Observation: financing for future public housing needs to include a quasi-trust fund assembled at the point of construction to be held back for life cycle maintenance. It's clear govts can't be trusted to keep up sufficient maintenance otherwise. /1
/2 Sidebar: truthfully, you could say the same about most North American public capital projects. Notably, one of the plus points of a Cdn-style P3s is supposed to how they build-in financing for that very same maintenance gap. People/govts who hate P3s could mimic that benefit -
/3 - in design-build or conventional projects by plugging in the same maintenance trust fund idea into overall financing, but without a *contract* for maintenance built in (which has some advantages and disadvantages better discussed elsewhere).
/4 But the particular issue with deferring maintenance in public housing is, of course, that it puts people at risk, reinforcing the very sort of health, safety & social problems that you're trying to resolve by bringing people into govt-$/operated housing in the first place.
/5 As an ex-budget guy who has seen this movie before, I know the reply will be, "but that will make projects more expensive." And that's where the comparisons to P3s are interesting; apples to apples, it doesn't. One of the flaws of conventional 20th C infrastructure models -
/6 - is precisely the bias toward up-front construction costs without consideration for life cycle costs. Ultimately, excluding future maintenance costs in decisions and financing models undercounts the true cost of projects, not the other way around.
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