When a politician pushes for affordable housing, what is their motivation? We'd like to imagine it's altruistic and ideally in some cases it is. But in practice

When a politician pushes for affordable housing, what is their motivation? We'd like to imagine it's altruistic and ideally in some cases it is. But in practice, there is near invariably a major political motivation. The 'job' of politicians is to accumulate votes, which lets them stay in office. And so the outcome of spending directed towards housing is, from their perspective, going to be measured in terms of the accumulation of votes. For one of the most clear examples of this, the Civil Rights Act was championed by LBJ. LBJ was for his part an overt and outspoken racist [1]. I mean a real and genuine racist, not somebody making politically incorrect comments here and there. But he felt that passing the Civil Rights Act would work to his, and his party's, political benefit. The reason I mention this is because I think you need to consider motivations when determining which system is more desirable. What is Microsoft's motivation? It's not the short term gain of capital, since they could earn more elsewhere. And it's also unlikely to be an extremely long term purpose, since those aren't the sort of ideas shareholders often look too kindly upon. I think it's probably similar to what somebody else mentioned. They want to ensure there is a stable supply of low-skill low-earning employees that can provide affordable labor for local companies (including Microsoft) and for their employees. And they're looking at achieving this in the not so distant future. I find this motivation much more desirable, since sustainability and progress is key. In politics there are many people will keep voting for parties that they perceive as giving them things, even when there is no tangible progress being made decade after decade. Because of this, progress becomes secondary to the act of being perceived as giving ostensibly towards achieving progress, especially as politicians are giving people things with other peoples' money. But for a company, success is going to be quantified in ways where progress is all that matters. If this affordable housing is ineffective, worsens the social situation in the city, or whatever else - then they will have effectively wasted half a billion dollars of their own money. They have a major incentive to make sure this works. The short version of this is that I definitely don't see affordable housing being sponsored by private interests as being contradictory. On the contrary I'd expect to see far better outcomes from the private than public sector on issues like this when there is a significant private industry benefit to be had from affordable housing. [1] - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/