a US public housing project; Vienna may have nice social housing, but no US city is Vienna.)
And finally, even if you can push through getting a bunch of new public housing, why not upzone as well?