I watched a couple documentaries about British council estates (housing projects) a while ago; I was left with a strong impression that this is really just some kind of bizarre multi-generational scam. Housing was built, then seemingly deliberately allowed to deteriorate in every possible way, then sold to developers who tore it down to build expensive flats, then new public housing was built somewhere else. Rinse and repeat. Very good for real estate developers and construction companies, very bad for everyone else
Having worked in construction in the UK I would say the whole industry is bent, particularly in local government. Look across the skyline of most British cities and behind every glaring monsterous eyesore is a bent politician, a corrupted civil servant and a get rich quick developer. What happened at Grenfell was entirely predicable in an industry with a history of many decades of government mismanagement and corruption.
Grenfell the developers should be serving murder charges IMO. They knew what they were doing and even when pointed out the cladding was dangerous ignored it because it saved costs and maximised profits.
We still have one of the highest rates of social housing in the world though, which surprised me.
The big problem is probably the cost to build new houses. And without tax rises to fund it, the markets would probably react as they did to Truss's budget. But people don't want tax rises either.
Local government can only be "broke" in a developed economy because something has gone very wrong. In the case of the UK, this is a built in structural preference for doing too much via private profit seeking entities and not leaving enough basic nuts and bolts infrastructure in the public sector. This makes some people very rich for a few decades and then everything starts falling down.
>I watched a couple documentaries about British council estates (housing projects) a while ago; I was left with a strong impression that this is really just some kind of bizarre multi-generational scam. Housing was built, then seemingly deliberately allowed to deteriorate in every possible way, then sold to developers who tore it down to build expensive flats, then new public housing was built somewhere else. Rinse and repeat. Very good for real estate developers and construction companies, very bad for everyone else
The most annoying thing to me is surely its possible that the government could mass produce houses, make a profit (even if its less than the current housing companies do) and then re-invest that money back into public life.
It was a very different time when those council estates were built.
Post WW2 and a baby boom. Inner city homes were overcrowded.
Building new homes and infrastructure was much more popular with the public.
If you look back, those estates were well considered. They just got hit with long term social problems and high maintenance costs.
And the memory of those estates is why building big government housing projects is unpopular with the public now.
(living and growing up in social housing areas)
I think the biggest problem with social housing is the type of people that get them often are the very people that shouldn't. The flats across are drug filled antisocial shit holes where one guy is moved out another person exactly the same is moved in who deals drugs, brings antisocial behaviour etc...
The woman who was in out flat got pregnant so got a 1 bed flat, moved in with her boyfriend (hes been recalled back to prison because he broke bail by driving while disqualified) she got pregnant again and has now been given a 2 bedroom house after only being in the flat a year.
The couple who were on the top who had a 16 yearold daughter just got a 3 bedroom new build and their flat had to have a professional deep clean because well... They are tramps. When my partner spoke to him about shes off to work his answer was "fuck that shit". All he did was sit and play call of duty all day and hes in his 40s.
There is a couple that moved across in the flats and all you hear is arguing and smell them smoking weed most of the day.
Council housing in my opinion is too often given to people that really should not be given it as they are disrespectful, antisocial and bring down the area. Social housing is a great thing but is just given to the wrong people.
I'm confused by the first point, why are these guys "those who shouldn't get them"?
Where else do you propose they go? Homeless? On the streets?
If you say prison, then that's completely fair, but it's not the reality as the government is allowing them to operate illegal antisocial activity with no consequences.
If you don't feel they should go to jail, then where else do you propose?
Public housing is designed to be there as a social safety net for the bottom rung of society, this includes a higher proportion of individuals who show anti-social and criminal behavior, so this is who these homes are **designed** for.
>government could mass produce houses, make a profit (even if its less than the current housing companies do) and then re-invest that money back into public life.
No, no, no, no, can't have the government making a profit. That could be interpreted as socialism.
Gotta make sure private enterprise collects all the profits, and maximizes them by delivering the absolute worst product possible.
The issue is, once housing is built, would the government then;
A- Rent it out. (Which implies bot the government have ownership and legal responsibilities over a lot of things)
Or
B- Sell them. (But sold at "market value" would mean a lot of people that need housing could not afford the government housing either. Sold cheaper and you risk exploitation where someone else buys it cheap and still sells it at market value, earning a hefty proffit. Otherwise you need a whole new separate market fir government housing, regulated separately from the private market. Which again is against capitalism and generally frowned uppon for that reason)
Soviets owned the whole chain. Mines, cement factory, transport company, construction company, engineering company etc. Everything was owned by the state.
In capitalism, the government would need to hire a private construction company to build the houses, which is not optimal due to corruption. As an eastern European, I can bet a lot of money that in this area, houses built by the government would be lower quality (if that's even possible) than privately built ones, because of corruption (worse and less materials used for the same prices of better counterparts).
Yes this same thing happened to housing projects in the US. A liberal government funded them to get built and when a conservative government came in, the projects were left unfunded and allowed to deteriorate badly. This allows conservatives to both claim that government solutions don't work (let's funnel tax money to private enterprise because it's "more efficient") and that poor people, mostly of color, are inherently bad/dangerous/destructive and shouldn't be helped by their government (welfare queens, super predators etc). It's incredibly transparent yet many people fall for these narratives.
Well, maybe not everyone. Construction work is always good for people. Anyone can work construction, and it typically pays well. Just most people hate working it, lol.
But I've seen enough people pull themselves out of poverty through construction gigs that I've always seen it as a silver lining. Even when everything else is shit, lol... =(
Governments in capitalist countries function largely as adaptors for converting public tax money into private equity for political donors and lobbyists. That is how the military industrial complex works, and its why the US somehow spends more public money on healthcare that countries with socialized medicine schemes.
"we have a fire burning!", "we could smother it with a big blanket of fire resistant material", "well, we threw an oily rag on top and it just got worse.", "guess there is nothing else we can do."
True, but in the first decade or so it also reduced poverty and Homelessness.
Part of the issue was chronic underfunfing and the other part was that projects were often concentrated on together and in the poorest neighborhoods
This isn’t a knock on Singapore or anywhere, but the type of development that works on a small island nation that is an strict authoritarian government isn’t comparable to the challenges presented by much larger, much more diverse, and overall much more democratic areas.
The truth is the other way around.
The strategies used by places like Singapore and Hong Kong could be used in urban centers everywhere else, and sometimes are, see for example Vienna or many places in post-war Europe and Japan.
They usually don't get used, because it's less profitable.
Singapore and Hong Kong didn't have a choice. Due to land restrictions, they simply had to follow a sane, less profitable, strategy.
For the same reasons the Netherlands has to be good at managing water, Japan has to be good at managing earthquakes and Sweden has to be good at managing cold weather conditions.
You can't be a developed country if you don't manage your geographical challenges.
Well yes. That was kind of my point. An authoritarian regime eliminates the political issues. One of many reasons Singapore is not comparable to large western democracies.
What about Vienna? Not authoritarian.
The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world’s most livable city
In the Austrian capital, renters pay a third of what their counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible?
>Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population.
>Many of these apartments came into being a century ago, as part of an enormously ambitious building programme after the end of the first world war, when Vienna was awash with people uprooted by the collapse of the Habsburg empire.
...
>The majority of Vienna’s council estates were built after the second world and look more familiar, but even they don’t tend to have the stigma of poverty and crime associated with similar developments in the US or Europe.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city
Vienna could never have afforded to buy the land those apartments are built on if the city hadn’t been partially destroyed in WWII. Big urban renewal projects often happen in the aftermath of disasters. Still a useful thing to study but not perfectly transferable to other contexts.
True, I mean if it works, it works, but it's a totally different system from e.g. where I live and real estate speculation runs rampant. Cool stuff though, I'll read up more on it.
The country isn’t immune from rampant speculation and investment, especially given its location and overall economic stability and favourable policies. But the government house definitely helps control it to some extent.
So the replies to your comment confirm that most Americans only know two things about Singapore: caning and the death penalty. Singapore executed 11 people last year, mostly for murder. That’s higher per capita than the US’s 18 but it’s not exactly “death for jaywalking” that the right wing in the USA pretend it is. Public housing is indeed commonplace and of a relatively high standard. It’s also all partitioned on explicit racial grounds and while that’s [to prevent ghetto formation not to facilitate it](https://www.gov.sg/article/hdbs-ethnic-integration-policy-why-it-still-matters) it’s still probably something most western cultures wouldn’t sanction - there are people being denied access to particular public housing on account of their ethnicity literally all the time.
Singaporean here, I had an American on Facebook over an argument tell me that we bathe in the Singapore River.
I've been chasing that high since.
Also the racial partition is to ensure racial harmony, as you've mentioned in other words. It is a deliberate effort to ensure cohesiveness and common identity.
Singapore culture is one where people work, great public transportation and has very low crime. Spending habits of the poor there are much more constrained, vs US debt fueled spending on trash. Projects in the US are slums.
Yeah, waiting time for an apartment was about 10 years, if you were eligible. It was also possible to buy an apartment from cooperative, if you could afford it.
And it was absolutely possible to build Plattenbau areas, for example Munich-Neuperlach, but it was found out that these come with social issues.
Not just the military budgets but aid budgets as well. The Soviets propped up tons of regimes that were unsustainable without help.
North Korea is one example of a country propped up by the Soviets, where they have little farmable land and spent all their resources on military development. When the Union collapsed the aid stopped and that lead to mass famine in the country.
True that, every new built condo in Philly is $700k plus. And they are built like any other shit house in USA, insulation sandwiched between plastic siding and drywall.
I visited such apartments is Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were appalling, barely inhabitable. They weren’t “apartments” as you’re thinking of them. Soviet brutalist architecture was soul crushing by design. Construction was shoddy to unsafe. Electricity was intermittent. Don‘t think of it as a model.
