Problems in credible commitment

If you can credibly commit to punishing, you won't have to do it. If you can't, then you'll have to, but you won't be able to, and that'll be a problem. 

A couple of weeks ago, Newsroom reported on problems in state housing. The state housing provider, Kainga Ora, has had to spend about $300k on security guards during Auckland's lockdown. Why? Because they don't know how to deal with part of the cross-section that shows up in state housing.

For the real reason, on top of a violent home invasion linked to the complex shortly after tenants moved in, an email trail in a follow-up official information request is more compelling: a dispute stretching months between neighbours and the agency over general behaviour - in particular, one tenant and her visitors.

And not just neighbours either. Other state tenants, looking for peace and quiet in pleasant new homes, were as upset as anyone by late night noise, rowdy visitors, partying, drunkenness, abusive behaviour, lockdown breaches and suspicions of criminal behaviour.

With the gate excuse quietly shoved aside, the corporation was more candid in its second attempt to explain the security presence at Asquith Ave: “Security guards have been deployed at this site to mitigate anti-social behaviour. The primary focus is to provide for the safety and security of vulnerable tenants.”

The email trail identified one “risk related” tenant among “many vulnerable” others and indicated problems had been drifting on for months.

Which begged the question asked by neighbours: why not move her, and any other irresponsible and anti-social tenants, and let the problems go with them?

It took until mid-September before Kainga Ora apparently decided enough was enough and the problem tenant was shifted – presumably to cause friction elsewhere. One suburb’s solution becomes another’s headache.

You'd think good behaviour would be part of the quid pro quo in being given a home by the state. 

If the state could credibly commit to excluding antisocial jerks from state housing, behaviour among some of those tenants would change. But the state cannot do so. The person who made the neighbours' lives miserable would have a made-to-be-compelling sob story to provide to newsmedia on being evicted with nowhere else to go. There would be demands that a house be found, especially if there were a child in the house. And so the state doesn't exclude.

I wonder whether an alternative mechanism might be helpful. You could imagine Kainga Ora setting the equivalent of a body corporate for residents in the development, and that governance body having the ability to evict a resident on secret ballot of neighbours. If someone were then so evicted, reporting on it would be different. Instead of getting sad stories from the person evicted, and a bureaucrat who can't say much because of privacy considerations, there'd have been some majority of neighbours who triggered the eviction. 

I'm not sure whether that could work either - there can presumably be all kinds of reprisal mechanisms and consequent difficulties in coordinating collective action. But the status quo holds a lot of vulnerable people hostage to the biggest jerks in the area. And it also helps ensure that state housing gets opposed by potential neighbours fearing that the state does a poor job in dealing with its problem tenants.