I wonder who is doing this voting? Oh, it's people who live in the areas we can't afford to live in. And capitalists add lobbying power to those voters selfish interests.
In the United States at least, your local government's public hearings for new housing developments kinda begs to differ.
People will demand the homeless be eliminated from their area while simultaneously opposing development of housing or shelters for the homeless in their area.
So maybe you're right though: they don't hate the apartments more, they simply can't make up their mind on which they hate more.
I agree but want to say everyone jumps to homeless. There are a ton of normal people that are suffering from high rent, lack of options, etc. We need to think about way more than homeless.
Most people think homeless as jobless, etc. But when we have people with entirely ok jobs that can't afford rent (see people living in their cars), addressing basic normal housing addresses both for a startling amount.
Aside from zoning laws, there's the lack of a unified federal intervention. This prevents any one area from addressing the local homeless issue because any area that takes steps to address it will consequently absorb more homeless individuals from other places in the country. For example, if a city in California develops a program to house any homeless individuals, then homeless individuals from other cities and states will be more likely to go to said city to get housed. Even worse, there are states that would actually pay for their transportation. What would happen is that either the city would have to solve a much larger homeless problem as new homeless move into town, or the initial wave of homeless people will be house while the new arrivals and homeless will stay homeless, leaving a continued homeless problem.
I think it’s more so that people don’t want an apartment complex built in their backyard, not that they are opposed to them being built in an area where there is proper infrastructure
Well there’s considerable difference between an apartment complex in a suburb not designed for heavy traffic and less developed areas where there’s room for expansion for infrastructure.
We can’t expand roads in my area, either for an extra lane (which I know is a sin) or for buses because it would be right up on houses at that point.
However, just a few miles down the road on the main drag, there’s undeveloped land that would be perfect. Build it there.
When I say “backyard” I mean literally in your backyard. Instead of name calling and downvoting, have a fucking conversation and ask in a respectful manner what somebody means. Stop being a douche because you automatically assume somebody who thinks slightly differently than you is wrong.
Well articulated. I'm not from the US, but I've seen housing developments go sideways when they built four 10-story blocks (not in somebody's back yard, but in an area without proper infrastructure) and after 1000ish people had moved in there were 1 hour long queues just to get out of the complex because there was only one road with one lane per direction. And the only bus stop was not really reliable.
This was not built in the middle of the city because of land availability (and huge prices even if there was land available - you're near the metro and tram and a bus stop? pay 50% more. oh, you're near a park too? pay 50% more on top of that). Should we just tear down old buildings in low density areas in the city to make room for big blocks? Some might be worth tearing down because of age and overall condition, but good luck getting people to move out.
I wasn’t being mean spirited with my original comment, it was a legitimate question. Whenever I hear people say something like “I don’t want that!” I like to find out why. It’s just curiosity. Sorry if it came across mean.
Go to/watch any planning or proposal meeting and watch the pearl clutching and nimbyism. I think you know this but you want to demand "studies" instead of engaging in good faith.
I went to a planning meeting in my neighborhood and it wasn't like that at all. Why did you lie about that?
Also, why don't you value scientific research and evidence? Because they don't corroborate your perverted worldview?
I think this is one of those communists who can't be bothered to actually read or live by anything. The meeting was full of shouting communists, whose side I'm on, regarding a city golf course and it's removal. You were way off. Why did you act like you knew what was going to happen? I'm not mad I'm just confused like, did you really think it was going to be like how you prejudged it or are you towing the disinformation line?
This is why it's never good to engage with adolescents as someone with an intellectual conscience, and not just some wishful-idea-drunk autist that can't tell human faces apart.
This is the response from user nutandcross for posterity, read to the end:
"instead of engaging in good faith"
So facts and good faith ethics are mutually exclusive?
I just got back from a planning meeting and it was nothing like how you said it would be. Why would you lie to me about that?
Why are you just constantly just lying to people from your room on the Internet? It's it because when you die, you'll just vanish and leave a bodily mess because you never became anything, never understood what it meant to be a human? Because you've turned yourself over to bad ideas cause your own were worse and now you're some pimpled Putin puppet.
Communism, fascism, Jordan Peterson, Trumpist demagogues thrive on weak 14-year-old minds hungry to assert their powerful opinion on something they've have no actual experience with
I urge you to visit these Utopias, maybe move there. There you won't be called parasite, you will experience the insouciant freedom of the lodged and suckling tick. Maybe the reason you feel so bad is that you don't belong in a free nation because you're too chickenshit to exist on your own merit.
They also recruit and weaponize mentally vulnerable people like young autistic men (4chan, Bannon, cp forums), here's just a couple I'm sure you can can find commie versions of these stories you can stomach (you can use these to strengthen your good faith arguments):
You're all George Santos wannabes in five years, too. Fucking garbage. My family didn't fight and die so a bunch of little kids could run around with Hitler mustaches telling me which way to think is the correct way to think according to the correct men. Everyone can see how sweaty and dangerous and anti-social utopian philosophies really are except the fevered adherent who always ends up dead or in a cell. You'd shit your pants in a fight.
Sure they do. Look at all of the posts from my neighbors on Facebook and Nextdoor every time a developer tries to build an apartment building instead of a single family home in our neighborhood.
We're not building homes, we're not focussing on density. But apparently our elected officials have no problem letting people set up shanty towns. Where do you think the priorities lay?
I hate how when there is any picture of Soviet blocks it's always shot in autumn or winter when it's overcast. I live in an ex Soviet country and when these bad boys are maintained they can outperform new apartments, be it in functionality, amenities or price.
Yeah i was recently looking for someone to work on windows and finding someone who does work in the traditional way is not easy. They're still out there, but for every one of them there's ten hack shops using minimum wage labor for everything. Even then, the real good techniques just seem like lost technology. They didn't get passed down to our generation.
Standards have improved 10 fold, I moved from a house built 70 years ago to a new build. It is completely different, air tight, less moisture, more efficient heating, permanent hot water, triple glazed windows. Literally everything is more secure and improved. There is nothing an old house can do a new one can't.
Heating is an accessory? The new tech associated with central heating compared to 50 years ago is night and day. The building materials have changed, the regulations have changed. Houses have better insulation, soundproofing, fire guarding, plumbing, electrical circuitry like how is this even a discussion.
Oh we don't have timber framed housing here, my house is concrete and the 50 year old house I was in, probably closer 100, was a stone cottage.
The new house has exactly those things you listed. I'm fairly certain they have to be in all new builds where I am. Though the solar is optional, we have a heat pump instead.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies... more in line with today's standards and have seen results more in line with today's standards.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies... more in line with today's standards and have seen results more in line with today's standards.
Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m^2^ (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m^2^ (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)
Even communism aside, this is actually not uncommon. One of the advances we've made in construction is knowing how to save even more money, making the right sacrifices and meeting the minimum bars of code compliance, to maximize our margins.
I don't know how you say this unironically as criticism. That's arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources. It's not a good thing to waste manpower and resources for no real gain.
What gain? More profits for the ultra rich? A dying planet?
People living in comfortable apartments is no real gain in capitalism because it means less ROI. But it is a huge gain to everyone's quality of life if they can live comfortably.
Market mechanisms are very powerful in optimising resource allocation - but they aren't optimising for maximum quality of life, they're optimising for maximum ROI. Which lands in the pockets of the ultra rich, which then allocate the accumulated capital in only those endeavours providing maximum ROI, and the cycle goes on and on until so much wealth is extracted from society that the middle class collapses and the planet dies - and the ultra rich with them, for they depend upon the plebes to work for them in order to have an ultra rich lifestyle in the first place.
I mean if we were trying to house people we should be aiming for inexpensive and non-wasteful building choices, shouldn't we? When we're handling basic human needs we send boats full of rice and beans, not a bunch of badass chefs.
I mean it's kind of a scarcity thing. Resources aren't infinite. I have no problem with letting people have nice things and would certainly want minimums to be pretty decent, but when you're getting people off the street or something then efficiency means lives saved.
We have all the money in the world. We have more than enough homes to house people, right now. We have an abundance of housing, of resources to build more housing, of everything. What we do not have is a distribution that allows people who need housing to get it. Instead we have a literal Spiders Georg situation where a tiny fraction of the country each own hundreds of homes they don't live in or even have any intention of living in. This situation is deranged.
Alright, then show the numbers. Let's ignore that seizing all that property will go super well. I know, you want people that own more than one house dead, so even include it as double the free housing. Figure out how much it costs to upkeep rental properties. Double it, maybe more, for people that literally don't give a fuck about it. Add costs for policing the shit.
An apartment complex went up outside my work and it's made of wood. That's against fire safety code but they found some creative work arounds to convince the inspectors it was legal. (And of course the inspections are all toadies who have been put in place to rubber stamp developer plans.) Very efficient until it burns down and kills everyone inside.
It's less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It's not like people didn't know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.
Asbestos has some pretty insane properties, though. Just a shame it causes cancer when disturbed and inhaled.
As a building material? What's even better than asbestos in terms of the trifecta of sound/heat isolation, bulk, melting point, and structural soundness? Aerogel?
Which is why I'm an anarchist. Pretty much every other system would force me to attempt to be happy in an apartment block, or waste huge amounts of resources creating suburbs that are still too goddamn crowded for me
I would like to share your attitude but fear the consequences when millions seek a place in the wilderness. What do you do when you arrive and your neighbor asks you to move on because he wants to be more alone?
I want to be more alone too, so I'd probably not get to the point where I was close enough to have them tell me to go away.
However, most people probably wouldn't like the actual wilderness. They want a big country house somewhere and when they find out they need to build it themselves they'll go back to the apartment blocks.
One reason I'm a fan of making cities less objectively terrible is that more people will live in them and be even further away from my hovel.
If everyone thought like this, everyone would have a home.