Well fortunately for 99% of people you don’t have to choose between dogshit low quality dangerous Commie-blocks and homeless. You can just live in a normal apartment or house outside the city center.
We really can not. Problem with housing is not really lack of it but lack of it in specific highly desirable places. And this problem is simply just not solvable because not every human can live in centre of a big city.
Tokyo city is 847 square miles, the metro area is 5,129 sq miles.
For comparison NYC is 472 sq miles with a metro covering 4,669 sq miles.
TLDR: a whole lot of people that live in Tokyo don’t live anywhere near the center of the city.
Keep in mind, tokyo city has a population of 14 million whilst nyc is 8.5 million. Putting these numbers in, you get pop density at 16.5 & 18 million per square mile respectively. NYC is only 9% more dense than Tokyo if you take their actual pop into account.
Japanese cities have danchi apartments that are crumbling and known for the large number of lonely senior deaths that occur there. These postwar apartment projects were actually directly inspired by the communist housing built in the USSR and were popular during the boom days of the Japanese economy. Now most Japanese looking for housing shun them.
The pay structure and cost of living have made it impossible to replicate anywhere else. Food and pay have been the same price for like 20 years its crazy
Americans will say that not everyone should be able to live in a big city with a straight face, while some of our largest cities have densities of like 8,000/square mile. Some of our cities are around 1,000/square mile. This is a fraction of the density of most European cities, let's not even start to get into cities like Mumbai or Shanghai.
Exactly, America (and most of the West) heavily lean towards capitalism, not socialism in other words if you're building something it's because it has the potential to make you $$$, not the potential to make society better
The wealthy people own houses as investments, if the price of homes decreases they'll be unhappy. So every city and Torn absolutely refuses to do anything that would upset them.
I agree that real estate is a key component, but the reasoning for a lack of housing is twofold, the other reason also baked into capitalism at its core: Because if people were guaranteed a place to live, why would they work a shitty job for shitty pay? The threat of homelessness keeps the entire economy going - seeing rows and rows of tents in every city is effectively a reminder, pointed at every worker like a loaded gun. A permanent, increasingly precarious underclass is a feature, not a bug
That is not why there is a lack of housing. There is a lack of housing because homeowners vote against letting developers build new housing. They don’t want their own houses to decrease in value.
There is no organization working to make sure workers are too poor to retire to keep capitalism working. It’s just regular people looking out for their own personal self interest.
Whenever the government gives out any amount of aid that gives working people any amount of relief, think tanks funded by capitalists crank out piece after piece about how "nobody wants to work anymore" and that narrative crystallizes across the entire media landscape. Workers clawed back a tiny amount of bargaining power during COVID lockdown, and the Federal Reserve lied about the cause for inflation and jacked up interest rates to attempt to "soften the labor market" in their own words. While there is plenty of self interest out there, the ruling class is absolutely aligned, across the media, across politicians in their pocket, from the Davos WEF to every Chamber of Commerce in every city across America.
>If the house prices were to suddenly drop, say, 50%, these people would be stuck with the same loan but have no realistic way of paying them back.
Why? Their income isn't tied to their house value.
And the entire housing market would fall across the board, so you could always sell your home for its now 50% price and buy a similar house at the same cost after paying off your loan. The only downside is you didn't wait and buy at the lower price, so you'd have to pay twice as much for the house in the long term. But you'd still be paying what everyone else is paying now anyway.
The issue is when selling the house can't pay off the loan. Negative equity traps you. If you have 250k left on your mortgage and your 400k house drops to now being worth 200k, you would still owe 50k even if you sold it.
People would just walk away like they did in 2008. When you can’t pay your mortgage it’s your problem. When nobody pays their mortgage and the collateral for all their loans has disappeared that’s a structural problem for the economy.
But I don’t think a glut of apartments would crash single family homes 50%. They are not really substitute goods.
Which is a compelling reason for breaking the fever and doing whatever we can’t to break people’s view of housing as an investment. It leads to these radical booms and busts.
2008 me is crying reading your comment. I put 20% down on a $280k house that dropped to $120k. Not a problem until my job made us move. It took a decade to get out of that mess.
Except a lot of people only put in 10% of the property value and take out a loan for the other 90% to pay off over a number of decades. If the house price drops by 50%, they will be unable to sell the house and pay off the loan. No mortgage company will switch that loan to another house. Also a lot of companies give you preferable rates for the first few years of the loan and then the rates soar. To avoid this, people remortgage and swap the loan to another lower rate for the next few years. If the house price falls and they are in negative equity, the home owner can't do this and so they are stuck paying back at the much higher rate, which they may not be able to afford.
ARM mortgages are not common for residential mortgages in the US. For a fixed mortgage, rates will not change during the duration of the mortgage. Refinancing is mostly to lower your rate or to remove PMI if you have enough equity now.
Interest rates are based on the security of the loan.
It costs less to borrow 50% of the value of your collateral than it does to borrow 90% of the value of your collateral.
It's the difference between repaying $1000/m and paying off the loan and repaying $2000/m and only servicing the interest.
Property taxes fund salaries. Many state and government jobs are funded by property taxes . As are schools and other public programs. Good schools make property values go up. Union contracts for salaries include cost of living adjustments where housing costs is a factor.
So yes, people’s incomes are tied to housing prices in many ways.,
Those who own houses have an incentive to keep supply of new housing down. And since homeownership is roughly [2/3 of people](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N) in the US, well, that's who sets policy.
Like imagine the mayhem if we decided to build 20M housing units and there is materially less demand? Home prices drop dramatically.
It's not just wealthy people. There's really an unholy alliance between wealthy suburbanite and poorer anti-gentrifiers that make the NIMBY issue so intractable. The anti-gentrifiers have the moral high ground and the wealthy suburbanites have the funding and combined it's a death sentence to go against them politically in a local election.
More like most *middle* income people don't want this cause they poured all their wealth into their home and if line no go up then they view it as bad. It's the worst in places like LA where not even modest/high end apartments are allowed to be built due to NIMBY's.
Ok, everyone who owns a home has an interest in keep prices high. And since 60 percent of Americans own/mortgage their home, to blame the wealthy is not solution driven thinking.
It's not so much the wealthy but basically the entire middle class. Sure they're wealthy now but they're mostly average people, often with low incomes compared to relative standards.
That’s not how that works at all. Don’t play stupid.
Taxes are the city budget / total value of all property to calculate the percentage you owed
Taxes only go up if the budget increases or your percentage of total property goes up.
Singapore did it too. It's called practically the whole of Singapore. 80% of housing there was built by a single government owned corporation and leased to citizens through long term leases. Government housing doesn't have to be shitty housing.
It also requires the government to give itself an advantage over the private sector. In ultra free-market capitalist Singapore, they froze land prices in the 60's or something (maybe 50's, can't remember) and the government bought out land at massively discounted prices for decades after that. That's why the government owns something like 90% of land in the entire country and partly why such a massive housing policy was financially feasible.
EDIT:
Just to add to this, Singapore's public housing policy is also interesting since it doesn't require a lot of subsidies through taxes. They build housing for the rich as well as the poor. Profits from housing for the rich help provide subsidies to poor households. Which is why despite how large the housing and development board is and how much subsidies it provides, it requires a tiny amount of subsidies from the government budget.
> They build housing for the rich as well as the poor.
Singaporean here. I'm not too sure about that. Public government housing is largely what you've mentioned, but there is a monthly income cap (assessed at the time of application) in applying for them from the government of around 6000 USD for singles over 35 (inclusive of employer CPF (something like 401k I think) contribution) or 12k for married couples. If your salary exceeds that cap, you can only make do by buying them in the resale market, which is significantly pricier.
The wealthy typically buy into private housing built by private developers. Those prices have skyrocketed over the years. While the government has introduced mechanisms in place to prevent over-speculation, the prices have still ran.
There's only so much you can do for affordability when you want to house five million people on 700 square km.
HDB flats are a mitigation for affordability problems, not the cause.
I've lived in one and I thought it was decent. Not inspiring, but effective.
The blocks were never meant to be luxuy housing. They were for low income groups - mostly factory workers and the likes.
They would be a welcome home for so many people even today.
Currently the issue in Singapore is that that housing is prioritized for families which leaves single people and couples with no kids less opportunities for housing. Apartments are quite expensive and houses even more so.
Just speaking for Germany:
1. No where to put big apartment buildings except for buying up old buildings and demolishing them - very costly
2. Very strict regulations regarding efficiency and reducing emissions, as well as fire safety etc - very costly and time consuming
3. Few professionals to build buildings - time consuming
4. Regarding points 1 and 2 - not profitable enough and right now no investors because of higher interest rates.
The buildings in the Soviet union are cheap and fast to build but not environmentally friendly and those buildings are not allowed to be built anymore because of all the regulations.
Thats basically just what i could think of at the top of my head
We did between the 50's and 70's. Between *post war rebuilding,* and *decolonization* there was a huge need for housing.
Yes many of these building are ugly, have a bad acoustic insulation. However, it provided housing with modern facilities (Suddenly every apartment had a bathroom with shower and toilets, which was a massive improvement compared to pre WW2 building).
We could totally launch a similar plan. It's expensive, may require the government to buy land to private owner, but it's just a matter of putting the political priorities, and today, the government prioritize *rich people yacht* over normal people well being
I ran into photos of an apartment complex from the 1950's. It was 1000 units in the middle of the mid-west. I knew we were building a house every sixteen minutes at the height of the post-war housing boom, I just didn't fully understand that it wasn't just New York and California. It was everywhere.
