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What if public housing were for everyone?
- harimau777 3y agoMy understanding is that one of the feature's of Singapore's public housing is that there is a range of qualities from basic to luxury. It seems to me that could help make such a program more palatable.
- purpleflame1257 3y agoOne of the other things about Singapore is that they will bring the hammer down on you for abusing the public housing. If you pee in an elevator, the doors will shut and the police will come. Compare that to public housing in America...
- grugagag 3y agoPublic housing is neglected in the US because it pushes certain demographics in it and wants it neglected Imo.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoPublic housing is for the middle class. This isn’t low barrier or even housing for the poor like in the USA.
- pydry 3y agoMuch like single payer healthcare (which even a majority of Republicans are in favor of), the program is perfectly palatable to voters. The problem is that the investors who fund political campaigns and media oligarchs hate HATE HATE public housing, because it reduces the value of their property investments. Extra supply reduces the price of existing supply. In order to win elections, you almost need those investors on your side more. The public will be swayed one way or another by their media and if you don't have the campaign financing they probably won't even hear about your exciting campaign platform to build lots of housing in the first place - you'll get cut out in an early race.
- Aurornis 3y ago> In order to win elections, you almost need those investors on your side more than the actual public …because those few elite investors outnumber the voting public at the voting booth? This claim doesn’t make any sense. It’s weird conspiratorial thinking. EDIT: Yes, people. I’m familiar with Fox News and the concept of campaign donations. However, Fox News’ prime time viewership is around 0.5% of the US population and the average size of presidential campaign contributions is well under $100. Claiming that elections are decided by a shadowy cabal of elite investors who trick unwitting voters into voting against their self interests is the election equivalent of claiming anyone who disagrees with you online is a bot or a shill.
- malermeister 3y agoYou need immense financial resources to win elections in the US. To get those, you need the support of elite investors. This is why other countries legally cap election campaign spending.
- bluGill 3y agoThis is why iowa has the first caucus. As a small state you need much less money to reach everyone and a win will get you attention and money to target other states. as an Iowan I hate it as so many caucus only for the strawpoll.
- pydry 3y agoHave you heard of Fox News? It's a TV channel that runs completely fair and balanced news. Anybody who says otherwise is a weird conspiracy theorist. /s Those elite investors can run large scale propaganda campaigns via the media that they own to sway voters from candidate A to candidate B. Their preference is to cut candidate C (the kind that likes stuff like public housing, single payer healthcare, reducing military spending) out of the political system at a low level and let voters fight over A and B at the highest levels (e.g. president) safe in the knowledge that A and B both have billionaire best interests at heart and that voters really feel like they're getting a choice. Which, of course, they are not: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/voterspolicies.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/voterspolicies.pdf
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoSingapore public housing is for the middle class, so it’s really different from American kind. Singapore also has subsidized/free housing for those that can’t even afford public housing, which isn’t exactly cheap, even if affordable to the middle class. Many Americans would think $500k for a flat was actually not reasonably priced at all, but locations is key.
- malermeister 3y agoAround two thirds of the Viennese population lives in public housing. The City of Vienna is Europe's largest landlord. On a related note, Vienna has been leading Global Quality of Life rankings for years. See also this short documentary about what that looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxuACFQBwxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxuACFQBwxs
- alistairSH 3y agoThe apartment building they highlight (in Montgomery County,MD) might be a good start, but it’s also missing larger floor for families. By sqft, two plans are planet big (1100, 1200sqft) but only 2 bedroom (using space for large open plan living space). I would like to see apartments more suitable for families. 3 bedrooms.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 3y agoLoads of families only want 2 bedrooms. While I tend to agree that it would be nice to have more 3-4 bedroom homes, I think it is a larger acute problem to build more 0-2 bedroom homes first. That relieves the over-housing problem of seniors living alone in large houses. Only < 30% of US households have children present. The majority of households will be satisfied with 2 bedrooms or less.
- ghaff 3y agoA fairly typical pattern over the past few decades in the US, at least for professionals, is that they'd live in or near a city after graduation and then move out to suburbs/exurbs when they got married and started a family. There's been an influx (reversing an outflux) to certain cities over the past couple of decades. Of course, there's no law of nature that will continue.
- jonfw 3y agopublic housing doesn't address the root of the problem. Housing prices are insane because it's expensive and difficult to acquire and develop land. There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market. This make land very expensive to developers and limits competition. Developing, rezoning, acquiring land can take expertise and political capital. Small developers have a hard time getting involved in tight markets, where most development is now handled by the national builders on a huge scale. We need to approach this from a different perspective. One is to kill speculative land investments with a land value tax, causing people who aren't using the land to sell off. Two is to streamline zoning and permitting processes to make it much easier for upstart developers to get started on smaller scales.
- brtkdotse 3y ago> There's two primary reasons- zoning, and speculative investment that keeps good land off of the market. While I agree with the second point, I’m having a hard time understanding how zoning can affect pricing. Isn’t it just “you can’t build industry next to residential”?