And 50 or so people would own all of the rest of the land and do nothing with it because we're too fucking stupid to realize that a system that wants us all to live in 50m² micro apartments is a load of shit, and strung together by a greedy few.
There is enough land for us all to live comfortably, but a fraction of a percent don't want anyone to use most of the land for anything useful so hey let's just give up and take almost-squalor because at least it not squalor!
"Land-usage" is such a narrow-minded way to think about the implicit wants and needs of society. You sound like you've never been to actual cities, or never got your head far enough out of your arse to actually experience one.
North American suburban sprawl already proves that "enough land for us all to live comfortably" is a terrible way to live sociable lives and drains the economy due to massive swathes of those lands being used for roads and the maintenance of said roads.
I implore you to take a trip to almost any European city, and see for yourself what actual "comfortable living" for most people looks like.
I've lived in cities my whole life, which paints a pretty broad picture of you doesn't it? Couldn't even get the premise of your own bullshit comment right.
You make dense housing like these apartments because it is the most practical way to house everybody quickly. Once you take care of the immediate problem, homelessness, you can continue to expand and build nicer, bigger housing for everyone.
What's more important, that we have enough resources to house everyone, but there are still people forced to live on the streets or the fact that you don't like the inconvenience of living in an apartment because it's too small for you even in the short term? Guess that makes you one of the greedy few that can't see past their own problems to think of their community.
That would be a sensible next step, as long as the end goal is having reasonable amount of indoor and outdoor space for everyone to own.
There comes a point where it's not all about the m². You can give me 1000m² but if it's in a windowless box with one door in and out, it's not really meeting the quality bar.
The USSR didn't do much good but those apartment buildings are definitely good.
I used to live in a soviet apartment building and the funny thing about that was that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything. They were thick as hell and fully concrete.
Okay, I just went from "eh, commie blocks are gross but better than tents" to "fuck all the other apartments, bring on the commie blocks". Buildings in the US are built so ridiculously cheaply that in a lot of lower-rent buildings you can hear everything.
Commie blocks do have some issues like absolutely awful electrical wiring or lack of insulation but a lot of ex soviet countries renovate those buildings which leaves no downsides.
Commie blocks do have some issues like absolutely awful electrical wiring
Default wiring is not impossible to replace. My building from 70-ies has global PE, only thing left is to replace aluminium wiring without PE inside appartment to 3-wire copper wiring.
I'm living in a soviet-built tenement block, and the only time I've heard anything from a neighbour is when the guy living above me dropped a bowling ball.
that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything.
It seems you lived in panel building. There are limitations to it like you should not add horisontal chases becaue it reduces load capacity or can't replan appartment because it will be destruction of load bearong wall. So wiring better be done in factory-made in-wall concrete tubes.
This is kinda like saying we need more farms to solve hunger.
The cost of housing is very detached from supply. For rentals, companies bought up housing and just jacked up the price, because renters are a semi captive client base.
New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.
Even for home buyers, they’re facing a major up hill battle going against existing home owners who have access to the capital of their current homes, and even worse corporate home buyers.
This isn’t to say supply isn’t an issue and we can ignore it, but we need to stop housing from just being an investment vehicle. Otherwise we’re just going to get garbage housing at prices no one can afford.
Again I’m not saying supply isn’t an issue, and zoning is def a major problem in many states. But if the issue was only supply, rent would be growing more or less in line with the population not at the astronomical rate that it is.
yeah but due to immigration the population is growing in the USA, AFAIK, also you need to account for the trend of Urbanization (somewhat offset by move to WFH)
When Vanguard and Blackrock own half of the supply, then it's not a free market. Also, you said it's not detached from supply at all, but then proceeded to list reasons detached from supply that affect cost.
New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.
The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.
Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.
I get that argument and I think there’s some merit to it since like you said this whole thing is muddled. But the counter point is often those vacated units are in another town or city. So in the way overly simplified scenario, if 36 “programmers” move to the city, the vacated units through out the country don’t help the “bus drivers” who are tied to the area.
Again we largely agree, I just wanted to illustrate even the simple assumptions like building more is good isn’t always that straight forward in this fucked up system.
The obvious and immediate flaw with the 36 people moving into luxury apartments is, that's not usually how luxury apartments work. Particularly in certain markets, it's more and more common for luxury housing to be temporary homes, vacation homes that are turned into investments the rest of the year, e.g. air BNB. So a lot of the time, you get 36 regular homes destroyed, for 12 luxury apartments that get bought up by either people or companies that either then rent them out or keep them empty most of the year, with no increase in available housing.
The point of hostile architecture isn't to solve homelessness, just to send them to the next block/town over (not saying you don't understand that, just pointing it out).
I wonder if hostile architecture also kills people. Increasing exposure to cold and reducing opportunities to rest doesn't seem good for your chances for survival. I guess that would solve homelessness, but in the worst most morbid way possible.
You're absolutely right in your suspicion. Like so many "let's punish the poor and vulnerable so they'll stop being poor and vulnerable" policies that people think are just a "righteous" inconvenience, hostile architecture DOES kill people.
It's social murder just so the more fortunate don't have to look at the consequences of an unjust system.
The most morbid way i heard about was in the news, when i lived in Brasil. Store owners used to pay police officers to get rid of the homeless disturbing their business in Rio de Janeiro.
Carried out at night, organized & stealthy, most victims were kids.
I don't remember if someone really went to jail for this. That was in the 80s, like 20 years ago.
I understand the point. But France has done this and ended up with giant ghettos filled with si much crime that no emergency services whatsoever go there anymore.
In the US, they built giant housing projects like this where poverty was concentrated and the same thing happened. Crime installed itself in those projects and these neighbourhoods became dangerous ghettos.
Picture 1 is not the solution you think you want.
The condo building where I live is not so big. And it was built with 25% dedicated to social housing where poor families and underpaid workers can live comfortably in an apartment unit as big as my condo unit, which I paid nearly $400k CAD, for the price of about $650 CAD per month. This allows them to integrate with everyone else and live with everyone else and near where all the jobs are.
And for those unaware, the cost of homelessness does exist, and it is quite high. We pay for it through emergency services (police, doctors, ambulance, hospital beds), waste removal services, etc.
The problem needs fixed, and part of the solution is commie blocks unironically.
Very much so. Legal system, downtown areas, medical care… all face expenses of one sort or other, and those get passed on to the consumer and taxpayer. But a lot of people that don’t have to deal with the homeless because they live in a poor and/or rural area, or are incredibly hostile to homeless, that it’s fine for them to push the indirect tax onto areas that don’t have that demographic.
I don't get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
There's a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they're scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don't even realize that they're racing to the bottom. By today's standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let's build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let's build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let's ban airbnb, and let's severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we're gonna have to build some high rises, but let's not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.
apartment building, essentially because they're scared of poor people
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don't know if you hold that idea, but you're repeating it
ugly skyscrapers
You've now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
individuals have less choice, less freedom
Now you say apartments are against freeeeeddooomm lol.
actively exploited
As if you can't own a condo.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
building housing at all costs
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they’re scared of poor people,
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don’t know if you hold that idea, but you’re repeating it
It's pretty obvious I don't, and if you think accurately describing the misguided motivations of people counts as repeating propaganda, then you must live in a pretty thick bubble.
You’ve now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
They are.
As if you can’t own a condo.
You have to buy the condo from a corporation, you have to pay condo fees to a condo board that is out of your control, and much of the quality of your home is determined by the original corporation that built it, as well as that board that you have no real control over and typically pays out maintenance, repairs, upgrades, etc. to other corporations.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
I advocated for increasing apartment builds. I also advocated for numerous other measures to increase rental supply, I just didn't advocate for blindly buying the developer propaganda and letting them build high rise after high rise.
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
So since we have a food supply crisis we should all stop cooking and hand over all food control to corporations that will sell us back bland nutrition paste?
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
They literally do. Go live in Manhattan, it sucks. Sunlight literally doesn't hit street level except for at noon because you've put a bunch of gargantuan towers everywhere. Go look at a complex like Habitat 67 that actually tried to make apartments pleasant to live in instead of just being the cheapest they can possibly be to maximize developer profit. Go look at the size of Walmart parking lots in small towns that are the size of entire Manhattan blocks. Yes we need to densify, no we don't need to necessarily build blindly and continue just letting the free market decide what gets built where.
Yeah. Visceral reaction to apartments. Peace.
Yeah, not having a visceral reaction to anything, just plainly stating their benefits and downsides, though you seem to be having a visceral reaction to any perceived criticism of apartments whatsoever.
Fucking tell me about it. The best part is how they try to justify how they are only focused on themselves by shit like calling apartments "inhumane." JFC, living in an apartment is not inhumane. Living on the street is inhumane.
Why do you think people are living this way? Do you think it's personal failure or maybe desperation? Where else do they have to go? If you tear down the buildings but don't address the root problem, do you think they will just stop existing or will they be forced to find a new spot to live? Were these places always this way? What would you like me to call them?
Please continue making assumptions about my personal life and deriding me for my choice of words rather than contributing something useful. I try to meet people where they are at, which means speaking to what they know. In this case, you seem to know the symptom, but not the cause.
I'm for that. Hell, I would just like small tiny home communities without state government trying to restrict it. Block apartments are fine for many people (newly graduated, small families, and independent elders).
Of course people would rather homeless people have housing instead of living in tent cities everywhere. But they also don’t have any desire to pay for it when it comes time to do something and of course make moral arguments against the homeless.
These are two different groups of people
The first, who are on board with state housing projects, are the common people who still have empathy for their fellow people
The second, who are totally on board with homelessness because the housing projects are "too expensive", belong to the political and economic elite
Most people aren't pieces of shit and don't want people to be homeless, but then they're unwilling to do anything to solve it because it requires money and effort.
Dishonest framing. The average worker has nothing to do with this issue. They are not the people we're asking to solve this. Like I already said, it's the political and economic elite. Capitalists. The state. Where is the worker's money supposed to be sent? On what is their effort to be put?