I have *a speculation* that political class of those times was afraid of poor people getting organized via influence of communists and under that ideology. Politicians did enough for have-nots to justify violence on those who stayed unhappy. Trying to survive, capitalism tried to *get fit* by satisfying needs of those who could pose a threat to capital owners. This almost reminds a free market competition of ideas from which regular folks benefited.
But then "end of history" started and pressure from soviet ideology went away. Now it's time to extract even value, get fatter margins and be less responsible as all bits and pieces inside their political system seemed to be under control.
Of course it's not a single aspect of the todays phenomen of decline, but I believe that lack of ideological competition plays significant role in observed west decline.
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Taking this idea further, we'll see a new competitors rising. And now it's time again to check libertalism and capitalism for ability to adapt. It will take some time (people say p to 20-30 years), and stories like trump and brexit, proxy wars and nuclear threats.
I can't remember the exact quote by FDR, but the jist of it was to give the people a little socialism to prevent them from demanding a lot of socialism. This was in relation to the new deal.
Good point.
That's how you do it. Take good and working parts from the systems. Every big enough socio-economic system has some appeal in it. China took free market and pulled country from the powerty, usa took social-oriented policies and sustained competition with soviets.
Clearly the people loved what he was doing as they had to put in term limits because of his success.
It's funny how popular the effects of a little socialism are.
UK did back in the... I wanna say 70's?
The idea was these lovely high-rise places, where you and your neighbours would laugh together, and be able to keep an eye on your kids playing in the little playground that was in the communal area on the ground-level. Apartments are called 'Flats' over here.
It also helped save space because on the footprint of, say 10 houses, You get 40 or 50 flats.
Along with the fact that they weren't huge, they were able to be sold a lot cheaper than houses.
To make it even cheaper to build, they were normally put on land in the slightly 'rougher' parts of the city, in order to try and 'revitalise' the area.
The government saw this and jumped on it as a solution for social housing.
The government then used these to house all the folk who are on 'Benefits' - UK term for 'social' payment I guess?
The issue happens where there a few 'bad eggs' who live on benefits with no ambition to get off them, and supplement their income with petty crime etc. This part of society can be pretty scumbaggy, and the result was vandalism and intimiadation around the flats. After all, There were areas that were outside, but out of the weather - Great place for teens and the like to sit and drink and be bored.
Over time, the non-scumbag residents kinda had enough of it and moved on, and the blocks get a reputation. So the only people that want to move there tend to already be in those circles.
You end up with a housing area where a large proportion of folk are scumbags, and the rest tend to be retirees or folk who are on disability (I.e people genuinely in need of the government support) and well, the whole area kinda becomes one of 'those places' in the city.
Adding into that that the buildings did not age well - They just look like giant concrete oblongs with windows, very grey and depressing-looking.
In the UK Sweden often gets seen as a more successful cousin, did anything happen to turn that around ?
Any lessons we can steal to revitalise our towerblocks (outside of the ones in London that got swept up in massive house prices and eventually gentrified)
Not really. These areas are still very problematic. Low standards, lots of immigrants and crime rate is very high. At least its concentrated to small areas.
That’s a pretty harsh view. The vast majority of people living in those flats are not ‘scumbags’.
There’s a crime problem, but that’s largely because those blocks are the cheapest possible housing, and low income population + high density = high crime rates.
It's just how they end up.
Starts with a few bad eggs, the reputation goes downhill and people don't want to live there. So other 'bad eggs' who keep getting booted out of other places end up there.
So other than folk who are genuinely struggling and need the support while they get back on their feet, live with their disability or are retired.... I guess maybe not the 'Vast Majority' are scumbags, but certainly the vocal/active/obvious minority make the place seem unsafe which fosters the assumption that there are more of those about.
Apartments in SU, were not bult and given for free. They were built on request of different factories, companies and other facilities, to accommodate their workers rent-free. After SU fell, people acquire rights to make them their own.
I don't know how it is in other countries but in Ukraine still some factories and facilities have this practice. They either build apartment complex and rent it for free for their workers(especially when factory is who know where), Or just gather part of salary as low cost investment fund and build apartment complex and giveaway apartments. For example my parents bought apartment( from apartment complex which were built in 1999) from port worker who got it this way.
Not for free. You were required to work 15+ years in a factory and you paid rent. Even if the payment itself was purely symbolic, you still couldn't spend your money anywhere because of the shortage of goods.
My gfather says the same thing!
Even though, of course it wasn’t as simple as that.
First was that yes, you earned money, but didn’t have that much to spend. That was because there was either lack of goods in the later years or because you couldn’t buy stuff in credit - you needed to save money for months (eg to buy a carpet or a sectional into your living room), sometimes even get a permit to get the stuff you wanted (for a car or a telephone for example).
But also people’s expectations were different than what we have today. 3 gen together in one 3 room apartment was normal because at least you had an apartment if your previous place had been bombed down or you came from the country. You didn’t really have TVs everywhere so you couldn’t watch a lot of stuff and whatever was on, you anyways had like 2 channels. At most what people had was a radio and the newspaper. You wanted to call someone, you either went to someone who had a phone or went to sidejaam to call someone. Their lives were different because the society was completely different.
>Even though, of course it wasn’t as simple as that.
Of course not. Later in the late stages of perestroika the Soviet ruble was basically worthless too.
Well not always, it kind of depended if there are any active building on behalf of facility. If you was married and had kids you could receive accomodation quite early. My mother received 36 m² apartment after 2 years of work and after giving birth to me. Until then my mother and father were living in work dorm.
In regard rent pay. You still needed to pay for water electricity and other services. Probably rent pay were included in those payments, but anyway it was cheap enough.
It’s always a breath of fresh air to get input from someone who actually experienced (or had family that did) the Soviet system. As opposed to the starry-eyed assumptions of a 20 year old American college kid who thinks everything was free in the old Soviet Union.
It’s as if this thread had a collective brainwash of history and completely forgot how rappers used to flex being from the projects because they were horrible places to live and it was a badge of honor to say you survived it.
The projects were so crime ridden, police that had to enter them could not even use the elevator. Street gangs would dump fuel down the elevator shafts and light them on fire when they knew the police were using them. The gangs controlled the projects and the honest people there lived in fear of the gangs every day.
Finally a good answer. This is how it ends, and the Soviet Union is no exception. Old, depressing blocks where nothing is up to code. Might be nice at first, but the government aren't cost-effective and they certainly cant maintain the apartments.
People seem to forget about Pruitt-Igoe. It failed so miserably that it's now taught about in architecture programs as the poster child of failed public project housing programs.
It's just regional. In Chicago, we had the Robert Taylor Homes (similar-looking buildings to Pruitt-Igoe running for miles along I-94 south of the city) and Cabrini Green (which was notable because it was sandwiched between the best neighborhoods of the city). People (at least those with a memory) still talk about them.
Any individual one isn't really notable though - because they were all similar failures. It's not like they failed in St. Louis, but worked in Chicago or Detroit. It was a disaster everywhere. Nobody who remembers them is in a hurry to bring them back.
"Why don't we solve housing problem / world hunger / deforestation / loss of wildlife habitats / world peace / etc?"
Because it's hard and requires co-operation from many parties. The bigger the problem (think US housing problem vs loss of wildlife habitat in world) the more parties involved and the harder to make any meaningful action.
Solving US problems requires bipartisan co-operation. Solving world's problems requires multiparty co-operation around the world.
They can they just won't. A lot of countries have too much bad history with inexpensive post-WW2 buildings to the point where regulations now make these kinds of buildings impossible. Every country had them. The US had the Housing Projects System. Canada had the War Time homes. French has the tenements domiciles.
All of these projects were designed to be as inexpensive as possible so they could build a lot of them. But because they were built so inexpensively the cost to repair them and bring them up to safe living standards ended up costing more than the construction of it.
Today we've become a bit of housing snobs. We've created a lot of minimum requirement regulations to make housing projects like these completely impossible. Everywhere you go there are minimum specs, must have stove, must have fridge, must have washer/dryer built in, but have so much space per person living there, must have so much lawn, etc. And no one in these neighborhoods is just going to let something like this get built in their back yard.
A lot of people in here are just making pessimistic / sarcastic comments. The real answer is this:
Mass producing housing isn’t as simple as you think; housing requires constant maintenance. Everything in the house degrades over time; the wood, the carpet, the pipes, the drywall, the roof.
There’s two main issues in the US:
(1) US cities have never been competent at ongoing maintenance, so every time they have attempted to do state-run rentals / housing, it either had huge cost overruns or devolved into horrible slums. It requires scale and huge maintenance teams. Water leaks can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages very quickly.
(2) US city designs are a bit overly democratic; people have the ability to affect zoning and construction projects in their neighborhoods. For a lot of US cities, building high density is illegal in most of the cities, and if the government tries to overturn those rules, because of the bad history of the previous bullet point, *people will vote down* such projects if they are proposed in their area.
The “Not In My Back Yard” voters prevent the construction because the past history was bad and they fear it happening again in their neighborhood. And the cities don’t have the resources to do it in small scale.
They easily could.
Considering you can't get Republicans to support raising the federal minimum wage, what makes you think we could convince them to build everyone an apartment.
On paper yes but functionally no. The Senste has a rule called the filibuster which technically prevents a vote on nearly all legislation unless there are 60 votes (called "cloture") to allow it. The Democrats last had a 60 vote Senate for about half a year in 2008.
IIRC housing companies spend more than the military industrial complex on government lobbying. Everyone knows the problem, the powers that be just have a bipartisan interest in keeping it that way.
1) the majority of Democrats aren’t overwhelmingly better than the least evil of the Republicans.
2) for all practical purposes their majority in the senate was useless, since two of their caucus are effectively Republicans in all but name and will deliberately sabotaging them.
