Public/social housing (presumably what’s being proposed here) sure as hell would beat tent cities. Who the hell wants to stay in a tent rather than an actual home? Housing co-ops work if you’ve already got some amount of money, too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, you should have a tent city filling up. San Diego is just like every other city in North America. We’re seeing the endgame of late stage capitalism. Rampant homelessness, at the risk of being redundant, is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. There is only so much money in circulation and most working class people have none of it.
Have you ever lived in one? I do, it’s actually really nice people. In mine, there’s basically 2 big groups: families with young children and the elderly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neoliberals never seem to get around to actually address what’s being said. They just hem and haw about why they can’t do anything about it, as they pull their SUVs into the third stall in their garage.
I’ve certainly noticed the change. There are some posts lately that are indistinguishable from those on alt-right breeding grounds like 4chan and reddit. That’s why I wasn’t too gung-ho about persuading people to join Lemmy – there were a lot of people on reddit I was hoping wouldn’t come.
I’ve started using raddle more, which comes with its own problems, but at least I don’t have to start by convincing people not to hate marginalized groups every time I open my inbox.
Raddle is a site similar to reddit, but it’s run by anarchists (anarcho-primitivists to be specific, but I’ve never felt unwelcome as an anarcho-communist)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thats funny because I live in a country that is significantly more left leaning than the US and yet our poverty and homelessness is significantly lower than yours.
Oh and it would help if you stop blaming each other for the problems in your country and start looking at the ones actually making the decisions to be responsible for them as well.
Your country is not perfect and has its problems. I went to many European countries and saw the beggers everywhere. So spare me the bullshit. Besides, it’s a fact that the US leftist states have bigger homelessness problems.
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.
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
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.
Where living in such apartments would be hell because they’d expect them to be built out of sticks and cardboard, as it is common in the USA. Someone sneezes in the south end on the 2nd floor, the guy on the 12th floor north end goes bless you.
Buildings in Europe are built from proper building materials, concrete, steel, glass, and bricks. Not cardboard and sticks and paper. Hence living in them is actually much nicer than one used to US buildings would expect.
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