We also have internalized that a lot of homeless people "did something wrong" to get there, which doesn't help.
Yep, neoliberal chuds, as I said
You're trying to oversimplify a complex cultural issue
How? What variables have I abstracted into a black box, here? What few mechanisms have I reduced the issue to? To me, "people want affordable housing but don't wanna pay for it" sounds extremely oversimplified.
I have no idea why you're picking an argument with someone who probably largely agrees with you.
I'm not "picking an argument with you" lol. I'm just correcting what I see as a defeatist, "what can we even do" attitude.
That's not what cognitive dissonance means. It's a question of willpower/desire to actually help. No one wants people to be homeless but they also aren't willing to do anything about it. That's not cognitive dissonance.
Sounds like semantic fudging to me. "These people need homes! No, stop building homes, it's too expensive!!" sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
That's just a cop out. Of course it's complex. No reason to just throw your hands in the air and say "it's too hard, let's just leave it to the market". We already tried that. It led to this.
Also, no one is saying, literally, "building more houses will fix homelessness alone, nothing else needed, DURRR". That's just a strawman.
What we also need is a complete end to landlording. But this of course won't happen under the current system, because capitalism fucking worships private property.
The entire post is about low income housing as a solution to people sleeping in tents. Building more apartments won't stop people from living in tents.
Pointing out that it's a complex issue that isn't solved by more houses is pretty much the opposite of a strawman
No, that is not the point it's making. It's making the point that neoliberal chuds would prefer to see homeless people than affordable housing. It doesn't say that building housing itself is the sole solution. Hell, it doesn't say anything at all about building. We don't see any construction in that picture, the blocks are just there. You could read it as saying that already built flats should just be given to people.
Nonono, it's unreasonable for taxes to go toward helping the poor. They live on the street and starve by their own choice. No one wants to pay for those wretched people!
Where are the police when you need them to quickly usher the inconvenient truth of my selfish lifestyle out of my sight?
You’re in lemmy.ml, a Marxist instance, reading a meme criticizing capitalism and saying that Soviet apartment buildings are a stretch?
No, they’re the whole point of the meme. Paying for them is the point, who paid for the Soviet buildings? The message is that the Soviet Union built these and American capitalists allow people to live in tents on the street (while calling those buildings ugly). Housing projects would be a perfect “yeah but” except they are very low priority and not so common.
Ugly Soviet buildings are themselves a meme. Up there with the hammer and sickle and the color beige when Americans visualize the Soviet Union.
It's also forgetting that a significant portion of homeless people are homeless by choice, or are homeless for reasons that just providing housing won't resolve.
People have this idea that all homeless people are just regular people who experienced hard times, but that's just a minority. Most homeless are mentally ill people who won't take their meds or drug addicts who aren't willing to quit.
It sucks, and they shouldn't have to live on the streets, but you can't force people to change.
I don’t think people have that idea at all, if anything they are more likely to assume a homeless person is mentally ill and drug addicted than they are to think they are experiencing hard times or employed but unable to pay for housing.
However housing first has been pretty successful, but goes against many people’s values for some reason. The big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong.
You're more than welcome to look up statistics. ~60% of the chronicly homeless have life long mental health issues, and ~80% have substance abuse issues.
Pretty much every city/state has resources to help the homeless, but the homeless have to be willing to accept the help. Most shelters are drug free, so addicts don't want to stay there and they won't accept people whose mental illness makes them violent.
You can't force a person to take their medicine or stop doing drugs unless you want to start building more prisons.
Again, I was never saying that all homelessness is a choice, but a lot of people choose not to accept the help that's available.
Source: My wife has her masters in the field and used to work with these populations as an addiction counselor, in Texas, so I know that resources exist at a state level even in a state that clearly hates it's citizens.
Yeah, liberals and conservatives only differ on whether gay people should be put to death, so you're not really saying much. And being liberal does not, whatsoever, make you immune to conservative propaganda. We live in a capitalist society, founded on liberal values: whether conservatives know it or not, it is liberal values they are conserving.
Also, as I've said about 5 times now, no one is saying that building houses alone will solve the issue. So stop beating that strawman.
I believe you are arguing in good faith, so I'm hoping you can provide a source for your claim that the majority suffer from mental illness or drug addiction.
Yeah that can't be right... The problem with these discussions I think is there's a very big difference between the technical definition of homeless, and the one people use colloquially.
It's the most visible minority of homeless people that tend to be the entrenched ones people think of when they think of homelessness, and those people essentially have nothing in common with the other "homeless" people other than having no permanent home. It makes the discussion harder as people are using the same word but talking about different things.
It assumes you can recognize Soviet housing block, designed to quickly house as many people as possible. It has nothing to do with a preference for houses over apartments.
If you look through the rest of the photos in the source article, ask if living like they do is worse than homeless in a tent.
The top is meant to represent the socialist solution to homelessness. These are socialist block apartments built to ensure that everyone had housing because homelessness was a huge problem. They were functional, but because they were built to functionally address a need quickly, they weren't large or luxurious. They were built to last and the rent levels were controlled at a low rate if the people didn't outright own the place themselves.
The bottom picture is the liberal solution to homelessness. Apartments suck, fuck the homeless, jack up the rent prices. The convenience of the few is prioritized over the needs of the many.
Funny how someone who is mentally 12 could put this together, but you couldn't be bothered.
It's only stupid if you don't address the root causes of the problems that you are listing. If you don't do anything to lift the people out of their desperation and end the cause of that desperation, then of course they will sell it.
Your middle paragraph is the first part of what I'm talking about, do what is needed to help people lift themselves back up. Only a small part of that is helping with housing. The bigger problem is the second part, if you do nothing about the conditions that contributed to their downward spiral, then that first part will only be a temporary relief.
This second comment made it much more clear that you weren't just saying, "nah, fuck them," but covering all of the nuances of what needs to change just isn't a realistic expectation for text comments online. Frankly, I have a feeling you and I agree a lot on that first part of what is needed to help people, no clue about how you feel about the second part. I appreciate you coming back with a thoughtful answer instead of trolling, because I expect trolling.
Not enough trees and first batch was mostly single-room(as in one bedroom, one kitchen, one toilet and one bathroom in appartment), but better than humant colony.
Right, well even though San Diego might have state park beach front property, we shouldn't have a tent city filling it up. This quickly becomes unhygienic, and crime rises, among other issues.
Imagine thinking living in an apartment with heat, water, furniture, dishwasher, clothes washer, electricity, all the amenities, is the same as living in a tent. Exactly what the meme says: brainwashed society.
I’m just saying the two are part of the same picture, both literally and metaphorically. Often when people go against these they point to the homeless in cities. I get and agree with the point, I just don’t agree with the presentation; maybe some similar picture for the bottom in a suburb would do
Again, I'm not saying that tents must be associated with apartments. I'm saying that people who oppose things like apartments often associate homelessness with density in their arguments.
Depending on how one defines homelessness, China has either a very tiny homeless population or an extremely large one. Compared to other countries, there very few vagrants: people living on the streets of China's cities without means of support. But if one counts the people who migrated to cities without a legal permit (hukou), work as day laborers without job security or a company dormitory, and live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on the edge of cities, there are nearly 300 million homeless
I think what they're trying to say in thr meme is that the building is government funded.
In the US, we also a made some government funded buildings, "projects" but it did not go very well (combination of bad optics, and supposedly bad funding) .
So the US basically said fuck public funding for housing, the free market will fix everything.
And instead of the "ugly" buildings that Russia has (the idea pushed onto Americans) , we ended up with a large number of unhoused people because of spiraling out of control housing costs
The US uses vouchers, but they are underfunded (years long wait lists) and not accepted in many places. Some of the places that do accept them have similar issues to housing projects.
I hate both of them equally and with a vile passion. Having to share walls with other families is just as inhumane. I don't know why "Urban Sprawl" is such a looked down upon term. I'd much rather cities start as a central hub, and then urban sprawl outwards with minor hubs surrounding them every 100 miles or so.
This whole -- either everyone has to be packed like sardines, or everyone has to have 5 acres per house crap is annoying. Give the nation some medium density housing. We have the fucking internet now, half the people can work from home. You don't need to be walking-distance from everything.
You've obviously never actually lived in one of these places. They regularly have infestations, dirty water, and no heating due to the types of people they house and the "affordable" nature of them which generally causes lack of upkeep once built. Which can be, yes -- just as inhumane as living in a tent.
In addition, it removes the potential for ownership away from the people living there, in an effort to rent-seek and make sure they own nothing for as long as they live.
I'm not gonna dox myself here bg linking my adress, but rest assured: I have been living in apartments all my adult life, and it's been fine. The problems you describe are not inherent to apartments but rather the way landlords handle things. With better regulations and organizations that help renters assert their rights, it can be a good way to house people.
I agree that we're incredibly overdue for regulations in these areas. Since the mid 90s it's been deregulation, privitization, deregulation, privitization. A healthy capitalistic society can only survive with regulations which govern how absolutely atrocious capitalists can be. If they could sell you rat poison as food to make a dollar, they certainly would. My guess is that these kind of apartment complexes are probably better in less city-centric areas where the construction is newer. Unfortunately all I see going up around here is wood-frame apartment complexes, and they are clearly inferior to block/prefab concrete.
How is that a yikes? We're talking about poverty here, it is a class of people which regularly lack the same benefits in society as others, so there's higher instances of drug use, crime, etc. You know in conversation, it's occasionally useful to classify things with a broad brush so you can talk about overarching issues and how to solve them without being prejudiced, right?
Not when done properly. Two poorer Eastern European countries have 90+% of their citizens living in government owned housing that costs them 2% of their monthly income. The apartments are modern, well maintained, and preferable to home ownership because 2% rent. IIRC it's Estonia and Lithuania, but I may be wrong there.