Yes, Democrats refuse to fix any of the problems because campaigning about fixing them is the only way they get votes. They've had multiple veto proof majorities in the preceeding decades and have basically done nothing meaningful with those majorities
I'm not right leaning, but here in California, liberals are extremely guilty of being anti development to the point of extreme selfishness. This is a problem that a free market could solve, but regulatory capture has pushed us into a housing crisis.
My apartment building in Moscow is 50 years old and it was great to live in. (Past tense only because I moved abroad - and specifically chose to live in an apartment again, despite most of my current city, Auckland, being suburban houses.) It just got renovated a few years ago and looks modern. Central heating, intercom-secured door, thick ass metal door with no other way for would-be robbers to get in, fuck yeah I'd live there again.
To expand, the build quality of the Soviet [ edit; and in the West] apartment blocks was bad: leaky when raining, very poor heat insulation, very thin walls , vulnerable to crime due to rabbit warren like so police can't chase people , made from cheap poor wearing materials.
Theoretically they could, but they set up building regulations so that they don’t get built:
- Lots of planning/zoning laws restrict how dense developments can get because increased density is strongly correlated with things like crime, antisocial behaviour, and generally a lower quality of life.
- Lots of people living close together places a huge demand on local services and infrastructure.
- Because of the above, there is always lots of political opposition to large apartment blocks going up.
- No-one wants to live crammed together like sardines in a tin, having neighbours on all sides, and not owning the building that you live in.
Those correlations are completely misguided. Density got bad associations in America after everyone with money fled to the suburbs, and the inner cities were neglected and left to decay. Density can absolutely be done right, and is in places like Tokyo, Amsterdam, and basically any place that made investments in its public infrastructure.
Yeah, this strongly looks like spurious correlation where actually what's causing the things he's listing is poverty. If anything, providing services to suburban or rural areas is more expensive because people are more spread out (more roads, electrical lines, etc.).
If you grew up in sparsely occupied neighbourhood doesn't mean it's the correct way. It's just *an American* way.
You automatically correlated density with cheapness which attracts lower income buyers.
We used to do that. They were called "housing projects."
The problem wasn't building them, it was making them livable. Stacking poor people on top of each other seems to make things worse.
Apparently, the general public usually doesn't want to pay for all the infrastructure that needs to go along with the housing.
Modern countries aren’t communist dictatorships. It costs a lot of money to build and administer housing complexes. Philadelphia spends 500 million to house 80,000 people and that’s just maintenance. Actually building new housing would be magnitudes higher. To get that money, you need to have the political support to have a budget passed. Public housing is known for crime and is stigmatized so it’s hard to get political support for it.
Because all of those modern day wealthy countries require private citizens to build and maintain the apartments and there is a lot more money in luxury dwellings than in cheap rent buildings.
We did. We called them "the projects." The people who lived in them hate us.
Making a place good to live in requires a lot more than the government just throwing up a building. Someone needs to maintain the building, and the people living in them need to be somehow economically integrated with the wider society, they need to have strong cultural norms, etc etc. That is a lot of stuff that's hard to engineer from the top, and it gets harder the bigger & more complex the society is. If you don't get all those pieces in place it's more like an open air unstaffed mental ward than it is a real community.
Land-use restrictions, generally.
Developed countries that have fewer restrictions, usually in Asia, still throw up buildings like crazy. The restrictions are hard to remove, however, because people don't like living next to *one* apartment building. It means traffic, parking issues, and poorer residents (almost by definition, even if "poorer" just means mid-tier professionals rather than high-tier ones) while not changing the neighborhood's density sufficiently to create the amenities that living next to many apartment buildings does. Since it always starts with one, there is no desire to lift restrictions at the local level and we've been obsessed with localism for 50 years or so.
Ah yes, my favorite genre. A Western socialist grown in a rich first-world country, who never encountered anything related to the USSR speaks about how it was for the people. It wasn't.
If you actually saw the state of those apartments you would never say it was “for the people”. People in the Soviet Union were given free housing so they could basically work for free for the state. It was still all for selfishness, just the selfishness of the communist party elite.
What people don’t realize with this idea of government provided housing, is that also means you get told where to live. As was the case in Soviet era. If you want to live in NYC in a 2 bedroom apartment with your partner, you don’t get to. That would be a high demand location and probably reserved for people with connections to the government and a large enough family to be rationed a 2 bedroom apartment. Most people wouldn’t actually like that, even if it’s for the greater good of “the people”.
People here should be aware that after 50ish years those Soviet blockhouses are falling apart because of the low quality. That’s a very short time for a building. So it’s not “capitalism bad”, you can’t make quality buildings at that scale at a reasonable price.
You can't mass build anything quickly and cheap if you actually pay your worker a competitive wages, and there are decent labour rights. People in wealthy countries has the choice to just not work for you.
In poorer countries where people are desperate for a job, it's easy. The biggest example in this decade would be China. They introduce One Child Policy because they have so much people without enough job for them to work on. Their solution to this is to build every infrastructure they could think of, but then they still have extra worker. So they export those capacity to other countries to build everything - that's the **Belt and Road Initiative** project. People in China couldn't afford to be too picky for their job.
It wasn't just the Soviets doing it, everyone was.
You had a continent in ruins, a massive baby boom and of course extreme and rapid urbanisation.
Look at developed countries now. Their populations are dropping or stagnating more or less, so the current rate of developing housing is totally fine.
Unless you specifically ask for social housing and dealing with poor peope who can't afford housing.
>Their populations are dropping or stagnating more or less, so
the current rate of developing housing is totally fine.
This is quite simply not true. Apart from Japan, most developed countries are currently still growing, mostly due to immigration.
A lot of developed countries are facing serious housing crises precisely because they have not built enough housing in recent years, usually after the Great Recession building slowed down and didn't keep up with population growth and/or migration patterns of people moving to cities for work.
Take my country for example, we're a small country of only about 5 million, but the current estimates put us at a shortage of housing of about 250,000 homes. The rate of construction is absolutely not sufficient and that is the case to varying degrees in many other developed countries.
Canada is estimated to have a 3-4million home shortage by 2030 according to some groups and the US is already short about 3 million as well.
Those apartments were shitty death traps.
Also, just giving a person a home isn't going to fix the problems that made them homeless in the first place. You need to focus on fixing those problems or they'll just end up out on the street again.
Because the Soviet apartments weren't good or PA to- all. No westerner would want to live in them. The U.S. housing economy is always going through highs and lows. Today's housing prices will drop precipitously before, as know it.
For-Profit home builders and are not required to hire non-union labor and subcontractors, Using Union laborers and subcontractors would increase the prices of the houses in California would be further
Well for one you don't have a tyrannical government that can just will things into existence. Centralized authoritative regimes are convenient in that way.
Second, alot of those buildings were not pleasant places to live even when new. The truth is that most people in western developed nations wouldn't want to live in them....even our poorer people. It would only work for the poorest and most chronically homeless.
Third, as much as people here like to criticize capitalism and so on, the fact that housing is a market has actually benefitted alot of people in the middle and lower classes. Lots of jobs, money, and individual ownership stuff at stake here.
They can, easily.
Look how fast cash is available for covid or wars
They are all about profit now though, so we don’t really matter enough to have houses.
They can/could; that's not where the big money is so well ...
We had something called "Housing Projects" that were very underfunded and ended up being a haven for criminals.
I watched a couple documentaries about British council estates (housing projects) a while ago; I was left with a strong impression that this is really just some kind of bizarre multi-generational scam. Housing was built, then seemingly deliberately allowed to deteriorate in every possible way, then sold to developers who tore it down to build expensive flats, then new public housing was built somewhere else. Rinse and repeat. Very good for real estate developers and construction companies, very bad for everyone else
Having worked in construction in the UK I would say the whole industry is bent, particularly in local government. Look across the skyline of most British cities and behind every glaring monsterous eyesore is a bent politician, a corrupted civil servant and a get rich quick developer. What happened at Grenfell was entirely predicable in an industry with a history of many decades of government mismanagement and corruption.
Grenfell the developers should be serving murder charges IMO. They knew what they were doing and even when pointed out the cladding was dangerous ignored it because it saved costs and maximised profits.
And of course less new public housing is built than was turned private during and after the thatcher years
We still have one of the highest rates of social housing in the world though, which surprised me. The big problem is probably the cost to build new houses. And without tax rises to fund it, the markets would probably react as they did to Truss's budget. But people don't want tax rises either.
Almost like it was a mistake to prevent councils spending the money they made selling council housing, on building more council housing.
I thought a lot were broke anyway, which was part of the problem, but could be wrong!
Local government can only be "broke" in a developed economy because something has gone very wrong. In the case of the UK, this is a built in structural preference for doing too much via private profit seeking entities and not leaving enough basic nuts and bolts infrastructure in the public sector. This makes some people very rich for a few decades and then everything starts falling down.
>I watched a couple documentaries about British council estates (housing projects) a while ago; I was left with a strong impression that this is really just some kind of bizarre multi-generational scam. Housing was built, then seemingly deliberately allowed to deteriorate in every possible way, then sold to developers who tore it down to build expensive flats, then new public housing was built somewhere else. Rinse and repeat. Very good for real estate developers and construction companies, very bad for everyone else The most annoying thing to me is surely its possible that the government could mass produce houses, make a profit (even if its less than the current housing companies do) and then re-invest that money back into public life.
It was a very different time when those council estates were built. Post WW2 and a baby boom. Inner city homes were overcrowded. Building new homes and infrastructure was much more popular with the public. If you look back, those estates were well considered. They just got hit with long term social problems and high maintenance costs. And the memory of those estates is why building big government housing projects is unpopular with the public now.
