Maya Dukmasova recently published at Slate an interesting piece about the potential for current trends in affordable housing policy to tear apart the social capital of low-income people. She makes the Ostromian point that policymakers’ lack of understanding of the informal institutions that govern communities makes it likely that government housing policies are likely to have unintended consequences.

Her policy prescription to improve living standards through a “truly progressive understanding of poverty” that respects the institutions that underlie social order in low-income communities fails to acknowledge that housing policy to date has been led by progressives under the ideas that government can improve social organization over what voluntary civil society achieves. Hopefully today’s progressive housing policies of encouraging lower-income people to purchase homes, housing vouchers that can only be used in middle-income neighborhoods, and inclusionary zoning will be less detrimental than slum clearance. However, as Dukmasova points out herself, these latest policies all seek to break up current low-income neighborhoods, thereby reducing the strength of residents’ support systems and potentially making life more difficult for beneficiaries.

The long, failed history of housing policies designed to engineer the lives of low-income provide ample reason to be skeptical of new policies designed to break up concentrated poverty, as Dukmasova demonstrates. Unconditional cash transfers provide an alternative. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget is nearly $50 billion per year. Devoting some portion of these resources to cash transfers that low-income households could spend either on improving their housing or on any other goods that would improve their lives provides an opportunity to break with the failed, paternalistic policies of the past. Unlike slum clearance, public housing, or housing vouchers that require recipients to move to a new neighborhood, cash transfers do not disrespect the autonomy and ability of people of all income levels to make decisions that benefit their own interest.