With "Urban Sprawl," reliable public transit, and working from home, we could each nurture our personal green space and drastically cut emissions. I'm all for it.
Nobody is saying this stupid strawman you are arguing! If the kitchen is on fire and the trashcan is full, what do you do first? Do you take out the trash first because you can't live in such a wretched state?
Your vile passion is just thinly veiled narcissism. You can get your just desserts after we take care of major societal problems affecting the wider community. POOR YOU.
It's literally the argument in the image. That the bottom image is "worse to look at"...what are you on about?
I'm simply commenting on a third option that people regularly complain about looking at, "Urban Sprawl". There's no strawman here - you should really learn what that word means. I live comfortably in a medium sized neighborhood. I don't have to deal with the sights of either of these images at all... there's no "poor you" because I'm...not complaining. I'm offering a third option to a 2-choices fallacy presented in the OP.
I think you missed the point of the meme and then argued about a common, tangentially related topic, which made it sound like a strawman argument. Because you seem to be more genuinely confused as to my response than arguing in bad faith, I'll drop it. Those types of dismissive comments are meant for people arguing in bad faith.
The image is not attacking urban sprawl, it's attacking the very mindset that you displayed in your comment: "why do I have to choose between these two things? I hate living in apartments, so why would you force me to do this?"
The meme is showing two different approaches to dealing with a massive housing crisis where many people did not have access to housing. In the first image, we see how the USSR dealt with it: they needed more houses for people, so they forced families with homes to share with those without until new homes had been built. The government subsidized the construction and focused on building economical housing that functionally fixed the problem, but at the expense of luxury and some comfort. Would people have liked more space? Yes. Was it reasonable to accommodate that want before the needs of people without housing? No.
The lower image is showing how the US has handled a massive housing crisis...it hasn't. If someone can't manage to find and/or afford to house themselves, they choose to force those people to live on the streets. The thought process is more individual focused rather than community focused as in the top image. "Why should the people who have houses be inconvenienced by those who do not?" This assumes that those without have some type of moral or personal failure that justifies them having nowhere to live rather than the situation being a result of a system that does not prioritize human needs. It rests on the callous assumption that people do not deserve a place to live, but they instead must earn a place to live.
As to your argument, I don't think you offered a third option so much as a complaint about the state of the things. To be honest, I agree with your complaint. Assuming the context of your comment was focused on the US, there is plenty of space for people to live in larger homes and there isn't some false dichotomy where we only have the options of urban sprawl or dense apartments. The problem with how you approached the problem is that without further analysis of why a housing crisis exists and how we can eliminate the source of the problem, saying "just build more medium-density housing" equates to no more than a complaint.
You cannot fix a problem unless you address the root of the problem. Pushing the homeless out of sight does not fix the problem. Much of the problem is caused by our economic and political systems, but there is also the influence of the cultural aspect in how we think about the problem and how we think about people (individualistic vs collective focus). When you focus on yourself and how the problem affects you, it is often at the expense of other people. For the people this hurts and the people cognizant of the cultural influence, seeing individualist-focused complaints really rubs them the wrong way.
Sorry, I know there are a lot of bad-faith actors here on Lemmy, I understand if you thought I was just being antagonistic.
I think the discussion about where people live is probably less helpful than discussing the method of getting there. You obviously already know my preference for where to house people, but I think the conversation we should all be having is how to get people out of the situation they're in in the bottom picture.
Housing prices right now are out of control due to places like AirBnB, so more regulation needs to be slapped down there for sure. "Below the line" pricing needs to stop, and taxes on these short-term rentals need to be raised so that all housing doesn't just keep looking like an investment opportunity to offshore investors.
Another problem is that a lot of the people that are homeless suffer from massive mental issues which make them unfit to live in everyday society. Many homeless suffer from schizophrenia, drug addiction, or other major mental illness. I won't pretend that I have even the beginnings of a solution for this. Of all the solutions I hear about, many require taking these peoples rights away from them and putting them under government care, but that rarely works out the way people think it will.
I agree pushing them out of sight is not the way to handle it. I think that's true in most things -- I think a lot of us agree on a lot more than we disagree on, but we get so hung up on the details that often times online conversations spiral out of control. I commend you for being one of the few here who can actually hold a legitimate discussion without losing your cool. It's hard to find that when half the people on here are just looking for a fight.
Have...you sat there and thought about what you're asking? What "affordable housing" complexes do you know that aren't made out of paper walls? That's the "affordable" part.
Come to the Netherlands, where I’m from, social housing apartments are made of brick and concrete with thick walls. No shitty 5 over 1 stick building apartments in my country.
Also social housing apartments in my country are always mixed in between owner occupied apartments of different price ranges. So the buildings are of high quality and maintained.
Two poorer Eastern European countries have 90%+ of their citizens living in government owned housing. It costs them 2% of their monthly income. They prefer the apartments because the government built them properly, so they are modern, and well maintained. Oh, year and the rent is 2% of your income.
What you seems to be describing is Single-Family Housing. True medium density is actually really compact, using lots for more efficient housing and including public green space.
No, many countries do it right. But the meme implies this. Top picture is commie blocks, bottom picture is what you see in some western countries that do not get their social policies right. And the whole statement is a straw man as homelessness is not related to capitalism alone. This is typical propaganda.
Stupidity at its purest form: vote for socialism and leftism, and then when it destroys your city, call it capitalism. You guys come stragiht out of a comic book.
It's 100% a coincidence that more leftist cities have bigger homelessness problems. You deserve this. You voted for this. Enjoy!
And hey, I don't give two shits. I'm laughing at you.
I don’t think anybody thinks that.
Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:
In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.
Maybe we should institute a tax on underutilized land in metro areas.
Land Value Tax 👀
Fuck anyone that uses money to buy things and let them rot. That's a purposefully broad statement.
Based Geoism.
I wonder who is doing this voting? Oh, it's people who live in the areas we can't afford to live in. And capitalists add lobbying power to those voters selfish interests.
In the United States at least, your local government's public hearings for new housing developments kinda begs to differ.
People will demand the homeless be eliminated from their area while simultaneously opposing development of housing or shelters for the homeless in their area.
So maybe you're right though: they don't hate the apartments more, they simply can't make up their mind on which they hate more.
I agree but want to say everyone jumps to homeless. There are a ton of normal people that are suffering from high rent, lack of options, etc. We need to think about way more than homeless.
Most people think homeless as jobless, etc. But when we have people with entirely ok jobs that can't afford rent (see people living in their cars), addressing basic normal housing addresses both for a startling amount.
So it sounds like zoning laws are the problem?
In some cases. But even proposed changes to zoning laws can get this kind of opposition.
Aside from zoning laws, there's the lack of a unified federal intervention. This prevents any one area from addressing the local homeless issue because any area that takes steps to address it will consequently absorb more homeless individuals from other places in the country. For example, if a city in California develops a program to house any homeless individuals, then homeless individuals from other cities and states will be more likely to go to said city to get housed. Even worse, there are states that would actually pay for their transportation. What would happen is that either the city would have to solve a much larger homeless problem as new homeless move into town, or the initial wave of homeless people will be house while the new arrivals and homeless will stay homeless, leaving a continued homeless problem.
Succinctly put.
So conservative NIMBYs are the problem?
There's definitely an "I got mine, fuck you." component, yes.
I think it’s more so that people don’t want an apartment complex built in their backyard, not that they are opposed to them being built in an area where there is proper infrastructure
NIMBY!!
Where do you place the proper infrastructure then? It’s always going to be in someone’s “back yard” as you put it.
Well there’s considerable difference between an apartment complex in a suburb not designed for heavy traffic and less developed areas where there’s room for expansion for infrastructure.
We can’t expand roads in my area, either for an extra lane (which I know is a sin) or for buses because it would be right up on houses at that point.
However, just a few miles down the road on the main drag, there’s undeveloped land that would be perfect. Build it there.
When I say “backyard” I mean literally in your backyard. Instead of name calling and downvoting, have a fucking conversation and ask in a respectful manner what somebody means. Stop being a douche because you automatically assume somebody who thinks slightly differently than you is wrong.
Well articulated. I'm not from the US, but I've seen housing developments go sideways when they built four 10-story blocks (not in somebody's back yard, but in an area without proper infrastructure) and after 1000ish people had moved in there were 1 hour long queues just to get out of the complex because there was only one road with one lane per direction. And the only bus stop was not really reliable.
This was not built in the middle of the city because of land availability (and huge prices even if there was land available - you're near the metro and tram and a bus stop? pay 50% more. oh, you're near a park too? pay 50% more on top of that). Should we just tear down old buildings in low density areas in the city to make room for big blocks? Some might be worth tearing down because of age and overall condition, but good luck getting people to move out.
lmao make up your mind
do you want to have a conversation without name calling? Then leave out the name calling or kindly get fucked
Yeah, "in stead of name calling, stop being a douche" is not the MOST consistent argument ever 😂
Tired of being nice. I do it all the time and it’s never returned in kind.
Lemmy users act like this is a different place, that it’s a more wholesome internet, what a joke. It’s as bad as anywhere else.
I wasn’t being mean spirited with my original comment, it was a legitimate question. Whenever I hear people say something like “I don’t want that!” I like to find out why. It’s just curiosity. Sorry if it came across mean.
It's not far off what many think. Many think apartments are, oh so many adjectives, dirty, poor, unsanitary, inhumane, cruel, unusual, etc.
Who is “many”? Do you have surveys and data to support this?
Go to/watch any planning or proposal meeting and watch the pearl clutching and nimbyism. I think you know this but you want to demand "studies" instead of engaging in good faith.
Said the ocean gate sub captain.
jiggles keys Who wants to go see a shipwreck??
Third reply from user nutandcross for posterity:
Second reply from user nutandcross for posterity;
This is the response from user nutandcross for posterity, read to the end:
Sure they do. Look at all of the posts from my neighbors on Facebook and Nextdoor every time a developer tries to build an apartment building instead of a single family home in our neighborhood.