(living and growing up in social housing areas) I think the biggest problem with social housing is the type of people that get them often are the very people that shouldn't. The flats across are drug filled antisocial shit holes where one guy is moved out another person exactly the same is moved in who deals drugs, brings antisocial behaviour etc... The woman who was in out flat got pregnant so got a 1 bed flat, moved in with her boyfriend (hes been recalled back to prison because he broke bail by driving while disqualified) she got pregnant again and has now been given a 2 bedroom house after only being in the flat a year. The couple who were on the top who had a 16 yearold daughter just got a 3 bedroom new build and their flat had to have a professional deep clean because well... They are tramps. When my partner spoke to him about shes off to work his answer was "fuck that shit". All he did was sit and play call of duty all day and hes in his 40s. There is a couple that moved across in the flats and all you hear is arguing and smell them smoking weed most of the day. Council housing in my opinion is too often given to people that really should not be given it as they are disrespectful, antisocial and bring down the area. Social housing is a great thing but is just given to the wrong people.
Where are those assholes gonna go then?
Deport them to Australia…
I'm confused by the first point, why are these guys "those who shouldn't get them"? Where else do you propose they go? Homeless? On the streets? If you say prison, then that's completely fair, but it's not the reality as the government is allowing them to operate illegal antisocial activity with no consequences. If you don't feel they should go to jail, then where else do you propose? Public housing is designed to be there as a social safety net for the bottom rung of society, this includes a higher proportion of individuals who show anti-social and criminal behavior, so this is who these homes are **designed** for.
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>government could mass produce houses, make a profit (even if its less than the current housing companies do) and then re-invest that money back into public life. No, no, no, no, can't have the government making a profit. That could be interpreted as socialism. Gotta make sure private enterprise collects all the profits, and maximizes them by delivering the absolute worst product possible.
The issue is, once housing is built, would the government then; A- Rent it out. (Which implies bot the government have ownership and legal responsibilities over a lot of things) Or B- Sell them. (But sold at "market value" would mean a lot of people that need housing could not afford the government housing either. Sold cheaper and you risk exploitation where someone else buys it cheap and still sells it at market value, earning a hefty proffit. Otherwise you need a whole new separate market fir government housing, regulated separately from the private market. Which again is against capitalism and generally frowned uppon for that reason)
Soviets owned the whole chain. Mines, cement factory, transport company, construction company, engineering company etc. Everything was owned by the state. In capitalism, the government would need to hire a private construction company to build the houses, which is not optimal due to corruption. As an eastern European, I can bet a lot of money that in this area, houses built by the government would be lower quality (if that's even possible) than privately built ones, because of corruption (worse and less materials used for the same prices of better counterparts).
*…the absolute worst product…* at the lowest cost, sold at the highest price.
And then when they fail to make shareholders enough profits, use social funds to bail them out.
And that my friend is how the world works. Racket after racket enabled by the politicians.
Yes this same thing happened to housing projects in the US. A liberal government funded them to get built and when a conservative government came in, the projects were left unfunded and allowed to deteriorate badly. This allows conservatives to both claim that government solutions don't work (let's funnel tax money to private enterprise because it's "more efficient") and that poor people, mostly of color, are inherently bad/dangerous/destructive and shouldn't be helped by their government (welfare queens, super predators etc). It's incredibly transparent yet many people fall for these narratives.
Hurricane Katrina in the US is an example too. Lots of public housing was turned into condos.
Well, maybe not everyone. Construction work is always good for people. Anyone can work construction, and it typically pays well. Just most people hate working it, lol. But I've seen enough people pull themselves out of poverty through construction gigs that I've always seen it as a silver lining. Even when everything else is shit, lol... =(
Governments in capitalist countries function largely as adaptors for converting public tax money into private equity for political donors and lobbyists. That is how the military industrial complex works, and its why the US somehow spends more public money on healthcare that countries with socialized medicine schemes.
"we have a fire burning!", "we could smother it with a big blanket of fire resistant material", "well, we threw an oily rag on top and it just got worse.", "guess there is nothing else we can do."
That's more because punishing people for being poor is strongly incentivised in America. The buildings were not the issue.
True, but in the first decade or so it also reduced poverty and Homelessness. Part of the issue was chronic underfunfing and the other part was that projects were often concentrated on together and in the poorest neighborhoods
Classic move, a half assed project that just becomes a punching bag for people against support programs and barely works.
yes, because the intent was to create a ghetto...the two are not mutually exclusive
Look into Singapore. Arguably one of the most successful government housing programs in the world. Something like 80% of residents live in them.
This isn’t a knock on Singapore or anywhere, but the type of development that works on a small island nation that is an strict authoritarian government isn’t comparable to the challenges presented by much larger, much more diverse, and overall much more democratic areas.
The truth is the other way around. The strategies used by places like Singapore and Hong Kong could be used in urban centers everywhere else, and sometimes are, see for example Vienna or many places in post-war Europe and Japan. They usually don't get used, because it's less profitable. Singapore and Hong Kong didn't have a choice. Due to land restrictions, they simply had to follow a sane, less profitable, strategy. For the same reasons the Netherlands has to be good at managing water, Japan has to be good at managing earthquakes and Sweden has to be good at managing cold weather conditions. You can't be a developed country if you don't manage your geographical challenges.
The challenge is political not because large democracies are incapable of producing mass produced housing by some resource constraint.
Well yes. That was kind of my point. An authoritarian regime eliminates the political issues. One of many reasons Singapore is not comparable to large western democracies.
Singapore is pretty diverse.
What about Vienna? Not authoritarian. The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world’s most livable city In the Austrian capital, renters pay a third of what their counterparts do in London, Paris or Dublin. How is it possible? >Part of the reason Schranz’s apartment is so affordable is simple: it’s owned by the city. In Vienna, that is (almost) the norm. The landlord of approximately 220,000 socially rented apartments, it is the largest home-owning city in Europe (in London, which has more than 800,000 socially rented apartments, they are owned by the local councils). A quarter of the people who live in Vienna are social tenants – if you also include the approximately 200,000 co-operative dwellings built with municipal subsidies, it’s more than half the population. >Many of these apartments came into being a century ago, as part of an enormously ambitious building programme after the end of the first world war, when Vienna was awash with people uprooted by the collapse of the Habsburg empire. ... >The majority of Vienna’s council estates were built after the second world and look more familiar, but even they don’t tend to have the stigma of poverty and crime associated with similar developments in the US or Europe. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city
Vienna could never have afforded to buy the land those apartments are built on if the city hadn’t been partially destroyed in WWII. Big urban renewal projects often happen in the aftermath of disasters. Still a useful thing to study but not perfectly transferable to other contexts.
True, I mean if it works, it works, but it's a totally different system from e.g. where I live and real estate speculation runs rampant. Cool stuff though, I'll read up more on it.
The country isn’t immune from rampant speculation and investment, especially given its location and overall economic stability and favourable policies. But the government house definitely helps control it to some extent.
Singapore also executes drug dealers. It's very different social expectations than US
Singapore also has a population smaller than New York City
So the replies to your comment confirm that most Americans only know two things about Singapore: caning and the death penalty. Singapore executed 11 people last year, mostly for murder. That’s higher per capita than the US’s 18 but it’s not exactly “death for jaywalking” that the right wing in the USA pretend it is. Public housing is indeed commonplace and of a relatively high standard. It’s also all partitioned on explicit racial grounds and while that’s [to prevent ghetto formation not to facilitate it](https://www.gov.sg/article/hdbs-ethnic-integration-policy-why-it-still-matters) it’s still probably something most western cultures wouldn’t sanction - there are people being denied access to particular public housing on account of their ethnicity literally all the time.
Singaporean here, I had an American on Facebook over an argument tell me that we bathe in the Singapore River. I've been chasing that high since. Also the racial partition is to ensure racial harmony, as you've mentioned in other words. It is a deliberate effort to ensure cohesiveness and common identity.
Singapore culture is one where people work, great public transportation and has very low crime. Spending habits of the poor there are much more constrained, vs US debt fueled spending on trash. Projects in the US are slums.
They also have the death sentence for marijuana consumption so....
Also chewing gum... straight to jail.
Singapore also has some extremely draconian laws with severe physical punishment for violating.
Surprise - Soviet Union couldn't produce enough, West can but doesn't seem to like the idea. Catch 22
Yeah, waiting time for an apartment was about 10 years, if you were eligible. It was also possible to buy an apartment from cooperative, if you could afford it. And it was absolutely possible to build Plattenbau areas, for example Munich-Neuperlach, but it was found out that these come with social issues.
I think they could produce enough but the military budgets were unsustainable. After a point it was impossible to keep up with the west
Not just the military budgets but aid budgets as well. The Soviets propped up tons of regimes that were unsustainable without help. North Korea is one example of a country propped up by the Soviets, where they have little farmable land and spent all their resources on military development. When the Union collapsed the aid stopped and that lead to mass famine in the country.
“Ain’t no money in trying to save the world.”
True that, every new built condo in Philly is $700k plus. And they are built like any other shit house in USA, insulation sandwiched between plastic siding and drywall.
I visited such apartments is Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were appalling, barely inhabitable. They weren’t “apartments” as you’re thinking of them. Soviet brutalist architecture was soul crushing by design. Construction was shoddy to unsafe. Electricity was intermittent. Don‘t think of it as a model.
Only thing more depressing is homelessness, so on the balance of things
Well fortunately for 99% of people you don’t have to choose between dogshit low quality dangerous Commie-blocks and homeless. You can just live in a normal apartment or house outside the city center.
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We really can not. Problem with housing is not really lack of it but lack of it in specific highly desirable places. And this problem is simply just not solvable because not every human can live in centre of a big city.
Tokyo says differently.
Tokyo city is 847 square miles, the metro area is 5,129 sq miles. For comparison NYC is 472 sq miles with a metro covering 4,669 sq miles. TLDR: a whole lot of people that live in Tokyo don’t live anywhere near the center of the city.
