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This is yet another short term positive but long term disaster. 1) This creates an incentive to become "homeless." Now any kid can drop out of college, declare

This is yet another short term positive but long term disaster. 1) This creates an incentive to become "homeless." Now any kid can drop out of college, declare himself homeless, and get a free apartment. While it takes time for such incentives to kick in, this WILL happen. 2) This creates classic housing projects problems which inevitably turn into centers for crime, over time deteriorating neighborhoods and creating tension that is bad for everyone. Every generation, we forget how terribly housing projects work out. The solution is a basic income, possibly phased out slowly with earned income increases. This allows for a mobility and rational incentives housing projects can not provide. Public housing projects perpetuate poverty and crime and this will end no differently. It's great that some homeless people have a place to sleep today - just wait 10 or 20 years and see how it turns out. Look at projects and low income housing in every city across the world.

mikeash 13y ago
Why do you think every generation forgets, if it's so obvious as you say? Perhaps it is not, in fact, so clear.
im_a_lawyer 13y ago
The main reason housing projects failed in the first place is because they were located in mostly urban places and at that time cities were deteriorating fast with the transition to service economy and the rush by federal government to move all white people from the cities to the suburbs thereby moving all the capital. How exactly can affordable housing that's spread out throughout the city be bad? Affordable housing is not just for poor people you know?
rXoX 13y ago
Please provide evidence that providing housing incentivizes people to become homeless. Oh - wait - you don't have any. You - like many other hysterically inclined people, seem to think people like doing nothing all day. You - like many foolish Americans seem to think the 'natural' predisposition of human beings is laziness and sloth. But what you don't understand is that many people are actually compelled to do things by a sense of belonging, of shared goals and common purpose, and that sitting on one's backside all day doing 'nothing' is not something the vast majority of people want in their lives. Don't believe me? Then why do people volunteer?
chad_oliver 13y ago
Just for the record, we have a similar system in New Zealand, and it works great. 1) In New Zealand there isn't really any incentive to become homeless, because a case worker takes you through an assessment process. This ensures that houses are only given to people who are truly homeless. Furthermore, I suspect you might underestimate the negative social image associated with living in state housing. If you need it, no-one really looks down on you (our current Prime Minister grew up in state housing), but if you're a young 20-something with a job, state housing is certainly not 'cool'. 2) The housing projects I have witnessed have not turned into centres for crime. It probably helps that these housing projects are really just clusters of 5-20 individual houses on a common plot, in the middle of some suburb. They're not segregated and concentrated. EDIT: rXoX and im_a_lawyer, it looks like you've both been shadowbanned.
- crystaln 13y ago
  Many many people would rather accept state housing than work. I'm not even opposed to that choice on the whole. What I'm opposed to is rewarding that choice, and a more fair basic income takes care of that.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > 2) The housing projects I have witnessed have not turned into centres for crime. It probably helps that these housing projects are really just clusters of 5-20 individual houses on a common plot, in the middle of some suburb. They're not segregated and concentrated. This is the biggest problem with American housing projects. They tend to be high density apartments in the cities, with thousands of poor people living together, segregated from everyone else. This is the result of the massive hypocrisy of American suburbanites. The county where my parents live in northern Virginia voted for Obama 60-40, but everyone would flip the fuck out if anyone built public housing in the suburbs near them. To them, public housing means segregating all the poor blacks and hispanics into the inner city so they don't run across them at the local shopping mall.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    The US hasn't been pushing high density public housing projects for twenty years. The last major construction initiative for public housing initiative was Hope VI. More recently, programs that funnel public money directly into the private sector have seen greater favor, e.g. Section 8 vouchers and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects. Ironically [or cynically depending on your point of view] LIHTC projects in particular saw increased funding in the rush to fund 'shovel ready' projects as housing cratered due to oversupply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_VI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_VI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_%28housing%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_%28housing%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Income_Housing_Tax_Credit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Income_Housing_Tax_Credit
xux 13y ago
