What Obama is doing is NOT a free-market solution to the need for low income housing. He is taking revenge on behalf of his base against white suburbanites.
I entirely agree. But the underlying problem is real, and you can't beat something with nothing. We are still living in the rubble of the 1960's. With regard to low income housing, slowly but surely we are dismantling the big, concentrated projects that proved so disastrous, both to their inmates and to the surrounding areas of the city. But the housing from which the project dwellers originally came -- much of it wretchedly substandard -- has long since disappeared. We can't simply tear down the projects and dump people on the street.
So where do they go? How do we spread the load so that we do not simply recreate the ghetto in another place? How do we move poor people, often without cars, into reasonable proximity to jobs? At this point in the discussion, there is a tendency -- certainly on this forum -- for too many people to simply go NIMBY. We should be trying to eliminate large concentrations of welfare populations. And we should be trying to link poor people with better schools and job opportunities without resort to forced busing and heroic commutes. That means low-income housing should be dispersed. NIMBY ranters have nothing useful to contribute to this discussion -- and that is exactly what opens the door to heavy-handed coercive measures such as Obama is implementing now.
There is a problem in search of a solution. We need to step up to the challenge.