We're not building homes, we're not focussing on density. But apparently our elected officials have no problem letting people set up shanty towns. Where do you think the priorities lay?
What do you mean we’re not building homes? I have plenty of homes and apartments being built in my city that cater to lots of strata of incomes.
The world will never recover until poverty is seen not as a character flaw, but as a failure of society itself to provide for the most vulnerable.
I hate how when there is any picture of Soviet blocks it's always shot in autumn or winter when it's overcast. I live in an ex Soviet country and when these bad boys are maintained they can outperform new apartments, be it in functionality, amenities or price.
To me this adds a lot to the charm. I'd love to live there (at least for some time)!
Kruschev housing outperforms new apartments? That's the opposite of what we see of Russia in North America.
I am simply not believing that 50 year old apartment blocks are outperforming new ones by any metric.
I'm glad you're happy and there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in my country that are just fine but they are not outperforming anything.
Yeah i was recently looking for someone to work on windows and finding someone who does work in the traditional way is not easy. They're still out there, but for every one of them there's ten hack shops using minimum wage labor for everything. Even then, the real good techniques just seem like lost technology. They didn't get passed down to our generation.
Standards have improved 10 fold, I moved from a house built 70 years ago to a new build. It is completely different, air tight, less moisture, more efficient heating, permanent hot water, triple glazed windows. Literally everything is more secure and improved. There is nothing an old house can do a new one can't.
Heating is an accessory? The new tech associated with central heating compared to 50 years ago is night and day. The building materials have changed, the regulations have changed. Houses have better insulation, soundproofing, fire guarding, plumbing, electrical circuitry like how is this even a discussion.
Oh we don't have timber framed housing here, my house is concrete and the 50 year old house I was in, probably closer 100, was a stone cottage.
The new house has exactly those things you listed. I'm fairly certain they have to be in all new builds where I am. Though the solar is optional, we have a heat pump instead.
That's a load of nonsense, experienced builder or not. Heating is part of building a house just like the other plumbing, electrical and joinery work.
And why "I moved from unmaintained house" is argument against old housing? I have all those things in 50 years old house.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies... more in line with today's standards and have seen results more in line with today's standards.
What is your argument here?
So you understand this!
So modern building standards, materials, technologies and completed products are better than old?
I don't see many people taking out the cavity insulation to make their homes more old style.
Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m^2^ (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m^2^ (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)
Even communism aside, this is actually not uncommon. One of the advances we've made in construction is knowing how to save even more money, making the right sacrifices and meeting the minimum bars of code compliance, to maximize our margins.
I don't know how you say this unironically as criticism. That's arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources. It's not a good thing to waste manpower and resources for no real gain.
What gain? More profits for the ultra rich? A dying planet?
People living in comfortable apartments is no real gain in capitalism because it means less ROI. But it is a huge gain to everyone's quality of life if they can live comfortably.
Market mechanisms are very powerful in optimising resource allocation - but they aren't optimising for maximum quality of life, they're optimising for maximum ROI. Which lands in the pockets of the ultra rich, which then allocate the accumulated capital in only those endeavours providing maximum ROI, and the cycle goes on and on until so much wealth is extracted from society that the middle class collapses and the planet dies - and the ultra rich with them, for they depend upon the plebes to work for them in order to have an ultra rich lifestyle in the first place.
I mean if we were trying to house people we should be aiming for inexpensive and non-wasteful building choices, shouldn't we? When we're handling basic human needs we send boats full of rice and beans, not a bunch of badass chefs.
Why not? Why not let people have nice things?
I mean it's kind of a scarcity thing. Resources aren't infinite. I have no problem with letting people have nice things and would certainly want minimums to be pretty decent, but when you're getting people off the street or something then efficiency means lives saved.
We have all the money in the world. We have more than enough homes to house people, right now. We have an abundance of housing, of resources to build more housing, of everything. What we do not have is a distribution that allows people who need housing to get it. Instead we have a literal Spiders Georg situation where a tiny fraction of the country each own hundreds of homes they don't live in or even have any intention of living in. This situation is deranged.
Alright, then show the numbers. Let's ignore that seizing all that property will go super well. I know, you want people that own more than one house dead, so even include it as double the free housing. Figure out how much it costs to upkeep rental properties. Double it, maybe more, for people that literally don't give a fuck about it. Add costs for policing the shit.
Seizure won't fix it.
They literally sacrificed quality and safety to maximize profits and you call that good? Come on... You're being too biased.
That's literally not what I said.
You called the thing I criticized "one of the biggest advantages".
Yeahhhhh...
An apartment complex went up outside my work and it's made of wood. That's against fire safety code but they found some creative work arounds to convince the inspectors it was legal. (And of course the inspections are all toadies who have been put in place to rubber stamp developer plans.) Very efficient until it burns down and kills everyone inside.
So it doesn't actually meet minimum standards?
It meets the law but it sure as hell doesn't meet the safety.
Laws usually follow industry standard safety guidelines.
No, it's not capitalism, this is definition of economy itself. Which by the way includes communism.
Por que no los dos?
It's something capitalists claim. Communism claims to distribute things equitably and they have to fight over efficiency. Capitalism is the opposite.
No, communism claims to distribute things fair.
Same does any other economic system, but define efficiency differently.
Fair on both counts.
It's less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It's not like people didn't know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.
We have absolutely made strides in material technologies for construction over the last 50 years. Take asbestos for example.
Asbestos has some pretty insane properties, though. Just a shame it causes cancer when disturbed and inhaled.
As a building material? What's even better than asbestos in terms of the trifecta of sound/heat isolation, bulk, melting point, and structural soundness? Aerogel?
Not just that but internal insulation and fireguarding has come a long way.
yes they are, they outperform american's cardboard house
That wasn't the debate, so your input was pointless
still a fact tho
So?
I'd gladly live in one of those apartments in the first picture if it meant that everyone could have a home
I’d gladly walk my ass out to the wilderness rather than live in an apartment block, but at least then there’d be an extra spot.
The nice thing is in an anarchist society you could do just that, and no one would stop you
I'd personally prefer to be surrounded by people
Which is why I'm an anarchist. Pretty much every other system would force me to attempt to be happy in an apartment block, or waste huge amounts of resources creating suburbs that are still too goddamn crowded for me
I would like to share your attitude but fear the consequences when millions seek a place in the wilderness. What do you do when you arrive and your neighbor asks you to move on because he wants to be more alone?
I want to be more alone too, so I'd probably not get to the point where I was close enough to have them tell me to go away.
However, most people probably wouldn't like the actual wilderness. They want a big country house somewhere and when they find out they need to build it themselves they'll go back to the apartment blocks.
One reason I'm a fan of making cities less objectively terrible is that more people will live in them and be even further away from my hovel.
No, you see, anarchism means I can do whatever I want. Who cares about the other people?
That’s horrible. Have empathy. :(
bruh...
You believe that housing is not a basic human right, yet you say to me, "bruh..."
Just gonna pre-emptively block your bootlicking ass
If everyone thought like this, everyone would have a home.
And 50 or so people would own all of the rest of the land and do nothing with it because we're too fucking stupid to realize that a system that wants us all to live in 50m² micro apartments is a load of shit, and strung together by a greedy few.
There is enough land for us all to live comfortably, but a fraction of a percent don't want anyone to use most of the land for anything useful so hey let's just give up and take almost-squalor because at least it not squalor!
Fuck both these pictures.
"Land-usage" is such a narrow-minded way to think about the implicit wants and needs of society. You sound like you've never been to actual cities, or never got your head far enough out of your arse to actually experience one.
North American suburban sprawl already proves that "enough land for us all to live comfortably" is a terrible way to live sociable lives and drains the economy due to massive swathes of those lands being used for roads and the maintenance of said roads.
I implore you to take a trip to almost any European city, and see for yourself what actual "comfortable living" for most people looks like.
I've lived in cities my whole life, which paints a pretty broad picture of you doesn't it? Couldn't even get the premise of your own bullshit comment right.
...Why did you reinterpret the premise of their statement into something entirely different and then attack them for it?
I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong, but that was mean.
You make dense housing like these apartments because it is the most practical way to house everybody quickly. Once you take care of the immediate problem, homelessness, you can continue to expand and build nicer, bigger housing for everyone.
What's more important, that we have enough resources to house everyone, but there are still people forced to live on the streets or the fact that you don't like the inconvenience of living in an apartment because it's too small for you even in the short term? Guess that makes you one of the greedy few that can't see past their own problems to think of their community.
Fuck you doubly.
You agreed with me and then said fuck you? Weird take but okay.
What if we made the commie block apartments 140 m² each?
That would be a sensible next step, as long as the end goal is having reasonable amount of indoor and outdoor space for everyone to own.
There comes a point where it's not all about the m². You can give me 1000m² but if it's in a windowless box with one door in and out, it's not really meeting the quality bar.
The USSR didn't do much good but those apartment buildings are definitely good. I used to live in a soviet apartment building and the funny thing about that was that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything. They were thick as hell and fully concrete.
FTFY. Not all of them were load-bearing, mind you, they were just proper walls made of wall.
I'd say those were made from at least 3 walls worth of wall.
Appartments in panel buildings have load bearing walls inside.
Okay, I just went from "eh, commie blocks are gross but better than tents" to "fuck all the other apartments, bring on the commie blocks". Buildings in the US are built so ridiculously cheaply that in a lot of lower-rent buildings you can hear everything.
Commie blocks do have some issues like absolutely awful electrical wiring or lack of insulation but a lot of ex soviet countries renovate those buildings which leaves no downsides.
Default wiring is not impossible to replace. My building from 70-ies has global PE, only thing left is to replace aluminium wiring without PE inside appartment to 3-wire copper wiring.
I find brutalism beautiful. Wish we could have more of it in my country but solid concrete, especially preformed, performs poorly under shear.