That's a pretty cynical view. You're a assuming people will strive for the lowest common denominator of living standards just so they can get free housing. Do some people take advantage of welfare? Sure. But if you're doing pretty ok making $30k a year, would you drag yourself into unemployment just so you can take food stamps? Doubt it. In fact, I see it completely reversed. It's a short term problem, with a long term solution. If you look at Maslow's hiearchy of needs, people who have their basic necessities met (housing, food, friends, etc) will naturally strive for higher living standards. In the short term, people will become homeless to claim free apartments, but in the long term strive for higher living standards.
- wmt 13y ago
  I don't think supporting basic income instead of housing projects is a cynical view. A basic income that guarantees enough money to have a basic living should help most poor much more than housing projects or food stamps.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Do we have evidence of this? I'd like to believe it's true, but there's a part of me that thinks giving people food and housing rather than money makes it less likely they'll spend it on drugs.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Which is like arguing that distributing condoms causes teenagers to have sex, or needle exchange causes drug use. You're solving the wrong problem. We can be sure addicts are going to get their drugs, and they're going to get the drugs whether they have a place to live and food on the table or not. The question is whether they're going to be committing other crimes that put society at risk in order to do so. I'd rather they spend my tax money than break into my house.
      - lmm 13y ago
        My problem isn't that they're using drugs, at least in the immediate; my problem is that if we give them money and they spend it on drugs then we haven't done anything about the fact that they're still hungry and homeless. The problem we want to solve is that these people don't have food and shelter - or from a more selfish perspective, that these people are costing us money on prisons and emergency services. Now, would giving these people money solving these problems? Would giving them money be more effective at solving these problems than housing projects and food programs? Like I say, I'd like to believe giving them money works, but I want to see the evidence.
gooble_flop 13y ago
I think we'll just have to wait and see how it goes. I don't see many people becoming homeless just to get a free house, and there are ways to prevent housing projects turning into ghettos. I'd be more concerned about whether they have knowledge/skills/motivation to live in a home. I suppose case workers will help with that.
yardie 13y ago
> This creates an incentive to become "homeless." Something tells me you've never had to deal with the homeless. If you did you would know you can't simply declare yourself homeless. Here are all the ways a typical college dropout isn't homeless, when you show up to a shelter they'll ask these questions: Do you have family you can stay with? Do you have friends you can stay with? Do you have assets you can use to stay in a sublet or studio? Can a typical college studio say no to all of these? The counselors job at the homeless shelter is to get you into housing as fast as possible, hopefully within the same night, sometimes it can take a week. Any longer than that and you start to mentally break down. They'll go through your entire phonebook and family tree to find a place for you to live that isn't the shelter. > Public housing projects perpetuate poverty and crime and this will end no differently. Public housing are a victim of their own success. People need help to emerge from poverty, move into the projects, and once they have built up enough resources they buy a home, or rent privately, and move out. After a while only the most indigent are left in the projects. So only the very poor are left in these places, the marginally poor have moved up and out. Projects don't start out a shithole, they get that way through neglect.
- true_religion 13y ago
  Why can't the college dropout simply lie and be uncooperative with giving out the phone numbers of their family and friends?
prawn 13y ago
There are a few projects/experiments around inclusive living situations where either caseworkers/staff live on-site, or such apartments are mixed with others owned by the rest of the population. Common Ground is one example running in Australia, I think inspired by a project in the US: http://www.commongroundadelaide.org.au/ http://www.commongroundadelaide.org.au/
DominikR 13y ago
Public housing projects worked great for Vienna (Austria). Even though a third of Vienna's population (2.4 million) lives in public housing [1] today, Vienna has one of the highest standards of living in the world. [2][3] There're a lot of things that I don't like about Austrian policy, but not having masses of homeless people roaming the streets is certainly not of them. > 2) This creates classic housing projects problems which inevitably turn into centers for crime, over time deteriorating neighborhoods and creating tension that is bad for everyone. Depends on how well it is implemented. Here they are distributed across the whole city thus preventing concentration of the poor in one neighborhood. There are still parts of the city where more poor or rich people live, but there is no part where you'll find only one type precisely because there is public housing everywhere. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_livable_cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_livable_cities

mikeash 13y ago

Why do you think every generation forgets, if it's so obvious as you say? Perhaps it is not, in fact, so clear.

