Today Donald Trump stands on the rally stage as an ex-president seeking to return to the White House. To most Americans, and to most people around the world, he is known as a viciously right-wing politician. To the extent that people remember his previous career, many recall him as a television personality who played the part of a ruthless businessman. But behind it all, he is and forever will be one thing: a multigenerational real estate schmuck.

Donald’s paternal grandfather, Frederick, got his start in real estate by building saloons and brothels near rail depots and mining towns in Washington State and the Yukon. His son Fred, Donald’s father, built up a Brooklyn- and Queens-based subsidized housing real estate empire that relied on a combination of fraud and racial segregation to achieve its success. Donald made the jump to luxury development in Manhattan through a blend of misbegotten tax breaks and wage theft. His children appear to be reinventing their father’s schemes, including by defrauding investors and overvaluing their developments.

In part as a result of all this — and of the actions of many more just like them — New York is reeling from a deep housing affordability crisis. While mayors and governors have primarily sought to resolve this crisis through zoning reforms, the city’s tenant and homeless movements have pushed for a combination of stronger rent controls, robust rental assistance, and social housing production.

Last year, socialists and progressives in the New York State legislature introduced a bill that would create a “social housing development authority.” This new public entity could build both public rentals and limited-equity cooperatives (on its own or in partnership with community land trusts, unions, and other movement actors) or acquire private housing and convert it into social housing. Although it will likely take years — and a different governor — to make this vision a reality, even its introduction was historic, signifying the first new development strategy by the New York housing left in generations. This fall, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will introduce a national version of the social housing development authority to operate under the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and fund social housing production across the country.

So far, the New York State government has either reacted with outright hostility or offered weaker countermeasures that would pay private developers to build affordable housing on publicly owned land. In doing so, they conjure the era of Donald Trump’s father as a time when New York’s government put its resources toward building housing for working people. But Fred and his ilk are hardly worth celebrating as the pinnacle of housing possibility.

Take Trump Village, the largest and most famous of Fred Trump’s developments. This roughly thirty-acre complex on Brooklyn’s Coney Island included five limited-equity cooperative towers, for which Fred received a $60 million construction mortgage through the state’s Mitchell-Lama Housing Program (worth over $625 million today, adjusted for inflation).

In some ways, it would be fantastic if New York propped up a new Mitchell-Lama program that built the next generation of large-scale limited-equity cooperatives, which offer both affordability and resident control to working-class people. Mitchell-Lama co-ops like Co-op City in the Bronx and St James Towers in Brooklyn remain some of the city’s most treasured sources of social housing. But if we look closer at Trump Village, the cracks in the old system quickly emerge.

First, Trump Village is no longer affordable. Mitchell-Lama housing is allowed to go private after twenty years (though the legislature recently made it much harder to do so). While most operators have admirably opted to stay in the program, more than 10 percent of Mitchell-Lama co-ops are now market-rate. Trump Village left the program in 2007, and today two-bedroom apartments there that previously sold for just a few thousand dollars are now on the market for almost half a million.

Second, the terms of the development were just as murky as you would expect from a Trump family production. The land where Trump Village was built had been previously promised to the Garment Workers Union’s housing fund, then the city’s most active developer of subsidized cooperative housing. Using his political connections in the Brooklyn Democratic Party, Fred got the city to renege on its commitments to the union developer and give him half the land. The site, however, was already home to nine hundred black, Italian, and Irish families. Fred Trump disingenuously offered them space in his new development, knowing that few could afford even the subsidized apartments. Then he got the state to pay the site tenants to move into nearby unwinterized bungalows, which were never meant to be inhabited year-round. During construction, he used shell corporations to rent equipment to himself at an inflated price and passed the cost along to the state.

New Yorkers are right to search for inspiration in prior methods of social housing production, from public rentals to limited-equity cooperatives. But we can do better than resuscitating old systems. The proposed federal and New York State social housing development authorities would draw the best from New York’s history with public housing, newly built cooperatives, and conversions of for-profit housing to tenant-controlled co-ops, while avoiding its greatest pitfalls. They would retain public control over the housing in perpetuity, with residents and workers comprising a large portion of their boards, and they would not rely on con artists like the Trumps to reach their goals. Social housing development authorities may be just a dream today, but at least they’re not another vehicle for the next generation of real estate schmucks.