It's gotten so "brutalist" is almost synonymous with "earthquake-prone".
How soundproof were they? I’m in an apartment with shitty drywall and sometimes I hear my neighbors fart.
As far as I knew I never even had neighbors or I at least never heard any.
I'm living in a soviet-built tenement block, and the only time I've heard anything from a neighbour is when the guy living above me dropped a bowling ball.
This is universal for all buildings. But I only hear when neoghbours do renovation and wall-penetrating ear-piercing baby cries.
It seems you lived in panel building. There are limitations to it like you should not add horisontal chases becaue it reduces load capacity or can't replan appartment because it will be destruction of load bearong wall. So wiring better be done in factory-made in-wall concrete tubes.
This is kinda like saying we need more farms to solve hunger.
The cost of housing is very detached from supply. For rentals, companies bought up housing and just jacked up the price, because renters are a semi captive client base.
New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.
Even for home buyers, they’re facing a major up hill battle going against existing home owners who have access to the capital of their current homes, and even worse corporate home buyers.
This isn’t to say supply isn’t an issue and we can ignore it, but we need to stop housing from just being an investment vehicle. Otherwise we’re just going to get garbage housing at prices no one can afford.
it's not detached from supply at all, single house zoning and mandatory minimum parking make for a whole lot of trouble in the US
Again I’m not saying supply isn’t an issue, and zoning is def a major problem in many states. But if the issue was only supply, rent would be growing more or less in line with the population not at the astronomical rate that it is.
yeah but due to immigration the population is growing in the USA, AFAIK, also you need to account for the trend of Urbanization (somewhat offset by move to WFH)
When Vanguard and Blackrock own half of the supply, then it's not a free market. Also, you said it's not detached from supply at all, but then proceeded to list reasons detached from supply that affect cost.
The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.
Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.
Largely agree with all your other points though.
I get that argument and I think there’s some merit to it since like you said this whole thing is muddled. But the counter point is often those vacated units are in another town or city. So in the way overly simplified scenario, if 36 “programmers” move to the city, the vacated units through out the country don’t help the “bus drivers” who are tied to the area.
Again we largely agree, I just wanted to illustrate even the simple assumptions like building more is good isn’t always that straight forward in this fucked up system.
The obvious and immediate flaw with the 36 people moving into luxury apartments is, that's not usually how luxury apartments work. Particularly in certain markets, it's more and more common for luxury housing to be temporary homes, vacation homes that are turned into investments the rest of the year, e.g. air BNB. So a lot of the time, you get 36 regular homes destroyed, for 12 luxury apartments that get bought up by either people or companies that either then rent them out or keep them empty most of the year, with no increase in available housing.
Rich people don't really move into these luxury apartment. They buy it as an investment, use it as a holiday home, etc.
I don't think: "ah, buildings again. I'd rather live in camps featuring trash scent."
The bottom picture also has a high rise apartment building in the background.
Except it's owned by rent oligopolist.
Imagine we could take care of the poor while at the same time not revert to a totalitarian dictatorship. Like if we could do both?
That's complete nonsense though, obviously. We get either to take care of the poor and go full Stalin or not and not. /s
Mass housing wasn't mass while Stalin was in power. Search for Stalinka, this is very not mass housing.
Don't worry, they've outlawed homelessness. Problem solved!
Literally though. And there's a whole practice of hostile architecture that makes it harder and more uncomfortable to be homeless.
The point of hostile architecture isn't to solve homelessness, just to send them to the next block/town over (not saying you don't understand that, just pointing it out).
I wonder if hostile architecture also kills people. Increasing exposure to cold and reducing opportunities to rest doesn't seem good for your chances for survival. I guess that would solve homelessness, but in the worst most morbid way possible.
You're absolutely right in your suspicion. Like so many "let's punish the poor and vulnerable so they'll stop being poor and vulnerable" policies that people think are just a "righteous" inconvenience, hostile architecture DOES kill people.
It's social murder just so the more fortunate don't have to look at the consequences of an unjust system.
The most morbid way i heard about was in the news, when i lived in Brasil. Store owners used to pay police officers to get rid of the homeless disturbing their business in Rio de Janeiro.
Carried out at night, organized & stealthy, most victims were kids.
I don't remember if someone really went to jail for this. That was in the 80s, like 20 years ago.
1980 was 43 years ago :P
Noooo! All of the 90s were 10 years ago and always will be, so it follows that the 80s were 20 years ago!
Make it unconstitutional for a municipality to let anyone go unhoused? Based, love it.
I understand the point. But France has done this and ended up with giant ghettos filled with si much crime that no emergency services whatsoever go there anymore.
In the US, they built giant housing projects like this where poverty was concentrated and the same thing happened. Crime installed itself in those projects and these neighbourhoods became dangerous ghettos.
Picture 1 is not the solution you think you want.
The condo building where I live is not so big. And it was built with 25% dedicated to social housing where poor families and underpaid workers can live comfortably in an apartment unit as big as my condo unit, which I paid nearly $400k CAD, for the price of about $650 CAD per month. This allows them to integrate with everyone else and live with everyone else and near where all the jobs are.
Capitalism has you thinking that these are our only options
Yeah, but I didn't have to pay anything for those people to live in tents. I keep my money out of their lazy hands.
/s, deeply, if it isn't obv.
And for those unaware, the cost of homelessness does exist, and it is quite high. We pay for it through emergency services (police, doctors, ambulance, hospital beds), waste removal services, etc.
The problem needs fixed, and part of the solution is commie blocks unironically.
You are forgetting the cost of building "asshole design" infrastructure, like spikes under bridges, instead of building affordable housing.
Hostile architecture makes my blood boil. We've really let more money be invested into hurting people that need help than to actually help them.
Very much so. Legal system, downtown areas, medical care… all face expenses of one sort or other, and those get passed on to the consumer and taxpayer. But a lot of people that don’t have to deal with the homeless because they live in a poor and/or rural area, or are incredibly hostile to homeless, that it’s fine for them to push the indirect tax onto areas that don’t have that demographic.
never fails to amaze me how "progressive" types do a complete 180 as soon as someone mentions solving the homeless problem by giving them homes
edit: i rest my case
I don't get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
There's a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they're scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don't even realize that they're racing to the bottom. By today's standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let's build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let's build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let's ban airbnb, and let's severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we're gonna have to build some high rises, but let's not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.
You're showing exactly what I said.
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don't know if you hold that idea, but you're repeating it
You've now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
Now you say apartments are against freeeeeddooomm lol.
As if you can't own a condo.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
Yeah. Visceral reaction to apartments. Peace.
It's pretty obvious I don't, and if you think accurately describing the misguided motivations of people counts as repeating propaganda, then you must live in a pretty thick bubble.
They are.
You have to buy the condo from a corporation, you have to pay condo fees to a condo board that is out of your control, and much of the quality of your home is determined by the original corporation that built it, as well as that board that you have no real control over and typically pays out maintenance, repairs, upgrades, etc. to other corporations.
I advocated for increasing apartment builds. I also advocated for numerous other measures to increase rental supply, I just didn't advocate for blindly buying the developer propaganda and letting them build high rise after high rise.
So since we have a food supply crisis we should all stop cooking and hand over all food control to corporations that will sell us back bland nutrition paste?
They literally do. Go live in Manhattan, it sucks. Sunlight literally doesn't hit street level except for at noon because you've put a bunch of gargantuan towers everywhere. Go look at a complex like Habitat 67 that actually tried to make apartments pleasant to live in instead of just being the cheapest they can possibly be to maximize developer profit. Go look at the size of Walmart parking lots in small towns that are the size of entire Manhattan blocks. Yes we need to densify, no we don't need to necessarily build blindly and continue just letting the free market decide what gets built where.
Yeah, not having a visceral reaction to anything, just plainly stating their benefits and downsides, though you seem to be having a visceral reaction to any perceived criticism of apartments whatsoever.
Fucking tell me about it. The best part is how they try to justify how they are only focused on themselves by shit like calling apartments "inhumane." JFC, living in an apartment is not inhumane. Living on the street is inhumane.
Why do you think people are living this way? Do you think it's personal failure or maybe desperation? Where else do they have to go? If you tear down the buildings but don't address the root problem, do you think they will just stop existing or will they be forced to find a new spot to live? Were these places always this way? What would you like me to call them?
Please continue making assumptions about my personal life and deriding me for my choice of words rather than contributing something useful. I try to meet people where they are at, which means speaking to what they know. In this case, you seem to know the symptom, but not the cause.
Pretty sure that’s just NIMBYs.
What is this trying to say???
That low income housing is good but people like when homeless people suffer.
Or that people living in block housing is preferable to some living in suburbs and some being homeless.
We could have both you know. Suburbistan for those that like it and apartments for those who like it. And homelessness for no one.
I'm for that. Hell, I would just like small tiny home communities without state government trying to restrict it. Block apartments are fine for many people (newly graduated, small families, and independent elders).
That's a bad take.
These are two different groups of people
The first, who are on board with state housing projects, are the common people who still have empathy for their fellow people
The second, who are totally on board with homelessness because the housing projects are "too expensive", belong to the political and economic elite
Yeah, that cognitive dissonance doesn't exist, and is misleading.
Dishonest framing. The average worker has nothing to do with this issue. They are not the people we're asking to solve this. Like I already said, it's the political and economic elite. Capitalists. The state. Where is the worker's money supposed to be sent? On what is their effort to be put?
Yep, neoliberal chuds, as I said
How? What variables have I abstracted into a black box, here? What few mechanisms have I reduced the issue to? To me, "people want affordable housing but don't wanna pay for it" sounds extremely oversimplified.
I'm not "picking an argument with you" lol. I'm just correcting what I see as a defeatist, "what can we even do" attitude.
Sounds like semantic fudging to me. "These people need homes! No, stop building homes, it's too expensive!!" sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
There's also the third group of people who realizes that homelessness is a complex problem that won't be solved by more housing.
