I wonder who is doing this voting? Oh, it’s people who live in the areas we can’t afford to live in. And capitalists add lobbying power to those voters selfish interests.
Go to/watch any planning or proposal meeting and watch the pearl clutching and nimbyism. I think you know this but you want to demand “studies” instead of engaging in good faith.
In the United States at least, your local government’s public hearings for new housing developments kinda begs to differ.
People will demand the homeless be eliminated from their area while simultaneously opposing development of housing or shelters for the homeless in their area.
So maybe you’re right though: they don’t hate the apartments more, they simply can’t make up their mind on which they hate more.
I think it’s more so that people don’t want an apartment complex built in their backyard, not that they are opposed to them being built in an area where there is proper infrastructure
Well there’s considerable difference between an apartment complex in a suburb not designed for heavy traffic and less developed areas where there’s room for expansion for infrastructure.
We can’t expand roads in my area, either for an extra lane (which I know is a sin) or for buses because it would be right up on houses at that point.
However, just a few miles down the road on the main drag, there’s undeveloped land that would be perfect. Build it there.
When I say “backyard” I mean literally in your backyard. Instead of name calling and downvoting, have a fucking conversation and ask in a respectful manner what somebody means. Stop being a douche because you automatically assume somebody who thinks slightly differently than you is wrong.
I wasn’t being mean spirited with my original comment, it was a legitimate question. Whenever I hear people say something like “I don’t want that!” I like to find out why. It’s just curiosity. Sorry if it came across mean.
Well articulated. I’m not from the US, but I’ve seen housing developments go sideways when they built four 10-story blocks (not in somebody’s back yard, but in an area without proper infrastructure) and after 1000ish people had moved in there were 1 hour long queues just to get out of the complex because there was only one road with one lane per direction. And the only bus stop was not really reliable.
This was not built in the middle of the city because of land availability (and huge prices even if there was land available - you’re near the metro and tram and a bus stop? pay 50% more. oh, you’re near a park too? pay 50% more on top of that). Should we just tear down old buildings in low density areas in the city to make room for big blocks? Some might be worth tearing down because of age and overall condition, but good luck getting people to move out.
I agree but want to say everyone jumps to homeless. There are a ton of normal people that are suffering from high rent, lack of options, etc. We need to think about way more than homeless.
Most people think homeless as jobless, etc. But when we have people with entirely ok jobs that can’t afford rent (see people living in their cars), addressing basic normal housing addresses both for a startling amount.
Aside from zoning laws, there’s the lack of a unified federal intervention. This prevents any one area from addressing the local homeless issue because any area that takes steps to address it will consequently absorb more homeless individuals from other places in the country. For example, if a city in California develops a program to house any homeless individuals, then homeless individuals from other cities and states will be more likely to go to said city to get housed. Even worse, there are states that would actually pay for their transportation. What would happen is that either the city would have to solve a much larger homeless problem as new homeless move into town, or the initial wave of homeless people will be house while the new arrivals and homeless will stay homeless, leaving a continued homeless problem.
Sure they do. Look at all of the posts from my neighbors on Facebook and Nextdoor every time a developer tries to build an apartment building instead of a single family home in our neighborhood.
We’re not building homes, we’re not focussing on density. But apparently our elected officials have no problem letting people set up shanty towns. Where do you think the priorities lay?
I get your point, and while there is certainly a subset of people who are suffering through no fault of their own, there are plenty of people who are lazy and/or made terrible decisions. Lumping them all together like you are doesn’t help the situation. Those who want help should absolutely be helped. Those who don’t should not be allowed to ruin it for the rest of us.
You’re going to get downvoted into oblivion for speaking the truth. Lemmy is full or libritards who are just as bad as the far right nutjobs. Both don’t live in reality.
We all have our limits. Some people seem to be tougher than others. There are things people go through that I would last maybe two weeks before killing myself. When analyzing these situations it’s hard to balance compassion and being reasonably critical.
