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Really interesting article. > ... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be
by Tiktaalik 7y ago
Really interesting article.
> ... it also set strict requirements for younger people who lived there: if your income exceeded a certain threshold, you would be evicted. If you refused, you were charged rent – at potentially up to twice the market rate, depending on your income.
The goal was to make public housing a safety net for elderly, low-income and socially vulnerable people. The effect, however, has been to make social housing off-limits for most people: eligibility fell from 80% of households in 1951 to 25% after 1996.
And it has turned public housing into a kind of ghetto for poor and elderly people who rely on pensions and can’t afford private rents.
In Canada it is often controversial when upper middle class people are found to be living in affordable coops and anti-poverty activists, in an understandable effort to create as much low income housing as possible, often call for wholly low income housing projects instead of having buildings with mixed incomes. This article suggests at the flawed outcome from overly means testing benefits.
- tungwaiyip 7y agoI have also seen this in public housing in Hong Kong. Government built housing for families in the 70s. Children move out. The remaining residents turn grey. The residents in the housing complex are aging along with the buildings.
- Gibbon1 7y agoThe street I spent my childhood on there was about 30 kids under 10 years old. Now there is about three. My family moved away but I recently checked and the girl next doors parents have lived there ever since. They're in their 80's. Mulling it over I think uniform single use zoning/construction is 'bad'. I saw presentation by a guys showing various housing. One of them was a very nice 1920's era apartment building in Redwood city. One of his points was it'd be totally illegal to build something like that today.
- dalbasal 7y agoI increasingly think that for social safety nets to work well, they need to be universalized, if possible. Otherwise we get welfare traps, ghettoisation or just poor quality (like buses in places where only the poor use em). It doesn't mean everyone has to use it, just that they can. This is common sense in services like health or education, where we're used to it.
- xcklo 7y agoThat universalism leads to less social stratification is essentially the idea behind the social democratic welfare state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_the_welfare_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state#Three_worlds_of_...
- smallnamespace 7y agoWe already have a good solution to avoid ghettoisation or traps called progressive taxation. However, it doesn't go far enough because the tax rate doesn't take benefits into account, so even though you're getting >$0.80 of every dollar earned, after adjusting for benefits it may instead be $0.20 or even negative. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is an especially large contributor to this situation [1]. To avoid a trap, marginal income after taxes and benefits should start high and fall monotonically. It should probably also be concave up (the amount of income to bump you into the next 'adjusted tax' bracket gets bigger and bigger). [1] https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/412722-How-Marginal-Tax-Rates-Affect-Families-at-Various-Levels-of-Poverty.PDF https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publicati... (page 767, Figure 2)
- freewilly1040 7y agoThe issue of capital gains getting preferential tax treatment over wage labor is a much bigger problem than any lack of benefits taxes.
- xchaotic 7y agoWhy? It's just artificial money, what's the concrete negative impact? (I probably agree, I just think it needs to be concrete and justified)
- gwbas1c 7y agoAnd in the US, a lot of upper-middle-class HATE mixed income dwellings. At least in dense cities, public housing can be mixed into free market housing.
- pas 7y agoThey hate it because it became a one stop shop solution for everything. (Especially the mental illness problems are troubling without any of the very much needed therapy, continuous follow ups, visits from a social worker, etc.)
- zem 7y agothat would be a bit more believable were it not for the people who make sure that the "poor apartments" in a building have a separate entrance.
- greglindahl 7y agoWhile that makes a great headline, how common is it?
- zem 7y agoenough to have its own wikipedia entry, at the least! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_door
- robocat 7y agoWhich seems to imply that while a poor door is not very common, it is becoming more common in response to affordable-housing regulations (requiring a % of market-rate developments to be affordable).
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoThat indicates poor zoning to me. If you have mixed market-rate and social housing you should be building them adjacent to each other or (as is often done now) in the same building.