That's just a cop out. Of course it's complex. No reason to just throw your hands in the air and say "it's too hard, let's just leave it to the market". We already tried that. It led to this.
Also, no one is saying, literally, "building more houses will fix homelessness alone, nothing else needed, DURRR". That's just a strawman.
What we also need is a complete end to landlording. But this of course won't happen under the current system, because capitalism fucking worships private property.
The entire post is about low income housing as a solution to people sleeping in tents. Building more apartments won't stop people from living in tents.
Pointing out that it's a complex issue that isn't solved by more houses is pretty much the opposite of a strawman
No, that is not the point it's making. It's making the point that neoliberal chuds would prefer to see homeless people than affordable housing. It doesn't say that building housing itself is the sole solution. Hell, it doesn't say anything at all about building. We don't see any construction in that picture, the blocks are just there. You could read it as saying that already built flats should just be given to people.
I don’t think it fails, but it does come from a specific cultural perspective.
Those are “ugly Soviet buildings” built by the government. That already communicates cost and the unwillingness to bear it in the US.
Nonono, it's unreasonable for taxes to go toward helping the poor. They live on the street and starve by their own choice. No one wants to pay for those wretched people!
Where are the police when you need them to quickly usher the inconvenient truth of my selfish lifestyle out of my sight?
You’re in lemmy.ml, a Marxist instance, reading a meme criticizing capitalism and saying that Soviet apartment buildings are a stretch?
No, they’re the whole point of the meme. Paying for them is the point, who paid for the Soviet buildings? The message is that the Soviet Union built these and American capitalists allow people to live in tents on the street (while calling those buildings ugly). Housing projects would be a perfect “yeah but” except they are very low priority and not so common.
Ugly Soviet buildings are themselves a meme. Up there with the hammer and sickle and the color beige when Americans visualize the Soviet Union.
Yes, any meme trying to say something with layers is probably misusing the format.
Exactly. It's not hard to keep the exterior of those buildings looking nice. You just have to pay someone to maintain it.
It's also forgetting that a significant portion of homeless people are homeless by choice, or are homeless for reasons that just providing housing won't resolve.
People have this idea that all homeless people are just regular people who experienced hard times, but that's just a minority. Most homeless are mentally ill people who won't take their meds or drug addicts who aren't willing to quit.
It sucks, and they shouldn't have to live on the streets, but you can't force people to change.
I don’t think people have that idea at all, if anything they are more likely to assume a homeless person is mentally ill and drug addicted than they are to think they are experiencing hard times or employed but unable to pay for housing.
However housing first has been pretty successful, but goes against many people’s values for some reason. The big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong.
Some might say the big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong enough to prop up an entire political party.
But it is not exclusive to them, of course. Some are just very bad about it.
For many it literally is a choice, and framing homelessness as something that no one has control over is problematic.
You're more than welcome to look up statistics. ~60% of the chronicly homeless have life long mental health issues, and ~80% have substance abuse issues.
Pretty much every city/state has resources to help the homeless, but the homeless have to be willing to accept the help. Most shelters are drug free, so addicts don't want to stay there and they won't accept people whose mental illness makes them violent.
You can't force a person to take their medicine or stop doing drugs unless you want to start building more prisons.
Again, I was never saying that all homelessness is a choice, but a lot of people choose not to accept the help that's available.
Source: My wife has her masters in the field and used to work with these populations as an addiction counselor, in Texas, so I know that resources exist at a state level even in a state that clearly hates it's citizens.
This is just conservative propaganda
I'm a liberal, buddy. Homelessness is a very complex issue that won't be solved by building more housing.
Yeah, liberals and conservatives only differ on whether gay people should be put to death, so you're not really saying much. And being liberal does not, whatsoever, make you immune to conservative propaganda. We live in a capitalist society, founded on liberal values: whether conservatives know it or not, it is liberal values they are conserving.
Also, as I've said about 5 times now, no one is saying that building houses alone will solve the issue. So stop beating that strawman.
I believe you are arguing in good faith, so I'm hoping you can provide a source for your claim that the majority suffer from mental illness or drug addiction.
Yeah that can't be right... The problem with these discussions I think is there's a very big difference between the technical definition of homeless, and the one people use colloquially.
It's the most visible minority of homeless people that tend to be the entrenched ones people think of when they think of homelessness, and those people essentially have nothing in common with the other "homeless" people other than having no permanent home. It makes the discussion harder as people are using the same word but talking about different things.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaigns/homelessness_programs_resources/hrc-factsheet-current-statistics-prevalence-characteristics-homelessness.pdf
Page 4
https://invisiblepeople.tv/capitalism-and-classism-increase-homelessness/
I think it's a confused message. Not the best meme.
But the basic idea is that homelessness is caused by people preferring houses ("urban sprawl") rather than apartment complexes.
It assumes you can recognize Soviet housing block, designed to quickly house as many people as possible. It has nothing to do with a preference for houses over apartments.
If you look through the rest of the photos in the source article, ask if living like they do is worse than homeless in a tent.
It's one of the worst memes ever.
It's a tankie meme, what would you expect.
This makes the most sense to me so far
It's trying to say that low income housing is the solution to homelessness.
It's wrong, but that's the point it's trying to make.
No, not really. But it's easy to read that into it.
seems like it's trying to imply that homeless people are homeless because houses are too expensive.
as if the guys in the bottom pic could afford a department in the top picture, but have to live in a tent because housing is expensive.
I think what the meme does say is that OP is mentally 12.
The top is meant to represent the socialist solution to homelessness. These are socialist block apartments built to ensure that everyone had housing because homelessness was a huge problem. They were functional, but because they were built to functionally address a need quickly, they weren't large or luxurious. They were built to last and the rent levels were controlled at a low rate if the people didn't outright own the place themselves.
The bottom picture is the liberal solution to homelessness. Apartments suck, fuck the homeless, jack up the rent prices. The convenience of the few is prioritized over the needs of the many.
Funny how someone who is mentally 12 could put this together, but you couldn't be bothered.
It is driving me to despair that so many people just don't get this.
your average homeless will sell the house in 5 microseconds for crack money or sign it away under duress.
homeless people need safer shelters, healthcare, detoxing, therapy, coaching and resources to help them out of the downward spiral they are in.
throwing free housing to vulnerable people suffering from addiction and mental illnesses is one of the stupidest things I have heard.
It's only stupid if you don't address the root causes of the problems that you are listing. If you don't do anything to lift the people out of their desperation and end the cause of that desperation, then of course they will sell it.
Your middle paragraph is the first part of what I'm talking about, do what is needed to help people lift themselves back up. Only a small part of that is helping with housing. The bigger problem is the second part, if you do nothing about the conditions that contributed to their downward spiral, then that first part will only be a temporary relief.
This second comment made it much more clear that you weren't just saying, "nah, fuck them," but covering all of the nuances of what needs to change just isn't a realistic expectation for text comments online. Frankly, I have a feeling you and I agree a lot on that first part of what is needed to help people, no clue about how you feel about the second part. I appreciate you coming back with a thoughtful answer instead of trolling, because I expect trolling.
Who is this society guy? He sounds stupid
Not sure why or from where this quote comes from. In germany and poland we have many such apartment houses that are very affordable
Uh, the billionaires don't see that. Even the millionaires can avoid seeing that.
What are you talking about dude? Those are homes with doors, locks, heat, and a bed. Compared to a tent?
The presence of picture 1 in no way prevents the presence of picture 2.
To be fair new social housing looks like this:
Not enough trees and first batch was mostly single-room(as in one bedroom, one kitchen, one toilet and one bathroom in appartment), but better than humant colony.
I really like russian appartement complexs, there is always green surrounding the buildings...I hate russia though
Right, well even though San Diego might have state park beach front property, we shouldn't have a tent city filling it up. This quickly becomes unhygienic, and crime rises, among other issues.
this confused me
Aren’t these basically the same picture? Like the second photo has a literal apartment building on the right of the background
Imagine thinking living in an apartment with heat, water, furniture, dishwasher, clothes washer, electricity, all the amenities, is the same as living in a tent. Exactly what the meme says: brainwashed society.
I’m just saying the two are part of the same picture, both literally and metaphorically. Often when people go against these they point to the homeless in cities. I get and agree with the point, I just don’t agree with the presentation; maybe some similar picture for the bottom in a suburb would do
Imagine thinking that tents must be associated with apartments. And that apartments must be associated with tents.
See meme again: brainwashed society.
Again, I'm not saying that tents must be associated with apartments. I'm saying that people who oppose things like apartments often associate homelessness with density in their arguments.
This more because of the local planning in a lot of western countries. Authoritarian countries force housing through much easier
China has 300m homeless people though?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9326182
Depending on how one defines homelessness, China has either a very tiny homeless population or an extremely large one. Compared to other countries, there very few vagrants: people living on the streets of China's cities without means of support. But if one counts the people who migrated to cities without a legal permit (hukou), work as day laborers without job security or a company dormitory, and live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on the edge of cities, there are nearly 300 million homeless
The source of your source
300 million homeless in China? What the hell, that's like almost the entire population of the US.
Yeah no. There is no way 20% of the Chinese population is homeless. Your source is a US government website, I'm sure they're not biased about China.
Yes. Well spotted....
The author is Zhaohui Su who is Chinese and works for:
a School of Public Health, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China
b Center on Smart and Connected Health Technologies, Mays Cancer Center, School of Nursing, UT Health San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78229, USA
I think what they're trying to say in thr meme is that the building is government funded. In the US, we also a made some government funded buildings, "projects" but it did not go very well (combination of bad optics, and supposedly bad funding) . So the US basically said fuck public funding for housing, the free market will fix everything. And instead of the "ugly" buildings that Russia has (the idea pushed onto Americans) , we ended up with a large number of unhoused people because of spiraling out of control housing costs
The US uses vouchers, but they are underfunded (years long wait lists) and not accepted in many places. Some of the places that do accept them have similar issues to housing projects.
