For the life of me, I will never understand why local and state governments never, EVER think to be proactive and do everything they can to build/increase the housing inventory when their state/city is in the early stage of a boom. It perpetually seems like every city in the US that experiences huge growth (Columbus, Austin, Denver, Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, etc) does not even begin to THINK about about building new housing on a large scale to keep rents and mortgages affordable until it's like 5-10 years too late.
Local and state governments do not "build housing." Private developers do. to be fair, sometimes local govts do waste a lot of money putting a small dent in the problem.
New affordable housing community coming to downtown Lincoln. $52.7 mil for 187 units ($282k per unit), which seems really high per unit according to
this unless they are HUGE apartments, but then that begs the question, why are poor people getting abnormally huge apartments? So they are either way over paying (the answer and we all know it) or they are making way too big of units (highly unlikely and with it's own problems).
So yeah, they can, they just shouldn't, 'cause they're bad at it.
