I ask this question not being sure of the answer. Let me explain:

For almost 45 years, I was involved with Federal and other government programs designed to provide affordable housing throughout the country. I started my career working for the City of St. Louis, moved to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and, for 40 years, dealt with these government initiatives as a private lawyer.

Throughout this time, I often found the federal and other government programs, and the administration of those programs, to be problematic, to say the least. Yet, either as I tried to work with their complexities, or as I represented clients who were tussling with them, I always actively supported the role of the government as an essential player in the housing and community development world. Was I deluding myself and simply engaging in cognitive dissonance?

The United States has always prided itself on the amount of “decent, safe and sanitary” housing available across the country, and the size and general quality of what an average family can afford. Of course, today, we find this pride tarnished a bit because of inflation, the continuation of homelessness, and the high subsidy costs (and therefore the diminution) of federal housing programs when government budgets are so stressed. But, nevertheless, this country has a lot to be proud of.

If there were no government programs to support housing, things would look very different. Entities like FNMA  provides a market for the securitization and creation of a market for mortgage loans, the Federal Housing Administration, the Farmers Home Administration and the Veterans Administration insure individual mortgage loans, and the Department of HUD and other agencies provide direct below income loans to developers and public bodies, or subsidies enabling families to pay rents at levels they could not otherwise afford. All this is crucial.

Of course, it would be nice if all government programs were perfectly designed, adequately funded, and run by government officials who were competent, patient, understanding, and unbiased. But guess what? Most programs don’t meet any of these qualifications.

What made this country work in these areas as well as well as they have has been the interaction between the private sector and public officials. And, in this regard, I usually (not always, but usually) felt that the private participants were more on the ball than the public officials when it came to particular projects, and I felt that the public officials were often overly suspicious of the private participants, thinking that they were trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

I understood this feeling, having worked at both the local and federal levels, and realizing how little government employees in the agencies dealing with housing programs really understood about the private participants’ motivations and needs. I know how little I understood before I joined the private sector myself.

On the other hand, the private participants often had no idea of the financial, time and programmatic limitations and pressures the government representatives were under, whether  because they were given constraints by their supervisors, or whether funding limitations that the private sector just couldn’t understand, and so forth.

In other words, the private and public representatives really did live in separate worldss, but were trying to work together with a high degree of misunderstanding and suspicion.

And, as you can see, between developers and managers on the one hand, the government regulators on the other hand, there was a kind of partnership between them.  And when there is a public/private partnership, it is ofyen the public partner that is the less reliable, as government programs, can so abruptly change or disappear

Without government, essential things can not be done. Working with government, there will always be misunderstandings, disagreements, and constraints. Of course, all should strive to make things go ever smoother. But the conflict is built into having these two worlds have to work so closely together. It is just a price that has to be paid.

So I could spend my days trying to get my clients’ positions to be understood by government officials, to rid these officials of suspicion about what my clients are really trying to do, and to rail against government workers who just don’t seem to get it. I can complain about the limitations of the programs, or the inadequacy of the funding.

But I never wanted to get rid of government. I never expected government officials to violate their own standards just to make my clients happy. And I thought the overall process may be too time consuming, too anxiety promoting, or unnecessarily complex. But as I said, that’s the price to pay.

So I am pro-government, yet I think that government actions are often wrong. I don’t think this is really cognitive dissonance. It is just life.

Did I make any sense today at all?