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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.

I think the problem you are alluding to only exists in rapidly gentrifying cities with already high housing costs, like Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco.

Here in Pittsburgh there is no shortage of rotting old mill towns or decaying urban neighborhoods where one can find a cheap floor. They can all go to Detroit and buy a house for a buck.

I have also heard of this problem in tony resort towns like Vail, Colorado. An ongoing shortage of valets, waiters and cleaning women for the 1% because there’s no place they can afford to live within 90 miles. But again, isolated instances.

We get the government the hell out of the housing market. We get the feds, at least out of the business of welfare and reparations totally. The market will take care of the housing and housing will be more affordable to people who go get and hold jobs. The hopeless criminals will not thrive when there is not a welfare population to sustain them. You don’t have to tear down the projects. Just quit building them and financing them. Turn them over to the residents and walk away. Let the residents do what they will with them or leave them. End the incentives to stay in them. Whether people choose to work or to starve is NOT the business of the government in the system instituted in 1787. Put together it is to end the WOP in one action. Cut it off and withdraw the government from all of it.

It depends on whether the low income is due to a low paying job or to welfare payments. The generations who have been on welfare have no clue how to obtain or keep a job. Things such as how to dress for a job or that one needs to arrive at work on time are taking for granted among non-welfare types, but the welfare generations don't have knowledge of these basic aspects of having a job. They also don't have a feeling of responsibility for the property they are living in. That is why, even if they are provided an initially nice place to live, it quickly turns into a dump. Putting Section 8 folk in high-end real estate is a bad idea all around.

I am sure there are a lot of low income earners/workers who would love to live in low crime neighborhoods. Those are the ones we should initially try to help. They are good people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Dems may have gotten their votes by buying the welfare rolls, but the Dems have not actually helped these people in the long run. We now have the (unintended) consequences of the WOP, and, as usual, the Dems refuse to take responsibility for the mess they have created.