At scale banks only win as a facilitator of economic growth. As the adage goes they can only 3-6-3 if someone is making at least 7.

For the everyman banks not winning is catastrophic.

It's always been a service.

you should go into real estate development and make a fortune while solving a serious social problem for your country!

Taking on those liabilities is very risky when the next downturn happens and you're stuck with inventory.

> actual public housing programs look like with Singapore and Vienna where rents can typically cost less than 20% of median salaries

It could work, but both Singapore and Austria have less than 10 million people amd have a residency system where you just can't come in from the outside and get your subsidized housing in Vienna or Singapore. Singapore doesn't extend subsidized housing to its foreign residents, even permanent residents, and they make up 40% of the population!

Vienna is a bit better, as it applies it to all EU citizens who are resident in Austria, but you have to have lived at the same address there for 2 years, you just can't come in and claim one.

Most blue metros in the US have a bad combination of high labor costs/low labor availability, high regulatory burden, wealthy conservative inhabitants who oppose construction, and working class people who are convinced that construction is gentrification.

I've been racking my brain trying ti figure out what it looks like for US cities to pull out of the housing crisis, and I think it's either going to take about a generation, or there will be some catastrophic event (Great Depression II, WWIII) that changes the political landscape so drastically that nobody can really oppose housing anymore.