The following is a transcript of the video above, from NPQ’s joint webinar with Shelterforce: “Housing as a Public Good: The State of Social Housing Today.” View the full webinar and read the full webinar transcript here.

Fernando Martí: I think it’s really important for both our cities and our states and for the federal government to begin to look at housing as infrastructure—as part of what makes a city, or a region, work and work well. If you can’t house people, if they are in unstable conditions, that is not good for your economy and for whatever rest of your vision you have for people’s health.

And so it should be, I think, seen as part of the infrastructure, just like transportation is, just like all the other infrastructure projects, which then leads to how do we fund this?

What we’ve done in the United States, this tax credit program has funded…maybe two million units of low-income housing across the United States for folks earning mostly less than 50 percent of the median income in their area. We have a mortgage-interest relief program for homeowners that is the largest federal subsidy for housing of any kind.

That’s what our federal government does. It does homeownership and then it gives tax breaks to rich people so they can invest in low-income housing.

[Affordable housing at scale] is entirely possible, but it requires kind of a change…of how government sees its role. Once you change that, you’ll find the solutions.

So, we need to start thinking about things differently. Whether that is…I’ll put it out there because this is part of the work that I’ve been doing around a public bank—is can we do either just direct subsidies or some combination of direct subsidy: We’re going to build it or we’re going to lend you the money to build it at a very low interest, something comparable to what our treasury bills are or maybe a little higher—3 percent, 4 percent—something that stays on par with inflation.

So, when we modeled this, even in San Francisco, even in a city that has probably one of the most expensive housing construction costs in the country—I think anywhere between $800,000 to a million dollars just to build one unit—if you are not paying the kind of returns that market rate investors want, you can build this stuff.

You could build a lot of social housing, and that’s where that kind of cross-subsidy comes in. Not cross-subsidy for market-rate developers, not cross-subsidy for investors who are trying to get their 16 percent returns, but actually the kind of thing at a scale that we are used to doing as government when we build bridges, when we build sewers, when we build all this other stuff that we consider public infrastructure.

It is entirely possible, but it requires kind of a change or an expansion of how government sees its role. Once you change that, you’ll find the solutions.