I’d guess absolutely every person in a shit situation wants help. No one WANTS to be homeless, destitute, and addicted. The problem is, that for a lot of the worst off people in the world, that’s pretty much all they have. Sometimes, the only source of any light in someone’s life is a chemically induced high. Who am I to tell someone in that situation that they can’t do one of the few things that makes life kind of ok?
This kind of thing is a failing of society, not the person, no matter how deep you drill. Each and every one of the people in this shit needs help, not judgement, not to get clean, not to make money. Start with providing actual help, a home, food, mental and physical healthcare. It doesn’t have to be luxurious,just safe.The rest will follow naturally.
There are also those who make bad decisions and are lazy but have a lot of money and power regardless. Being lazy/making terrible decisions does not equal poor; same as being hard working/making good decisions.
The system at this stage is just geared towards making the poor poorer and the rich richer. E.g. making people pay lots of money to stay healthy rather than give people equal opportunity, making good education only accessible to the rich by making it prohibitively expensive, the wage divide between an employee and a CEO, family trusts and associated taxes etc.
The simple fact of the matter is that most things most people do are simply input -> biology happens -> output. Breaking that hardwired process that happens in the background for every miniscule decision you make is the basis of like, every kind of therapy, self-help, meditation routine, etc.
Literally people born with or contracting disabilities that leave them permanently destitute due to you not being able to eat or house yourself without work you can’t do because your disabled.
They’re being satirical. They’re saying it’s virtually impossible to not succumb to poverty if you have disabilities, trauma, or racial prejudice working against you.
I’d file that under trauma. If there was no trauma caused by extreme poverty like; parent was a sexworker; watching a parent lose it all; emotional neglect; physical neglect; history of incarceration; generational drug abuse, it would be more unlikely they would succumb to homelessness. That said, you are right.
Generational poverty is also historically about racism. Now, that’s changing but it’s changing more because it’s just getting harder to get out of poverty than it is because there’s less racism…
My freaking God. I volunteered at a local charity org a bit this summer and one of the first things they told us in orientation was that “most people think that poverty is about what people lack. But it’s actually a mindset.” That pissed me the heck off not gonna lie.
I hate how when there is any picture of Soviet blocks it’s always shot in autumn or winter when it’s overcast. I live in an ex Soviet country and when these bad boys are maintained they can outperform new apartments, be it in functionality, amenities or price.
Building trades have been severely negatively impacted by a housing boom that created milions upon milliions of subcontractors who have no idea what happens before or after their specific trade. Everyone is just covering others’ mistakes. 50 years ago one company did all aspects of the building; 35 years ago that stopped.
Standards have improved 10 fold, I moved from a house built 70 years ago to a new build. It is completely different, air tight, less moisture, more efficient heating, permanent hot water, triple glazed windows. Literally everything is more secure and improved. There is nothing an old house can do a new one can’t.
Those are all accessories. The only build difference would be whether or not a moisture barrier was applied to the framing, either on the inside when insulated or outside with Tyvek.
Heating is an accessory? The new tech associated with central heating compared to 50 years ago is night and day. The building materials have changed, the regulations have changed. Houses have better insulation, soundproofing, fire guarding, plumbing, electrical circuitry like how is this even a discussion.
Heating is a thing applied to a home. Many homes have none (like mine). Yes, it is an accessory. That accessory has improved, but it has nothing to do with the building itself.
It’s a discussion because I am a builder and have been all my life and I have worked in most of those trades individually for three to five years each and I know what I’m talking about.
And yet, it isn’t. It’s an accessory applied to homes in zones that need heating and AC. You can retrofit different brands after the fact. You can remove and replace parts. It’s no more part of the house than an electric range is.
Again, I live in a $1.5M Mediterranean style 4BR 4.5 bath house. There is ZERO heating or AC anywhere in it. It is an unnecessary accessory.
I’m very happy for you in your made up home, but central heating and plumbing and requirements for construction where I live.
It is definitely more a part of the house than an appliance in that it is built into the house during it’s construction by the builders. Ranges are not the same as indoor plumbing, are you sure you’re a builder? You can add and remove walls after the fact too but it doesn’t make them an accessory in the sense that you are trying to claim.