im_a_lawyer 13y ago

The main reason housing projects failed in the first place is because they were located in mostly urban places and at that time cities were deteriorating fast with the transition to service economy and the rush by federal government to move all white people from the cities to the suburbs thereby moving all the capital. How exactly can affordable housing that's spread out throughout the city be bad? Affordable housing is not just for poor people you know?

rXoX 13y ago

Please provide evidence that providing housing incentivizes people to become homeless. Oh - wait - you don't have any. You - like many other hysterically inclined people, seem to think people like doing nothing all day. You - like many foolish Americans seem to think the 'natural' predisposition of human beings is laziness and sloth. But what you don't understand is that many people are actually compelled to do things by a sense of belonging, of shared goals and common purpose, and that sitting on one's backside all day doing 'nothing' is not something the vast majority of people want in their lives. Don't believe me? Then why do people volunteer?

chad_oliver 13y ago

Just for the record, we have a similar system in New Zealand, and it works great. 1) In New Zealand there isn't really any incentive to become homeless, because a case worker takes you through an assessment process. This ensures that houses are only given to people who are truly homeless. Furthermore, I suspect you might underestimate the negative social image associated with living in state housing. If you need it, no-one really looks down on you (our current Prime Minister grew up in state housing), but if you're a young 20-something with a job, state housing is certainly not 'cool'. 2) The housing projects I have witnessed have not turned into centres for crime. It probably helps that these housing projects are really just clusters of 5-20 individual houses on a common plot, in the middle of some suburb. They're not segregated and concentrated. EDIT: rXoX and im_a_lawyer, it looks like you've both been shadowbanned.

crystaln 13y ago
Many many people would rather accept state housing than work. I'm not even opposed to that choice on the whole. What I'm opposed to is rewarding that choice, and a more fair basic income takes care of that.
rayiner 13y ago
> 2) The housing projects I have witnessed have not turned into centres for crime. It probably helps that these housing projects are really just clusters of 5-20 individual houses on a common plot, in the middle of some suburb. They're not segregated and concentrated. This is the biggest problem with American housing projects. They tend to be high density apartments in the cities, with thousands of poor people living together, segregated from everyone else. This is the result of the massive hypocrisy of American suburbanites. The county where my parents live in northern Virginia voted for Obama 60-40, but everyone would flip the fuck out if anyone built public housing in the suburbs near them. To them, public housing means segregating all the poor blacks and hispanics into the inner city so they don't run across them at the local shopping mall.
- brudgers 13y ago
  The US hasn't been pushing high density public housing projects for twenty years. The last major construction initiative for public housing initiative was Hope VI. More recently, programs that funnel public money directly into the private sector have seen greater favor, e.g. Section 8 vouchers and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects. Ironically [or cynically depending on your point of view] LIHTC projects in particular saw increased funding in the rush to fund 'shovel ready' projects as housing cratered due to oversupply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_VI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_VI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_%28housing%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_%28housing%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Income_Housing_Tax_Credit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-Income_Housing_Tax_Credit

xux 13y ago

That's a pretty cynical view. You're a assuming people will strive for the lowest common denominator of living standards just so they can get free housing. Do some people take advantage of welfare? Sure. But if you're doing pretty ok making $30k a year, would you drag yourself into unemployment just so you can take food stamps? Doubt it. In fact, I see it completely reversed. It's a short term problem, with a long term solution. If you look at Maslow's hiearchy of needs, people who have their basic necessities met (housing, food, friends, etc) will naturally strive for higher living standards. In the short term, people will become homeless to claim free apartments, but in the long term strive for higher living standards.