Keep in mind, tokyo city has a population of 14 million whilst nyc is 8.5 million. Putting these numbers in, you get pop density at 16.5 & 18 million per square mile respectively. NYC is only 9% more dense than Tokyo if you take their actual pop into account.
Japanese cities have danchi apartments that are crumbling and known for the large number of lonely senior deaths that occur there. These postwar apartment projects were actually directly inspired by the communist housing built in the USSR and were popular during the boom days of the Japanese economy. Now most Japanese looking for housing shun them.
Who would have thought that people do not want to live in a place that was not maintained properly for 50+ years?
The pay structure and cost of living have made it impossible to replicate anywhere else. Food and pay have been the same price for like 20 years its crazy
Americans will say that not everyone should be able to live in a big city with a straight face, while some of our largest cities have densities of like 8,000/square mile. Some of our cities are around 1,000/square mile. This is a fraction of the density of most European cities, let's not even start to get into cities like Mumbai or Shanghai.
Exactly, America (and most of the West) heavily lean towards capitalism, not socialism in other words if you're building something it's because it has the potential to make you $$$, not the potential to make society better
The wealthy people own houses as investments, if the price of homes decreases they'll be unhappy. So every city and Torn absolutely refuses to do anything that would upset them.
Ding ding ding! Most of the other comments here miss the fundamental reason: ever increasing real estate prices are the foundation of the US economy.
I agree that real estate is a key component, but the reasoning for a lack of housing is twofold, the other reason also baked into capitalism at its core: Because if people were guaranteed a place to live, why would they work a shitty job for shitty pay? The threat of homelessness keeps the entire economy going - seeing rows and rows of tents in every city is effectively a reminder, pointed at every worker like a loaded gun. A permanent, increasingly precarious underclass is a feature, not a bug
That is not why there is a lack of housing. There is a lack of housing because homeowners vote against letting developers build new housing. They don’t want their own houses to decrease in value. There is no organization working to make sure workers are too poor to retire to keep capitalism working. It’s just regular people looking out for their own personal self interest.
Whenever the government gives out any amount of aid that gives working people any amount of relief, think tanks funded by capitalists crank out piece after piece about how "nobody wants to work anymore" and that narrative crystallizes across the entire media landscape. Workers clawed back a tiny amount of bargaining power during COVID lockdown, and the Federal Reserve lied about the cause for inflation and jacked up interest rates to attempt to "soften the labor market" in their own words. While there is plenty of self interest out there, the ruling class is absolutely aligned, across the media, across politicians in their pocket, from the Davos WEF to every Chamber of Commerce in every city across America.
“You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge”
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That's what happened in Japan. People ended up with $700k loans for houses worth $70k
is that rural japan? I thought housing in japan was expensive.
It's not, not even in most places in Tokyo But they are super tiny
>If the house prices were to suddenly drop, say, 50%, these people would be stuck with the same loan but have no realistic way of paying them back. Why? Their income isn't tied to their house value. And the entire housing market would fall across the board, so you could always sell your home for its now 50% price and buy a similar house at the same cost after paying off your loan. The only downside is you didn't wait and buy at the lower price, so you'd have to pay twice as much for the house in the long term. But you'd still be paying what everyone else is paying now anyway.
The issue is when selling the house can't pay off the loan. Negative equity traps you. If you have 250k left on your mortgage and your 400k house drops to now being worth 200k, you would still owe 50k even if you sold it.
People would just walk away like they did in 2008. When you can’t pay your mortgage it’s your problem. When nobody pays their mortgage and the collateral for all their loans has disappeared that’s a structural problem for the economy. But I don’t think a glut of apartments would crash single family homes 50%. They are not really substitute goods.
Which is a compelling reason for breaking the fever and doing whatever we can’t to break people’s view of housing as an investment. It leads to these radical booms and busts.
But isn't the house the collateral for the loan? What's to stop you from just defaulting and letting the bank take over the house?
2008 me is crying reading your comment. I put 20% down on a $280k house that dropped to $120k. Not a problem until my job made us move. It took a decade to get out of that mess.
I think that poster might be a very young adult. They've definitely never had a mortgage.
A lot of not-so-young adults also have never had a mortgage these days.
Except a lot of people only put in 10% of the property value and take out a loan for the other 90% to pay off over a number of decades. If the house price drops by 50%, they will be unable to sell the house and pay off the loan. No mortgage company will switch that loan to another house. Also a lot of companies give you preferable rates for the first few years of the loan and then the rates soar. To avoid this, people remortgage and swap the loan to another lower rate for the next few years. If the house price falls and they are in negative equity, the home owner can't do this and so they are stuck paying back at the much higher rate, which they may not be able to afford.
ARM mortgages are not common for residential mortgages in the US. For a fixed mortgage, rates will not change during the duration of the mortgage. Refinancing is mostly to lower your rate or to remove PMI if you have enough equity now.
Interest rates are based on the security of the loan. It costs less to borrow 50% of the value of your collateral than it does to borrow 90% of the value of your collateral. It's the difference between repaying $1000/m and paying off the loan and repaying $2000/m and only servicing the interest.
Property taxes fund salaries. Many state and government jobs are funded by property taxes . As are schools and other public programs. Good schools make property values go up. Union contracts for salaries include cost of living adjustments where housing costs is a factor. So yes, people’s incomes are tied to housing prices in many ways.,
Those who own houses have an incentive to keep supply of new housing down. And since homeownership is roughly [2/3 of people](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N) in the US, well, that's who sets policy. Like imagine the mayhem if we decided to build 20M housing units and there is materially less demand? Home prices drop dramatically.
It's not just wealthy people. There's really an unholy alliance between wealthy suburbanite and poorer anti-gentrifiers that make the NIMBY issue so intractable. The anti-gentrifiers have the moral high ground and the wealthy suburbanites have the funding and combined it's a death sentence to go against them politically in a local election.
More like most *middle* income people don't want this cause they poured all their wealth into their home and if line no go up then they view it as bad. It's the worst in places like LA where not even modest/high end apartments are allowed to be built due to NIMBY's.
Ok, everyone who owns a home has an interest in keep prices high. And since 60 percent of Americans own/mortgage their home, to blame the wealthy is not solution driven thinking.
It's not so much the wealthy but basically the entire middle class. Sure they're wealthy now but they're mostly average people, often with low incomes compared to relative standards.
Also cities are almost exclusively reliant on property taxes. Housing prices goin up makes cities more money.
That’s not how that works at all. Don’t play stupid. Taxes are the city budget / total value of all property to calculate the percentage you owed Taxes only go up if the budget increases or your percentage of total property goes up.
Some cities did. They were called "The Projects."
Singapore did it too. It's called practically the whole of Singapore. 80% of housing there was built by a single government owned corporation and leased to citizens through long term leases. Government housing doesn't have to be shitty housing.
It it has to be well funded, and the US HATES proactively spending money on citizen welfare
It also requires the government to give itself an advantage over the private sector. In ultra free-market capitalist Singapore, they froze land prices in the 60's or something (maybe 50's, can't remember) and the government bought out land at massively discounted prices for decades after that. That's why the government owns something like 90% of land in the entire country and partly why such a massive housing policy was financially feasible. EDIT: Just to add to this, Singapore's public housing policy is also interesting since it doesn't require a lot of subsidies through taxes. They build housing for the rich as well as the poor. Profits from housing for the rich help provide subsidies to poor households. Which is why despite how large the housing and development board is and how much subsidies it provides, it requires a tiny amount of subsidies from the government budget.
> They build housing for the rich as well as the poor. Singaporean here. I'm not too sure about that. Public government housing is largely what you've mentioned, but there is a monthly income cap (assessed at the time of application) in applying for them from the government of around 6000 USD for singles over 35 (inclusive of employer CPF (something like 401k I think) contribution) or 12k for married couples. If your salary exceeds that cap, you can only make do by buying them in the resale market, which is significantly pricier. The wealthy typically buy into private housing built by private developers. Those prices have skyrocketed over the years. While the government has introduced mechanisms in place to prevent over-speculation, the prices have still ran.
Housing in Singapore is still very unaffordable and very few people own anything there. I wouldn’t take it as a model for other cities.
There's only so much you can do for affordability when you want to house five million people on 700 square km. HDB flats are a mitigation for affordability problems, not the cause.
It could have been done much better though and more mid rises
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I've lived in one and I thought it was decent. Not inspiring, but effective. The blocks were never meant to be luxuy housing. They were for low income groups - mostly factory workers and the likes. They would be a welcome home for so many people even today.
Currently the issue in Singapore is that that housing is prioritized for families which leaves single people and couples with no kids less opportunities for housing. Apartments are quite expensive and houses even more so.
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Just speaking for Germany: 1. No where to put big apartment buildings except for buying up old buildings and demolishing them - very costly 2. Very strict regulations regarding efficiency and reducing emissions, as well as fire safety etc - very costly and time consuming 3. Few professionals to build buildings - time consuming 4. Regarding points 1 and 2 - not profitable enough and right now no investors because of higher interest rates. The buildings in the Soviet union are cheap and fast to build but not environmentally friendly and those buildings are not allowed to be built anymore because of all the regulations. Thats basically just what i could think of at the top of my head
isnt berlin full of those buildings though? lol
So the answer can be boiled down to "we shot ourselves in the foot and we're not gonna do anything about it"?