There is only the illusion of a market. Construction codes and lack of construction sites prevent that there is a surplus that drives down costs.
Honestly I'd take homeless any time of the year over the culture that is fostered in those Russian type block houses. It's far worse.
Literally to whom does this apply? Get in touch with reality.
I hate both of them equally and with a vile passion. Having to share walls with other families is just as inhumane. I don't know why "Urban Sprawl" is such a looked down upon term. I'd much rather cities start as a central hub, and then urban sprawl outwards with minor hubs surrounding them every 100 miles or so.
This whole -- either everyone has to be packed like sardines, or everyone has to have 5 acres per house crap is annoying. Give the nation some medium density housing. We have the fucking internet now, half the people can work from home. You don't need to be walking-distance from everything.
Yes, occasionally hearing your neighbors is just as inhumane as having no shelter, water and heating.
You've obviously never actually lived in one of these places. They regularly have infestations, dirty water, and no heating due to the types of people they house and the "affordable" nature of them which generally causes lack of upkeep once built. Which can be, yes -- just as inhumane as living in a tent.
In addition, it removes the potential for ownership away from the people living there, in an effort to rent-seek and make sure they own nothing for as long as they live.
I'm not gonna dox myself here bg linking my adress, but rest assured: I have been living in apartments all my adult life, and it's been fine. The problems you describe are not inherent to apartments but rather the way landlords handle things. With better regulations and organizations that help renters assert their rights, it can be a good way to house people.
I agree that we're incredibly overdue for regulations in these areas. Since the mid 90s it's been deregulation, privitization, deregulation, privitization. A healthy capitalistic society can only survive with regulations which govern how absolutely atrocious capitalists can be. If they could sell you rat poison as food to make a dollar, they certainly would. My guess is that these kind of apartment complexes are probably better in less city-centric areas where the construction is newer. Unfortunately all I see going up around here is wood-frame apartment complexes, and they are clearly inferior to block/prefab concrete.
That's gonna be a yikes from me, scoob
How is that a yikes? We're talking about poverty here, it is a class of people which regularly lack the same benefits in society as others, so there's higher instances of drug use, crime, etc. You know in conversation, it's occasionally useful to classify things with a broad brush so you can talk about overarching issues and how to solve them without being prejudiced, right?
Not when done properly. Two poorer Eastern European countries have 90+% of their citizens living in government owned housing that costs them 2% of their monthly income. The apartments are modern, well maintained, and preferable to home ownership because 2% rent. IIRC it's Estonia and Lithuania, but I may be wrong there.
With "Urban Sprawl," reliable public transit, and working from home, we could each nurture our personal green space and drastically cut emissions. I'm all for it.
If you have urban sprawl, you're not having reliable public transport. You need density to make it work.
Nobody is saying this stupid strawman you are arguing! If the kitchen is on fire and the trashcan is full, what do you do first? Do you take out the trash first because you can't live in such a wretched state?
Your vile passion is just thinly veiled narcissism. You can get your just desserts after we take care of major societal problems affecting the wider community. POOR YOU.
It's literally the argument in the image. That the bottom image is "worse to look at"...what are you on about?
I'm simply commenting on a third option that people regularly complain about looking at, "Urban Sprawl". There's no strawman here - you should really learn what that word means. I live comfortably in a medium sized neighborhood. I don't have to deal with the sights of either of these images at all... there's no "poor you" because I'm...not complaining. I'm offering a third option to a 2-choices fallacy presented in the OP.
Where does the land for the sprawl come from? You either have to destroy nature or farmland.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/america-land-use/ provides a nice visualization.
Only 2% of USA's landmass is used for our urban areas. There is plenty of "Open Space" (3%), "Shrubland" (24%), Grassland (17%) to utilize.
I think you missed the point of the meme and then argued about a common, tangentially related topic, which made it sound like a strawman argument. Because you seem to be more genuinely confused as to my response than arguing in bad faith, I'll drop it. Those types of dismissive comments are meant for people arguing in bad faith.
The image is not attacking urban sprawl, it's attacking the very mindset that you displayed in your comment: "why do I have to choose between these two things? I hate living in apartments, so why would you force me to do this?"
The meme is showing two different approaches to dealing with a massive housing crisis where many people did not have access to housing. In the first image, we see how the USSR dealt with it: they needed more houses for people, so they forced families with homes to share with those without until new homes had been built. The government subsidized the construction and focused on building economical housing that functionally fixed the problem, but at the expense of luxury and some comfort. Would people have liked more space? Yes. Was it reasonable to accommodate that want before the needs of people without housing? No.
The lower image is showing how the US has handled a massive housing crisis...it hasn't. If someone can't manage to find and/or afford to house themselves, they choose to force those people to live on the streets. The thought process is more individual focused rather than community focused as in the top image. "Why should the people who have houses be inconvenienced by those who do not?" This assumes that those without have some type of moral or personal failure that justifies them having nowhere to live rather than the situation being a result of a system that does not prioritize human needs. It rests on the callous assumption that people do not deserve a place to live, but they instead must earn a place to live.
As to your argument, I don't think you offered a third option so much as a complaint about the state of the things. To be honest, I agree with your complaint. Assuming the context of your comment was focused on the US, there is plenty of space for people to live in larger homes and there isn't some false dichotomy where we only have the options of urban sprawl or dense apartments. The problem with how you approached the problem is that without further analysis of why a housing crisis exists and how we can eliminate the source of the problem, saying "just build more medium-density housing" equates to no more than a complaint.
You cannot fix a problem unless you address the root of the problem. Pushing the homeless out of sight does not fix the problem. Much of the problem is caused by our economic and political systems, but there is also the influence of the cultural aspect in how we think about the problem and how we think about people (individualistic vs collective focus). When you focus on yourself and how the problem affects you, it is often at the expense of other people. For the people this hurts and the people cognizant of the cultural influence, seeing individualist-focused complaints really rubs them the wrong way.
Sorry, I know there are a lot of bad-faith actors here on Lemmy, I understand if you thought I was just being antagonistic.
I think the discussion about where people live is probably less helpful than discussing the method of getting there. You obviously already know my preference for where to house people, but I think the conversation we should all be having is how to get people out of the situation they're in in the bottom picture.
Housing prices right now are out of control due to places like AirBnB, so more regulation needs to be slapped down there for sure. "Below the line" pricing needs to stop, and taxes on these short-term rentals need to be raised so that all housing doesn't just keep looking like an investment opportunity to offshore investors.
Another problem is that a lot of the people that are homeless suffer from massive mental issues which make them unfit to live in everyday society. Many homeless suffer from schizophrenia, drug addiction, or other major mental illness. I won't pretend that I have even the beginnings of a solution for this. Of all the solutions I hear about, many require taking these peoples rights away from them and putting them under government care, but that rarely works out the way people think it will.
I agree pushing them out of sight is not the way to handle it. I think that's true in most things -- I think a lot of us agree on a lot more than we disagree on, but we get so hung up on the details that often times online conversations spiral out of control. I commend you for being one of the few here who can actually hold a legitimate discussion without losing your cool. It's hard to find that when half the people on here are just looking for a fight.
How is it inhumane? Have you only ever lived in apartments made of paper walls?
Have...you sat there and thought about what you're asking? What "affordable housing" complexes do you know that aren't made out of paper walls? That's the "affordable" part.
Come to the Netherlands, where I’m from, social housing apartments are made of brick and concrete with thick walls. No shitty 5 over 1 stick building apartments in my country.
Also social housing apartments in my country are always mixed in between owner occupied apartments of different price ranges. So the buildings are of high quality and maintained.
Two poorer Eastern European countries have 90%+ of their citizens living in government owned housing. It costs them 2% of their monthly income. They prefer the apartments because the government built them properly, so they are modern, and well maintained. Oh, year and the rent is 2% of your income.
What you seems to be describing is Single-Family Housing. True medium density is actually really compact, using lots for more efficient housing and including public green space.
More like "This doesn't exist, we're going to deal with it just one minute" 🤗
Totally true!
No. The only bigger problem I have with the first image is permanence; the situation in the second picture is easier to clean up.
Oh good, more edgy agenda posts
What's edgy about it?
The high rises are have right angles. I'm guessing that's those are the edgy bits
Making sure people have ample access to basic human rights such as shelter is pretty extreme
Whats with all the soviet propaganda in lemmy memes?
Housing homeless is Soviet?
No, many countries do it right. But the meme implies this. Top picture is commie blocks, bottom picture is what you see in some western countries that do not get their social policies right. And the whole statement is a straw man as homelessness is not related to capitalism alone. This is typical propaganda.
Lemmy is run by left wingers
As someone who lives in a former communist country, I can tell you that “commie blocks” most definitely don't fix homelessness.
North Korea have more births than South Korea, having half of population. Capitalism is a demographic failure.
What a stupid snivelling American sophomoric bullshit opinion.
The bottom problem is drug addiction, not capitalism.
The top photo isn't about what it's like to fucking look at , it's about what it's like to live in.
And I can tell you that there is plenty of crime there.
there's no worse/better they're both worse
oh no you've been a victim of misinformation oh dear 🙄
Stupidity at its purest form: vote for socialism and leftism, and then when it destroys your city, call it capitalism. You guys come stragiht out of a comic book.
It's 100% a coincidence that more leftist cities have bigger homelessness problems. You deserve this. You voted for this. Enjoy!
And hey, I don't give two shits. I'm laughing at you.
Now i can work for myself and earn for a better home, but under communism id most likely have to live in a building like top picture
Mmm, irony
"I'm winning at the capitalist crapshoot, so everyone else must be as well"
i don't care about people who don't care about themselves
Ah yes, because everyone on the streets "don't care about themselves".
People are usually on the streets because they have no other choice.
Empathy and understanding others is literally free.