wmt 13y ago
I don't think supporting basic income instead of housing projects is a cynical view. A basic income that guarantees enough money to have a basic living should help most poor much more than housing projects or food stamps.
- lmm 13y ago
  Do we have evidence of this? I'd like to believe it's true, but there's a part of me that thinks giving people food and housing rather than money makes it less likely they'll spend it on drugs.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Which is like arguing that distributing condoms causes teenagers to have sex, or needle exchange causes drug use. You're solving the wrong problem. We can be sure addicts are going to get their drugs, and they're going to get the drugs whether they have a place to live and food on the table or not. The question is whether they're going to be committing other crimes that put society at risk in order to do so. I'd rather they spend my tax money than break into my house.
    - lmm 13y ago
      My problem isn't that they're using drugs, at least in the immediate; my problem is that if we give them money and they spend it on drugs then we haven't done anything about the fact that they're still hungry and homeless. The problem we want to solve is that these people don't have food and shelter - or from a more selfish perspective, that these people are costing us money on prisons and emergency services. Now, would giving these people money solving these problems? Would giving them money be more effective at solving these problems than housing projects and food programs? Like I say, I'd like to believe giving them money works, but I want to see the evidence.

gooble_flop 13y ago

I think we'll just have to wait and see how it goes. I don't see many people becoming homeless just to get a free house, and there are ways to prevent housing projects turning into ghettos. I'd be more concerned about whether they have knowledge/skills/motivation to live in a home. I suppose case workers will help with that.

yardie 13y ago

> This creates an incentive to become "homeless." Something tells me you've never had to deal with the homeless. If you did you would know you can't simply declare yourself homeless. Here are all the ways a typical college dropout isn't homeless, when you show up to a shelter they'll ask these questions: Do you have family you can stay with? Do you have friends you can stay with? Do you have assets you can use to stay in a sublet or studio? Can a typical college studio say no to all of these? The counselors job at the homeless shelter is to get you into housing as fast as possible, hopefully within the same night, sometimes it can take a week. Any longer than that and you start to mentally break down. They'll go through your entire phonebook and family tree to find a place for you to live that isn't the shelter. > Public housing projects perpetuate poverty and crime and this will end no differently. Public housing are a victim of their own success. People need help to emerge from poverty, move into the projects, and once they have built up enough resources they buy a home, or rent privately, and move out. After a while only the most indigent are left in the projects. So only the very poor are left in these places, the marginally poor have moved up and out. Projects don't start out a shithole, they get that way through neglect.

true_religion 13y ago
Why can't the college dropout simply lie and be uncooperative with giving out the phone numbers of their family and friends?

prawn 13y ago

There are a few projects/experiments around inclusive living situations where either caseworkers/staff live on-site, or such apartments are mixed with others owned by the rest of the population. Common Ground is one example running in Australia, I think inspired by a project in the US: http://www.commongroundadelaide.org.au/ http://www.commongroundadelaide.org.au/

DominikR 13y ago

Public housing projects worked great for Vienna (Austria). Even though a third of Vienna's population (2.4 million) lives in public housing [1] today, Vienna has one of the highest standards of living in the world. [2][3] There're a lot of things that I don't like about Austrian policy, but not having masses of homeless people roaming the streets is certainly not of them. > 2) This creates classic housing projects problems which inevitably turn into centers for crime, over time deteriorating neighborhoods and creating tension that is bad for everyone. Depends on how well it is implemented. Here they are distributed across the whole city thus preventing concentration of the poor in one neighborhood. There are still parts of the city where more poor or rich people live, but there is no part where you'll find only one type precisely because there is public housing everywhere. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_livable_cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_most_livable_cities