My “made up home” is in a place of perpetual summer. Those places exist. I’m gonna stop arguing with you here because you truly have no idea what you’re talking about, much like the Facebook redneck who is an epidemiology expert when he’s not cooking at Waffle House.
I don’t understand what you’re saying. Perhaps if you ran around in circles in your living room screaming at me through the screen, I could better understand.
Lemme let you in on another secret: modern housing has inferior framing compared to 50 years ago. The reason for this is that the housing boom that started in the 80s and into the 90s demanded more lumber than the supply could keeo up with so trees were hybridized to grow faster with a more erratic Heartwood grain and have spent less time in the kiln so they haven’t dried properly. The high moisture content left in this inferior grain wood has caused lots of buckling, or bowing, excessive settling, and other associated issues. When a 2x4 is ripped on a table saw it does not turn into two equal pieces, it’s springs apart into two twisted and bowed pieces. This is the behavior of an inferior product.
I believe it was in 1992 or possibly 93 that the CEOs of weyerhauser, Georgia Pacific, and one other manufacturer of masonite siding we’re convicted of fraud and sent to prison because they had been changing out the test samples of masonite siding in Dade county Florida in order to justify selling masonite as a building code compliant siding material. Masonite was then banned in favor of cementitious siding board. Masonite also led to a vinyl siding boom…fake plastic to cover up the problem and give insects a new home. So we at least have an improvement in siding materials now, but not over brick or stone.
Now, there ARE ways to make the modern home superior in construction by using steel studs, heated concrete slabs, on-demand water heaters combined with solar tanks, blown foam insulated walls, and condensation-capture cooling tubes, but it is very expensive and requires a very talented labor pool.
Oh we don’t have timber framed housing here, my house is concrete and the 50 year old house I was in, probably closer 100, was a stone cottage.
The new house has exactly those things you listed. I’m fairly certain they have to be in all new builds where I am. Though the solar is optional, we have a heat pump instead.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies… more in line with today’s standards and have seen results more in line with today’s standards.
So you gave your old building a retrofit with new technologies… more in line with today’s standards and have seen results more in line with today’s standards.
Right yeah well said, very little of any substance. What is modernising? Switching to underfloor heating? Because that is not essential maintenance it is large scale construction work.
Yeah i was recently looking for someone to work on windows and finding someone who does work in the traditional way is not easy. They’re still out there, but for every one of them there’s ten hack shops using minimum wage labor for everything. Even then, the real good techniques just seem like lost technology. They didn’t get passed down to our generation.
It gets frustrating for me also because I’d like to do high caliber work but there’s not enough of a market to keep myself busy with it. There are other factors involved as well, but I have moved away from artisanal work to utilitarian stuff between kitchen and bath remodels.
It’s less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It’s not like people didn’t know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.
Asbestos has some pretty insane properties, though. Just a shame it causes cancer when disturbed and inhaled.
As a building material? What’s even better than asbestos in terms of the trifecta of sound/heat isolation, bulk, melting point, and structural soundness? Aerogel?
Even communism aside, this is actually not uncommon. One of the advances we’ve made in construction is knowing how to save even more money, making the right sacrifices and meeting the minimum bars of code compliance, to maximize our margins.
I don’t know how you say this unironically as criticism. That’s arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources. It’s not a good thing to waste manpower and resources for no real gain.
What gain? More profits for the ultra rich? A dying planet?
People living in comfortable apartments is no real gain in capitalism because it means less ROI. But it is a huge gain to everyone’s quality of life if they can live comfortably.
Market mechanisms are very powerful in optimising resource allocation - but they aren’t optimising for maximum quality of life, they’re optimising for maximum ROI. Which lands in the pockets of the ultra rich, which then allocate the accumulated capital in only those endeavours providing maximum ROI, and the cycle goes on and on until so much wealth is extracted from society that the middle class collapses and the planet dies - and the ultra rich with them, for they depend upon the plebes to work for them in order to have an ultra rich lifestyle in the first place.
I mean if we were trying to house people we should be aiming for inexpensive and non-wasteful building choices, shouldn’t we? When we’re handling basic human needs we send boats full of rice and beans, not a bunch of badass chefs.
