Some political scandals do little more than confirm that even the high and mighty are just like the rest of us.  But the best scandals are those that illuminate more than human frailties.  The best scandals speak to failures of public policy itself.

When Gidget lifted her shirt, she did more than expose Peter Blute’s penchant for too-hard partying on the public dime; she exposed a culture of arrogance and entitlement at Massport, an agency that has for decades done anything it wants with minimal public oversight.

The scandal du jour is Matty O’Neil, the chief of staff for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, purchasing a home in Charlestown that was built with public money and was supposed to be set aside for those with low incomes.  Single and with a salary of $91,789 a year, O’Neil is not, by any stretch of the imagination, among those we call “low income.”

But the real scandal is not that the BRA has failed to exercise sufficient control over who is buying subsidized housing.  The real scandal is Boston’s housing policy itself.

Mirroring policy set by the federal government, Boston has spent millions trying to create a different class of housing.  Some call this “affordable” housing.  Others, more accurately, call it “subsidized” housing.  The blunt truth is that it is supposed to be housing for poor people.

Thus, the city is littered with federally-sponsored and city-administered housing projects which, to be blunt again, were little more than ghettoes where we kept poor people and isolated them from the community at large.

Some reformers, acknowledging the travesty of this policy, pushed for mixed-income developments - projects where some units were intended for the poor while others were to rent at market rates.

It’s a better approach, but it’s no solution.  It assumes that poor people always will be poor, that circumstances never change.  Yet circumstances do change - indeed, smart public policy should do everything it can to help poor people become richer.  So what happens when the once poor person in a subsidized apartment gets a decent job?  Do we kick the family out, uprooting them from a place that is not a house but, as real estate agents like to say, a home?  Or do we let them stay, thereby losing a unit of subsidized housing that could be better used by some other family that is still poor?

Moreover, the incentives such a system creates are bizarre.  Matty O’Neil paid $158,462 for a three-bedroom waterfront home that is probably worth a half a million.  Forget for the moment that he's not one of the deserving poor.  I sit here steaming about this, wondering what I am doing wrong.  I would love to live in a waterfront property. I would love to have three bedrooms.  I would love to get all this for $158,462, with only $12 down. I can't get this. Why?  I’m not poor enough.

Creating this second system of subsidized, below-market houses ultimately creates an underground market where those people who are in the know get the best properties.  It happened during rent control in Cambridge and, notoriously, still occurs in New York.  And I will bet that the subsidized, below market homes are being sold to family and friends or, if to a third party, with some kickback involved.  Needless to say, none of this activity has anything to do with helping poor people.

So what should we do instead? When poor people are hungry, we don’t make them go to different supermarkets or eat in different restaurants.  We give them money or, because there is this somewhat paternalistic sense that poor people can’t be trusted to spend their money correctly, we give them food stamps.

That’s what we should do with housing.  The problem with poor people and housing isn’t the housing.  It’s that poor people have no money.  The long-term solution, of course, is a decent education and a well-paying job.  The short-term solution is a voucher or some other direct subsidy.

The federal government has played around with so-called “portable” housing vouchers, which work well but are limited in availability.  Here in Boston, we have a few such programs; for example, we offer property tax breaks for elderly, low-income homeowners.

The bottom line is this: A smart government would do two things.  First, it would do everything possible to encourage developers to build housing throughout the city.  As that supply expands, average housing prices would inevitably drop.  Second, it would target poor people, giving them a voucher or some other subsidy so they can afford a home.

That’s a sensible public policy.  The scandal, of course, is that our present housing policy makes no sense at all.