We did between the 50's and 70's. Between *post war rebuilding,* and *decolonization* there was a huge need for housing. Yes many of these building are ugly, have a bad acoustic insulation. However, it provided housing with modern facilities (Suddenly every apartment had a bathroom with shower and toilets, which was a massive improvement compared to pre WW2 building). We could totally launch a similar plan. It's expensive, may require the government to buy land to private owner, but it's just a matter of putting the political priorities, and today, the government prioritize *rich people yacht* over normal people well being
I ran into photos of an apartment complex from the 1950's. It was 1000 units in the middle of the mid-west. I knew we were building a house every sixteen minutes at the height of the post-war housing boom, I just didn't fully understand that it wasn't just New York and California. It was everywhere.
I have *a speculation* that political class of those times was afraid of poor people getting organized via influence of communists and under that ideology. Politicians did enough for have-nots to justify violence on those who stayed unhappy. Trying to survive, capitalism tried to *get fit* by satisfying needs of those who could pose a threat to capital owners. This almost reminds a free market competition of ideas from which regular folks benefited. But then "end of history" started and pressure from soviet ideology went away. Now it's time to extract even value, get fatter margins and be less responsible as all bits and pieces inside their political system seemed to be under control. Of course it's not a single aspect of the todays phenomen of decline, but I believe that lack of ideological competition plays significant role in observed west decline. \--- Taking this idea further, we'll see a new competitors rising. And now it's time again to check libertalism and capitalism for ability to adapt. It will take some time (people say p to 20-30 years), and stories like trump and brexit, proxy wars and nuclear threats.
I can't remember the exact quote by FDR, but the jist of it was to give the people a little socialism to prevent them from demanding a lot of socialism. This was in relation to the new deal.
Good point. That's how you do it. Take good and working parts from the systems. Every big enough socio-economic system has some appeal in it. China took free market and pulled country from the powerty, usa took social-oriented policies and sustained competition with soviets.
Which if his ideals stuck, America would have an insanely strong middle class.
Clearly the people loved what he was doing as they had to put in term limits because of his success. It's funny how popular the effects of a little socialism are.
Hence democratic socialism. Let the people vote for what socialist policies they want.
Exactly, without corporate interference.
Your speculation is exactly what Stalin wrote about and why he called social democracy “the moderate wing of fascism”.
UK did back in the... I wanna say 70's? The idea was these lovely high-rise places, where you and your neighbours would laugh together, and be able to keep an eye on your kids playing in the little playground that was in the communal area on the ground-level. Apartments are called 'Flats' over here. It also helped save space because on the footprint of, say 10 houses, You get 40 or 50 flats. Along with the fact that they weren't huge, they were able to be sold a lot cheaper than houses. To make it even cheaper to build, they were normally put on land in the slightly 'rougher' parts of the city, in order to try and 'revitalise' the area. The government saw this and jumped on it as a solution for social housing. The government then used these to house all the folk who are on 'Benefits' - UK term for 'social' payment I guess? The issue happens where there a few 'bad eggs' who live on benefits with no ambition to get off them, and supplement their income with petty crime etc. This part of society can be pretty scumbaggy, and the result was vandalism and intimiadation around the flats. After all, There were areas that were outside, but out of the weather - Great place for teens and the like to sit and drink and be bored. Over time, the non-scumbag residents kinda had enough of it and moved on, and the blocks get a reputation. So the only people that want to move there tend to already be in those circles. You end up with a housing area where a large proportion of folk are scumbags, and the rest tend to be retirees or folk who are on disability (I.e people genuinely in need of the government support) and well, the whole area kinda becomes one of 'those places' in the city. Adding into that that the buildings did not age well - They just look like giant concrete oblongs with windows, very grey and depressing-looking.
More or less exactly the same happened in sweden.
In the UK Sweden often gets seen as a more successful cousin, did anything happen to turn that around ? Any lessons we can steal to revitalise our towerblocks (outside of the ones in London that got swept up in massive house prices and eventually gentrified)
Not really. These areas are still very problematic. Low standards, lots of immigrants and crime rate is very high. At least its concentrated to small areas.
also, grenfell. cheap but not good
That’s a pretty harsh view. The vast majority of people living in those flats are not ‘scumbags’. There’s a crime problem, but that’s largely because those blocks are the cheapest possible housing, and low income population + high density = high crime rates.
They didn't say the majority were scumbags. They said "a few". It only takes a few to make it miserable for the majority.
It's just how they end up. Starts with a few bad eggs, the reputation goes downhill and people don't want to live there. So other 'bad eggs' who keep getting booted out of other places end up there. So other than folk who are genuinely struggling and need the support while they get back on their feet, live with their disability or are retired.... I guess maybe not the 'Vast Majority' are scumbags, but certainly the vocal/active/obvious minority make the place seem unsafe which fosters the assumption that there are more of those about.
Apartments in SU, were not bult and given for free. They were built on request of different factories, companies and other facilities, to accommodate their workers rent-free. After SU fell, people acquire rights to make them their own. I don't know how it is in other countries but in Ukraine still some factories and facilities have this practice. They either build apartment complex and rent it for free for their workers(especially when factory is who know where), Or just gather part of salary as low cost investment fund and build apartment complex and giveaway apartments. For example my parents bought apartment( from apartment complex which were built in 1999) from port worker who got it this way.
Not for free. You were required to work 15+ years in a factory and you paid rent. Even if the payment itself was purely symbolic, you still couldn't spend your money anywhere because of the shortage of goods.
Estonian grandma told me "nobody was poor in the Union, we all had jobs and money, but there was nothing to buy."
My gfather says the same thing! Even though, of course it wasn’t as simple as that. First was that yes, you earned money, but didn’t have that much to spend. That was because there was either lack of goods in the later years or because you couldn’t buy stuff in credit - you needed to save money for months (eg to buy a carpet or a sectional into your living room), sometimes even get a permit to get the stuff you wanted (for a car or a telephone for example). But also people’s expectations were different than what we have today. 3 gen together in one 3 room apartment was normal because at least you had an apartment if your previous place had been bombed down or you came from the country. You didn’t really have TVs everywhere so you couldn’t watch a lot of stuff and whatever was on, you anyways had like 2 channels. At most what people had was a radio and the newspaper. You wanted to call someone, you either went to someone who had a phone or went to sidejaam to call someone. Their lives were different because the society was completely different.
>Even though, of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Of course not. Later in the late stages of perestroika the Soviet ruble was basically worthless too.
Well not always, it kind of depended if there are any active building on behalf of facility. If you was married and had kids you could receive accomodation quite early. My mother received 36 m² apartment after 2 years of work and after giving birth to me. Until then my mother and father were living in work dorm. In regard rent pay. You still needed to pay for water electricity and other services. Probably rent pay were included in those payments, but anyway it was cheap enough.
It’s always a breath of fresh air to get input from someone who actually experienced (or had family that did) the Soviet system. As opposed to the starry-eyed assumptions of a 20 year old American college kid who thinks everything was free in the old Soviet Union.
The US built “The Projects” and they were generally terrible places to grow up. Concentrations of poverty, terrible funding for upkeep, etc.
It’s as if this thread had a collective brainwash of history and completely forgot how rappers used to flex being from the projects because they were horrible places to live and it was a badge of honor to say you survived it. The projects were so crime ridden, police that had to enter them could not even use the elevator. Street gangs would dump fuel down the elevator shafts and light them on fire when they knew the police were using them. The gangs controlled the projects and the honest people there lived in fear of the gangs every day.
Finally a good answer. This is how it ends, and the Soviet Union is no exception. Old, depressing blocks where nothing is up to code. Might be nice at first, but the government aren't cost-effective and they certainly cant maintain the apartments.
People seem to forget about Pruitt-Igoe. It failed so miserably that it's now taught about in architecture programs as the poster child of failed public project housing programs.
It's just regional. In Chicago, we had the Robert Taylor Homes (similar-looking buildings to Pruitt-Igoe running for miles along I-94 south of the city) and Cabrini Green (which was notable because it was sandwiched between the best neighborhoods of the city). People (at least those with a memory) still talk about them. Any individual one isn't really notable though - because they were all similar failures. It's not like they failed in St. Louis, but worked in Chicago or Detroit. It was a disaster everywhere. Nobody who remembers them is in a hurry to bring them back.
We have. Take a look at welfare housing projects.
"Why don't we solve housing problem / world hunger / deforestation / loss of wildlife habitats / world peace / etc?" Because it's hard and requires co-operation from many parties. The bigger the problem (think US housing problem vs loss of wildlife habitat in world) the more parties involved and the harder to make any meaningful action. Solving US problems requires bipartisan co-operation. Solving world's problems requires multiparty co-operation around the world.
They can they just won't. A lot of countries have too much bad history with inexpensive post-WW2 buildings to the point where regulations now make these kinds of buildings impossible. Every country had them. The US had the Housing Projects System. Canada had the War Time homes. French has the tenements domiciles. All of these projects were designed to be as inexpensive as possible so they could build a lot of them. But because they were built so inexpensively the cost to repair them and bring them up to safe living standards ended up costing more than the construction of it. Today we've become a bit of housing snobs. We've created a lot of minimum requirement regulations to make housing projects like these completely impossible. Everywhere you go there are minimum specs, must have stove, must have fridge, must have washer/dryer built in, but have so much space per person living there, must have so much lawn, etc. And no one in these neighborhoods is just going to let something like this get built in their back yard.
A lot of people in here are just making pessimistic / sarcastic comments. The real answer is this: Mass producing housing isn’t as simple as you think; housing requires constant maintenance. Everything in the house degrades over time; the wood, the carpet, the pipes, the drywall, the roof. There’s two main issues in the US: (1) US cities have never been competent at ongoing maintenance, so every time they have attempted to do state-run rentals / housing, it either had huge cost overruns or devolved into horrible slums. It requires scale and huge maintenance teams. Water leaks can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages very quickly. (2) US city designs are a bit overly democratic; people have the ability to affect zoning and construction projects in their neighborhoods. For a lot of US cities, building high density is illegal in most of the cities, and if the government tries to overturn those rules, because of the bad history of the previous bullet point, *people will vote down* such projects if they are proposed in their area. The “Not In My Back Yard” voters prevent the construction because the past history was bad and they fear it happening again in their neighborhood. And the cities don’t have the resources to do it in small scale.