I mean it’s kind of a scarcity thing. Resources aren’t infinite. I have no problem with letting people have nice things and would certainly want minimums to be pretty decent, but when you’re getting people off the street or something then efficiency means lives saved.
Did you know that in the USA more buildings are vacant than there are homeless people? So the amount of housing that needs to be built is exactly zero. It’ s not an amount of resources problem, it’s an allocation of resources problem.
It is still a resource problem. There’s a reason NIMBYs exist. Homeless populations have substance, legal and mental issues. The property is pretty much a write off the moment you hand it over.
This is probably where we’ll disagree: I believe that all people living in a humane way is more important than investors’ real estate portfolio valuation.
I wasn’t even talking about investors or the homeowners you’d plan to confiscate from. I was talking about turning neighborhoods into slums overnight. Pest infestation and drug use.
Again, there are more vacant homes than homeless. It’s not taking away people’s homes. Homes where people actually live in, I mean. Most real estate investments, the owner hasn’t visited once in years.
And you’d be surprised at how much people improve once they have stable housing. Finland has had a “housing first, no conditions” programme for a while now with very impressive results.
Obviously people will initially be afraid of “bad people” coming to their neighbourhood. I understand this. But I believe their feelings of discomfort are less important than the immense suffering of the homeless.
Would you seriously place property valuations as more important than humanity and human dignity?
We have all the money in the world. We have more than enough homes to house people, right now. We have an abundance of housing, of resources to build more housing, of everything. What we do not have is a distribution that allows people who need housing to get it. Instead we have a literal Spiders Georg situation where a tiny fraction of the country each own hundreds of homes they don’t live in or even have any intention of living in. This situation is deranged.
Alright, then show the numbers. Let’s ignore that seizing all that property will go super well. I know, you want people that own more than one house dead, so even include it as double the free housing. Figure out how much it costs to upkeep rental properties. Double it, maybe more, for people that literally don’t give a fuck about it. Add costs for policing the shit.
The math has already been done. I’m not your high school teacher. Go look up, ex, housing co-ops for a relatively inoffensive example.
I’m not of the opinion that people with more than one house should be killed, but people who own a thousand? People who own houses they will never live in and have no intention of ever living in? Those people are parasites.
And you can talk about upkeep all you like but who’s paying for they upkeep now? Not the landlords, that’s for sure. Oh don’t get me wrong, they’re managing the upkeep and it’s coming out of their account but all that money? The money is all coming from the tenants. The people living there are already paying the upkeep.
It’s also an absolute joke to try to characterize landlords as being interested in maintaining property any more than is absolutely necessary when they’re, as a class of person, categorically infamous for being cheap bastards who refuse to make any improvements or even do basic maintenance because it would cost them money. “Sure the heat may be out and the place may be drafty and the freezer may not freeze and the whole place may be infested with vermin but if we didn’t keep paying the landlords for all this decadence the poor people would ruin it!”
An apartment complex went up outside my work and it’s made of wood. That’s against fire safety code but they found some creative work arounds to convince the inspectors it was legal. (And of course the inspections are all toadies who have been put in place to rubber stamp developer plans.) Very efficient until it burns down and kills everyone inside.
Tons of large buildings are older than you’d think. Hell, a lot of large buildings don’t even get serious structural inspections until they’re 40+ years old!
It was one of many contributing factors to the Champlain Towers South building collapsing in the US in Florida. No communism or Soviet corner cutting. Just good ol’ fashioned American ineptitude. That building was undergoing some work so they could raise prices. It wasn’t a low class building nor did many people think it was too old to invest in.
What OP said is extremely likely to be true: Those buildings are competative.
Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m^2^ (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m^2^ (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)
Which is why I'm an anarchist. Pretty much every other system would force me to attempt to be happy in an apartment block, or waste huge amounts of resources creating suburbs that are still too goddamn crowded for me
I would like to share your attitude but fear the consequences when millions seek a place in the wilderness. What do you do when you arrive and your neighbor asks you to move on because he wants to be more alone?
I want to be more alone too, so I'd probably not get to the point where I was close enough to have them tell me to go away.