- diziet_sma 3y agoA significant amount of zoning is about what type of housing you can build where, how much of it you can build, and how you have to build it. For example, in Berkeley California, which was one of the first cities to implement "exclusionary zoning" has roughly the following zoning restrictions: * R-1: One home per lot or estate, only. Bans apartments in 49% of the city. * R-1A: One home per lot or estate, unless the parcel exceeds 2,400 SF which allows for an additional home. * R-2: Two homes on one parcel, only. * R-2A: One home per every 1,650 square feet on a parcel. A typical residential parcel in Berkeley is about 5,300 square ft thus commonly three homes maximum. [source](https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeleys-upzoning-would-be-among https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeleys-upzoning-would...)
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoit's also "you can't build multi family housing" and "you must include 1 parking spot per resident"
- CommieBobDole 3y agoI think one of the big problems with public housing in the US is that we had a big push for it in the past but went about it in the wrong way and managed it poorly, and had very notoriously terrible results. Now the idea of building any at all for any reason is basically radioactive in most of the country and no politician wants to touch it.
- earthwalker99 3y ago[flagged]
- piva00 3y agoSweden built a million public housing homes (Miljonprogrammet) in a decade back in the 60s-70s, it has a freer market than the USA. Communism red scare was also from the 60s-70s, please change your worldview for the reality of the 2020s, not a boogeyman invented during the Cold War.
- hellojesus 3y ago> Communism red scare was also from the 60s-70s, please change your worldview for the reality of the 2020s, not a boogeyman invented during the Cold War. While the post's reference to communism may have been a bit hyperbolic, it's not too much off the mark. It would have likely been better to state that America is supposed to have a free market and not implement socialist policies to fix a problem created by the government: zoning and building restrictions as other comments in the thread have mentioned. Nevertheless, communism is a valid threat to current-state America, as there seems to be a large push towards marxist ideologies that are corrupting long standing public institutions.
- someonehere 3y ago> Governments have successfully addressed housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore in the past, but these examples have typically inspired little attention in the US Those countries demographics are way different than the US for affordable housing. It’s comparing apples and tennis balls.
- bboygravity 3y agoSingapore was a third world country when it started its public housing program. Are you arguing that the US's starting point is somehow worse than that? If so how?
- linuxftw 3y agoThis article is a joke. The apartments mentioned have a 1BR starting at $2,125. And it doesn't seem to be 'public housing' as much as it seems to be 'publicly subsidized private housing.'
- CivBase 3y agoWhat problem is public housing supposed to solve? The current housing crisis is a supply problem. We aren't building enough housing in places with high demand, so prices are going up. Even if public housing was subsidized to be cheaper than the market rate, it doesn't matter because the public housing will just fill up right away and then we're back to square one. Is there something about public housing that would allow them to build more than the private sector?
- nradov 3y agoPublic housing would likely be even more difficult to build. If you think that NIMBYs created obstacles before just wait until a politician proposes building "housing projects" in their neighborhood.
- bregma 3y agoPublic housing is for the poors and the ethnics. That will not change as long as policy is set in the interests of neither. Regulations are captured to Keep Your Hands Off My Stash and to possibly embiggen it. It is the way.
- tokai 3y agoUS has people that has no ethnicity? That's pretty wild.
- thworp 3y agoI appreciate every single new housing unit being built and think public housing is generally a good idea. But recently there seems to be a trend of people wanting to fast-track zoning and permitting for public housing only, while keeping private builders stuck in the quicksand of permitting. This is not the way mainly because the state does not have the resources to satisfy all housing demand (but also because two-tier rental markets are really unfair to newcomers). What we need is radical reforms in permitting and regulation at all levels of government (but especially at the local level). Imo the main obstacle to these reforms is that it is too easy to shout them down with talking points like "neighbourhood character", "lawn space", "shoeboxes" or "greedy developers". If North American cities zoned a quarter of their area as 5-story midrises with large parks and mixed use and made permitting quick and easy we could really bankrupt the rent-seekers.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago> If North American cities zoned a quarter of their area as 5-story midrises with large parks and mixed use and made permitting quick and easy we could really bankrupt the rent-seekers. I don’t believe that because it doesn’t happen in other countries that allow for 5 story midrises with large parks and mixed use and … the housing prices are often even more than North America in places that allow that in Europe and Asia. The only place with reasonable housing prices by our standards would be Japan, but housing is still expensive compared to what locals earn.
- thworp 3y agoWell yes, obviously there will be a price floor on housing in a wealthy country. My point is that in recent decades the entire developed world has absolutely strangled their housing markets. Anywhere people want to move to, the wages:home prices ratio has gotten to unprecedented levels. In Europe the reasons are slightly different. A big one is marking entire buildings, their facades or even their ornamentation as historical landmarks on a large scale (sometimes entire neighbourhoods). Buildings codes are quite a bit stricter than in the US (in all aspects, especially energy efficiency and fire code) and permitting is just as slow and vulnerable to lawsuits-after-the-fact. The reasons I suggested midrises is because that is the style of building that was built in Europe during the late 19th / early 20th century population boom and it still holds up today (people want to live there).
- Workaccount2 3y agoLocal governments need to change zoning. The federal government needs to extend low-interest (<4%) credit to home builders.
- workingdog 3y agoWe can't have heathly dense public housing when some of us act like feral animals.