4 ms·

What's wrong with housing the poor in cheap isolated areas? If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town. Doesn't t

What's wrong with housing the poor in cheap isolated areas? If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town. Doesn't the government fund cheap houses on purpose to prevent homelessness? Where's the exploitation? If the poor are too deserving for cheap housing, then who does deserve it?

war1025 6y ago
> What's wrong with housing the poor in cheap isolated areas? The thrust of the article is that no one should really be living in those places. Living in an isolated area is fine if you have access to transportation. The implication of the article is that there isn't adequate public transportation and the people don't have cars. Basically, if you house someone in a place that sets them up for failure, how grateful can you really expect them to be? > If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town. The lady in the article said she couldn't work because she spent half her day getting her kids to / from school. That is different from being unwilling to work. Maybe the residents are unwilling to work, but maybe it's a matter of them being too far away from jobs to realistically get one. > Where's the exploitation? The implication of the article is that the exploitation is by the property developers who converted the office space into something that qualified for government housing money, but wasn't really suitable for people to live in.
bilbo0s 6y ago
If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town Maybe that works in the UK, but in the US, at least where I live, we have rules about the poor. You can't be getting benefits and at the same time not be going to work. You used to be able to do that, like a few decades ago or whatever, but not nowadays. If you're poor, you can not work if you want, but you won't get benefits. As soon as you sign up for benefits where I live, they will assign you work, and your new employer has to keep them informed of your performance. Most states would call it something like "work-fare", or "w2", or something like that. There may still be states where you can get benefits without working? But I'd imagine there aren't too many of them, if any.
Spooky23 6y ago
Isolation makes the poor poorer. If you look at what happened in the slum clearance programs in the United States, we tried to fix people problems by bulldozing buildings. If you think about the needs of people without a prefix, the obviousness of some problems pop out. “Poor people” are “people”, and if you think that way, the issue of being a 50 minute bus ride from groceries should become apparent to you. The South Bronx is a great obvious example. 300k+ people were displaced directly by the construction of the Bruckner and other expressways, and probably twice that were indirectly displaced as their neighborhoods were shattered by the construction and impacts of running superhighways through. Landlords abandoned or torched thousands of buildings in the 70s. The answer to the housing issue was building big public housing projects in disconnected, cheap areas, which rapidly became magnets for crime and misery. Try feeding a family when no groceries exist — fast food and bodega food only. If you look at old neighborhoods and cities, the poor were present and integrated in broader society. They may have been marginalized, but they weren’t set aside like dirty dishes in the sink.

war1025 6y ago

> What's wrong with housing the poor in cheap isolated areas? The thrust of the article is that no one should really be living in those places. Living in an isolated area is fine if you have access to transportation. The implication of the article is that there isn't adequate public transportation and the people don't have cars. Basically, if you house someone in a place that sets them up for failure, how grateful can you really expect them to be? > If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town. The lady in the article said she couldn't work because she spent half her day getting her kids to / from school. That is different from being unwilling to work. Maybe the residents are unwilling to work, but maybe it's a matter of them being too far away from jobs to realistically get one. > Where's the exploitation? The implication of the article is that the exploitation is by the property developers who converted the office space into something that qualified for government housing money, but wasn't really suitable for people to live in.

bilbo0s 6y ago

If they're not working, they don't need to be occupying more valuable locations near town Maybe that works in the UK, but in the US, at least where I live, we have rules about the poor. You can't be getting benefits and at the same time not be going to work. You used to be able to do that, like a few decades ago or whatever, but not nowadays. If you're poor, you can not work if you want, but you won't get benefits. As soon as you sign up for benefits where I live, they will assign you work, and your new employer has to keep them informed of your performance. Most states would call it something like "work-fare", or "w2", or something like that. There may still be states where you can get benefits without working? But I'd imagine there aren't too many of them, if any.

Spooky23 6y ago

Isolation makes the poor poorer. If you look at what happened in the slum clearance programs in the United States, we tried to fix people problems by bulldozing buildings. If you think about the needs of people without a prefix, the obviousness of some problems pop out. “Poor people” are “people”, and if you think that way, the issue of being a 50 minute bus ride from groceries should become apparent to you. The South Bronx is a great obvious example. 300k+ people were displaced directly by the construction of the Bruckner and other expressways, and probably twice that were indirectly displaced as their neighborhoods were shattered by the construction and impacts of running superhighways through. Landlords abandoned or torched thousands of buildings in the 70s. The answer to the housing issue was building big public housing projects in disconnected, cheap areas, which rapidly became magnets for crime and misery. Try feeding a family when no groceries exist — fast food and bodega food only. If you look at old neighborhoods and cities, the poor were present and integrated in broader society. They may have been marginalized, but they weren’t set aside like dirty dishes in the sink.