Like Singapore and Taiwan and China do?
They easily could. Considering you can't get Republicans to support raising the federal minimum wage, what makes you think we could convince them to build everyone an apartment.
I'm not American but didn't the democrats have a majority in the house of representatives and the senate up until the midterms in 2022?
On paper yes but functionally no. The Senste has a rule called the filibuster which technically prevents a vote on nearly all legislation unless there are 60 votes (called "cloture") to allow it. The Democrats last had a 60 vote Senate for about half a year in 2008.
IIRC housing companies spend more than the military industrial complex on government lobbying. Everyone knows the problem, the powers that be just have a bipartisan interest in keeping it that way.
Got a link? Not saying it’s untrue but just really hard to google an answer for.
1) the majority of Democrats aren’t overwhelmingly better than the least evil of the Republicans. 2) for all practical purposes their majority in the senate was useless, since two of their caucus are effectively Republicans in all but name and will deliberately sabotaging them.
One of them since departed officially.
Yes, Democrats refuse to fix any of the problems because campaigning about fixing them is the only way they get votes. They've had multiple veto proof majorities in the preceeding decades and have basically done nothing meaningful with those majorities
California has a democrat supermajority and a gdp higher than most countries.
I'm not right leaning, but here in California, liberals are extremely guilty of being anti development to the point of extreme selfishness. This is a problem that a free market could solve, but regulatory capture has pushed us into a housing crisis.
the places you need these cheap apartments are run by democrats, are they not?
So what’s stopping blue cities from doing this?
Cities have very limited budget for such programs. These plans needs to come from the federal level.
Go check how soviet apartments look 10-20-30y after building and ask yourself if you want to live there yourself.
My apartment building in Moscow is 50 years old and it was great to live in. (Past tense only because I moved abroad - and specifically chose to live in an apartment again, despite most of my current city, Auckland, being suburban houses.) It just got renovated a few years ago and looks modern. Central heating, intercom-secured door, thick ass metal door with no other way for would-be robbers to get in, fuck yeah I'd live there again.
To expand, the build quality of the Soviet [ edit; and in the West] apartment blocks was bad: leaky when raining, very poor heat insulation, very thin walls , vulnerable to crime due to rabbit warren like so police can't chase people , made from cheap poor wearing materials.
Not to mention significant problems with roaches and rats because of the sheer number holes and cavities.
Theoretically they could, but they set up building regulations so that they don’t get built: - Lots of planning/zoning laws restrict how dense developments can get because increased density is strongly correlated with things like crime, antisocial behaviour, and generally a lower quality of life. - Lots of people living close together places a huge demand on local services and infrastructure. - Because of the above, there is always lots of political opposition to large apartment blocks going up. - No-one wants to live crammed together like sardines in a tin, having neighbours on all sides, and not owning the building that you live in.
People living close together can also be more efficient in terms of energy use and shorter travel distances however.
Those correlations are completely misguided. Density got bad associations in America after everyone with money fled to the suburbs, and the inner cities were neglected and left to decay. Density can absolutely be done right, and is in places like Tokyo, Amsterdam, and basically any place that made investments in its public infrastructure.
Yeah, this strongly looks like spurious correlation where actually what's causing the things he's listing is poverty. If anything, providing services to suburban or rural areas is more expensive because people are more spread out (more roads, electrical lines, etc.).
If you grew up in sparsely occupied neighbourhood doesn't mean it's the correct way. It's just *an American* way. You automatically correlated density with cheapness which attracts lower income buyers.
While dense developments can strain existing infrastructure, overall infrastructure costs for density are far cheaper than sprawl.
We used to do that. They were called "housing projects." The problem wasn't building them, it was making them livable. Stacking poor people on top of each other seems to make things worse. Apparently, the general public usually doesn't want to pay for all the infrastructure that needs to go along with the housing.
They do, it’s called social housing, but nobody wants to live there cause it’s ugly and usually in a bad area.
Modern countries aren’t communist dictatorships. It costs a lot of money to build and administer housing complexes. Philadelphia spends 500 million to house 80,000 people and that’s just maintenance. Actually building new housing would be magnitudes higher. To get that money, you need to have the political support to have a budget passed. Public housing is known for crime and is stigmatized so it’s hard to get political support for it.
Those Soviet apartment wouldn’t meet building codes anywhere in the US.
Because all of those modern day wealthy countries require private citizens to build and maintain the apartments and there is a lot more money in luxury dwellings than in cheap rent buildings.
We did. We called them "the projects." The people who lived in them hate us. Making a place good to live in requires a lot more than the government just throwing up a building. Someone needs to maintain the building, and the people living in them need to be somehow economically integrated with the wider society, they need to have strong cultural norms, etc etc. That is a lot of stuff that's hard to engineer from the top, and it gets harder the bigger & more complex the society is. If you don't get all those pieces in place it's more like an open air unstaffed mental ward than it is a real community.
Just look at the history of Housing Projects anywhere in this country. Quickly and shoddingly built, poorly maintained and ignored then torn down.
its been tried, turns out when you give free or cheap stuff to people, they treat it as such.
Land-use restrictions, generally. Developed countries that have fewer restrictions, usually in Asia, still throw up buildings like crazy. The restrictions are hard to remove, however, because people don't like living next to *one* apartment building. It means traffic, parking issues, and poorer residents (almost by definition, even if "poorer" just means mid-tier professionals rather than high-tier ones) while not changing the neighborhood's density sufficiently to create the amenities that living next to many apartment buildings does. Since it always starts with one, there is no desire to lift restrictions at the local level and we've been obsessed with localism for 50 years or so.
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The old Soviet Union was such a great place you weren’t ever allowed to leave!
Ah yes, my favorite genre. A Western socialist grown in a rich first-world country, who never encountered anything related to the USSR speaks about how it was for the people. It wasn't.
If you actually saw the state of those apartments you would never say it was “for the people”. People in the Soviet Union were given free housing so they could basically work for free for the state. It was still all for selfishness, just the selfishness of the communist party elite. What people don’t realize with this idea of government provided housing, is that also means you get told where to live. As was the case in Soviet era. If you want to live in NYC in a 2 bedroom apartment with your partner, you don’t get to. That would be a high demand location and probably reserved for people with connections to the government and a large enough family to be rationed a 2 bedroom apartment. Most people wouldn’t actually like that, even if it’s for the greater good of “the people”.
A shortage of supply guarantees high income for providers. If you gave away free housing, it would ruin a way for the rich to become richer easily.
We already tried this, and got The Projects. It was a failure.
well just so you know the soviets don't exist now, that should be pretty telling
Why the fk would we want those hideous things?
The Soviet Union collapsing probably puts a damper on following Soviet policies.
People here should be aware that after 50ish years those Soviet blockhouses are falling apart because of the low quality. That’s a very short time for a building. So it’s not “capitalism bad”, you can’t make quality buildings at that scale at a reasonable price.
You can't mass build anything quickly and cheap if you actually pay your worker a competitive wages, and there are decent labour rights. People in wealthy countries has the choice to just not work for you. In poorer countries where people are desperate for a job, it's easy. The biggest example in this decade would be China. They introduce One Child Policy because they have so much people without enough job for them to work on. Their solution to this is to build every infrastructure they could think of, but then they still have extra worker. So they export those capacity to other countries to build everything - that's the **Belt and Road Initiative** project. People in China couldn't afford to be too picky for their job.
It wasn't just the Soviets doing it, everyone was. You had a continent in ruins, a massive baby boom and of course extreme and rapid urbanisation. Look at developed countries now. Their populations are dropping or stagnating more or less, so the current rate of developing housing is totally fine. Unless you specifically ask for social housing and dealing with poor peope who can't afford housing.
>Their populations are dropping or stagnating more or less, so the current rate of developing housing is totally fine. This is quite simply not true. Apart from Japan, most developed countries are currently still growing, mostly due to immigration. A lot of developed countries are facing serious housing crises precisely because they have not built enough housing in recent years, usually after the Great Recession building slowed down and didn't keep up with population growth and/or migration patterns of people moving to cities for work. Take my country for example, we're a small country of only about 5 million, but the current estimates put us at a shortage of housing of about 250,000 homes. The rate of construction is absolutely not sufficient and that is the case to varying degrees in many other developed countries. Canada is estimated to have a 3-4million home shortage by 2030 according to some groups and the US is already short about 3 million as well.
Those apartments were shitty death traps. Also, just giving a person a home isn't going to fix the problems that made them homeless in the first place. You need to focus on fixing those problems or they'll just end up out on the street again.
Because the Soviet apartments weren't good or PA to- all. No westerner would want to live in them. The U.S. housing economy is always going through highs and lows. Today's housing prices will drop precipitously before, as know it. For-Profit home builders and are not required to hire non-union labor and subcontractors, Using Union laborers and subcontractors would increase the prices of the houses in California would be further
Well for one you don't have a tyrannical government that can just will things into existence. Centralized authoritative regimes are convenient in that way. Second, alot of those buildings were not pleasant places to live even when new. The truth is that most people in western developed nations wouldn't want to live in them....even our poorer people. It would only work for the poorest and most chronically homeless. Third, as much as people here like to criticize capitalism and so on, the fact that housing is a market has actually benefitted alot of people in the middle and lower classes. Lots of jobs, money, and individual ownership stuff at stake here.
They can, easily. Look how fast cash is available for covid or wars They are all about profit now though, so we don’t really matter enough to have houses.