However, most people probably wouldn't like the actual wilderness. They want a big country house somewhere and when they find out they need to build it themselves they'll go back to the apartment blocks.
One reason I'm a fan of making cities less objectively terrible is that more people will live in them and be even further away from my hovel.
If everyone thought like this, everyone would have a home.
And 50 or so people would own all of the rest of the land and do nothing with it because we’re too fucking stupid to realize that a system that wants us all to live in 50m² micro apartments is a load of shit, and strung together by a greedy few.
There is enough land for us all to live comfortably, but a fraction of a percent don’t want anyone to use most of the land for anything useful so hey let’s just give up and take almost-squalor because at least it not squalor!
“Land-usage” is such a narrow-minded way to think about the implicit wants and needs of society. You sound like you’ve never been to actual cities, or never got your head far enough out of your arse to actually experience one.
North American suburban sprawl already proves that “enough land for us all to live comfortably” is a terrible way to live sociable lives and drains the economy due to massive swathes of those lands being used for roads and the maintenance of said roads.
I implore you to take a trip to almost any European city, and see for yourself what actual “comfortable living” for most people looks like.
I’ve lived in cities my whole life, which paints a pretty broad picture of you doesn’t it? Couldn’t even get the premise of your own bullshit comment right.
You make dense housing like these apartments because it is the most practical way to house everybody quickly. Once you take care of the immediate problem, homelessness, you can continue to expand and build nicer, bigger housing for everyone.
What’s more important, that we have enough resources to house everyone, but there are still people forced to live on the streets or the fact that you don’t like the inconvenience of living in an apartment because it’s too small for you even in the short term? Guess that makes you one of the greedy few that can’t see past their own problems to think of their community.
The USSR didn’t do much good but those apartment buildings are definitely good. I used to live in a soviet apartment building and the funny thing about that was that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything. They were thick as hell and fully concrete.
I’m living in a soviet-built tenement block, and the only time I’ve heard anything from a neighbour is when the guy living above me dropped a bowling ball.
Okay, I just went from “eh, commie blocks are gross but better than tents” to “fuck all the other apartments, bring on the commie blocks”. Buildings in the US are built so ridiculously cheaply that in a lot of lower-rent buildings you can hear everything.
Commie blocks do have some issues like absolutely awful electrical wiring or lack of insulation but a lot of ex soviet countries renovate those buildings which leaves no downsides.
Commie blocks do have some issues like absolutely awful electrical wiring
Default wiring is not impossible to replace. My building from 70-ies has global PE, only thing left is to replace aluminium wiring without PE inside appartment to 3-wire copper wiring.
that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything.
It seems you lived in panel building. There are limitations to it like you should not add horisontal chases becaue it reduces load capacity or can’t replan appartment because it will be destruction of load bearong wall. So wiring better be done in factory-made in-wall concrete tubes.
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.
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.
I understand the point. But France has done this and ended up with giant ghettos filled with si much crime that no emergency services whatsoever go there anymore.
In the US, they built giant housing projects like this where poverty was concentrated and the same thing happened. Crime installed itself in those projects and these neighbourhoods became dangerous ghettos.
Picture 1 is not the solution you think you want.
The condo building where I live is not so big. And it was built with 25% dedicated to social housing where poor families and underpaid workers can live comfortably in an apartment unit as big as my condo unit, which I paid nearly $400k CAD, for the price of about $650 CAD per month. This allows them to integrate with everyone else and live with everyone else and near where all the jobs are.
This is absolutely correct. Concentrating poverty is something that happens in most counties, but is very detrimental to society at large. Wikipedia has a decent article to get a toe in the water: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty
I don’t get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
Fucking tell me about it. The best part is how they try to justify how they are only focused on themselves by shit like calling apartments “inhumane.” JFC, living in an apartment is not inhumane. Living on the street is inhumane.
There’s a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they’re scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don’t even realize that they’re racing to the bottom. By today’s standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let’s build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let’s build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let’s ban airbnb, and let’s severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we’re gonna have to build some high rises, but let’s not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.
apartment building, essentially because they’re scared of poor people
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don’t know if you hold that idea, but you’re repeating it
ugly skyscrapers
You’ve now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
individuals have less choice, less freedom
Now you say apartments are against freeeeeddooomm lol.
actively exploited
As if you can’t own a condo.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
building housing at all costs
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they’re scared of poor people,
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don’t know if you hold that idea, but you’re repeating it
It’s pretty obvious I don’t, and if you think accurately describing the misguided motivations of people counts as repeating propaganda, then you must live in a pretty thick bubble.
You’ve now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
They are.
As if you can’t own a condo.
You have to buy the condo from a corporation, you have to pay condo fees to a condo board that is out of your control, and much of the quality of your home is determined by the original corporation that built it, as well as that board that you have no real control over and typically pays out maintenance, repairs, upgrades, etc. to other corporations.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
I advocated for increasing apartment builds. I also advocated for numerous other measures to increase rental supply, I just didn’t advocate for blindly buying the developer propaganda and letting them build high rise after high rise.
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
So since we have a food supply crisis we should all stop cooking and hand over all food control to corporations that will sell us back bland nutrition paste?
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
They literally do. Go live in Manhattan, it sucks. Sunlight literally doesn’t hit street level except for at noon because you’ve put a bunch of gargantuan towers everywhere. Go look at a complex like Habitat 67 that actually tried to make apartments pleasant to live in instead of just being the cheapest they can possibly be to maximize developer profit. Go look at the size of Walmart parking lots in small towns that are the size of entire Manhattan blocks. Yes we need to densify, no we don’t need to necessarily build blindly and continue just letting the free market decide what gets built where.
Yeah. Visceral reaction to apartments. Peace.
Yeah, not having a visceral reaction to anything, just plainly stating their benefits and downsides, though you seem to be having a visceral reaction to any perceived criticism of apartments whatsoever.
I don’t think “progressives” have any issue with housing the homeless. The issue is where.
Go to a conservative (or indeed any) neighbourhood and tell them you’ll be building 200 apartments nearby to house rough sleepers, see how that goes down.
Most homeless are invisible to us anyway. They hold down jobs, they have gym memberships, they just sleep in their car, or on a mate’s sofa every so often. Nobody would have a problem with them moving in nearby.
It’s the aggressive beggars, addicts, and shitting in shop doorways (and these three are the same person) that nobody wants anywhere near them. These are who most people think of when they hear the word “homeless”. Most of them need more treatment than just a roof. We don’t have enough of that either.
I’ve no issue with my taxes helping all these people. I’m happy to pay tax to reduce the chances of me personally being robbed by somebody in desperate poverty.
I think fears about the homeless robbing you are massively overblown. I’ve been panhandled hundreds of times, and the worst response I’ve ever gotten is a dirty look.
I also think that the people shitting on public, etc. are more likely to be mentally ill than addicted (although they could be both). The reason is that Drugs Are Really Expensive. Also, I’m not aware of any addiction that causes you to shit in public, but it’s easy to find mental illnesses that would.
What causes the homeless to shit in public is that we barely have any public toilets. And the ones we do have are locked overnight, because we’re terrified that gays will have sex in them.
I have a house and a job and I’ve almost shit in public. I can totally see how it could happen if you didn’t have access to one or either of those two (because they have bathrooms).
The left leaning rich progressives are all hypocrites when it comes to investing, money, housing, tech, jobs, waste, emissions, and more.
Who knew the people who have the most to gain from capitalism would be so willing to also suck the dick of it for their own personal gain. Imagine that.
And for those unaware, the cost of homelessness does exist, and it is quite high. We pay for it through emergency services (police, doctors, ambulance, hospital beds), waste removal services, etc.
The problem needs fixed, and part of the solution is commie blocks unironically.
Very much so. Legal system, downtown areas, medical care… all face expenses of one sort or other, and those get passed on to the consumer and taxpayer. But a lot of people that don’t have to deal with the homeless because they live in a poor and/or rural area, or are incredibly hostile to homeless, that it’s fine for them to push the indirect tax onto areas that don’t have that demographic.
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