Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:
In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.
Maybe we should institute a tax on underutilized land in metro areas.
Land Value Tax 👀
Fuck anyone that uses money to buy things and let them rot. That's a purposefully broad statement.
Based Geoism.
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 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.
In some cases. But even proposed changes to zoning laws can get this kind of opposition.
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.
So conservative NIMBYs are the problem?
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.
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?
What do you mean by "overcame their own biology"?
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.
And because of how disability works in the US, if they want care they're legally forbidden from ever having money so...
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.
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.
Also historical and/or generational poverty.
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...
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.
No one is on the street because they are lazy. That is ignorance.
Also, what exactly are they ruining for the rest of us? What upward mobility are they keeping me from? Are you suggesting someone living in a tent or shelter ruins your???Propery value? Urban view? Existence?
Sounds like to me there is a certain pettiness you hold on to and letting that go means you actually have to accept the humanity of people less fortunate than yourself. That also sounds like an illness you should rid yourself of because it's rottng away at you.
No one chooses consciousness. We are all coming in from the cold. We have this one chance to peer into the nature of the universe. Except, some are more concerned with the length of small little plants out in front of their house.
No one is on the street because they are lazy. What an entirely ignorant and stupid comment. Come to the West coast idiot. I can show you plenty of people that are lazy ass mother fuckers among the homeless. Not all, but enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was it a religious charity org? Those ones are often condescending assholes like that..
There is no hate like Christian love.
Did it occur to you that poverty has psychological impacts, and that poverty over numerous generations creates a culture and mindset of poverty? Generational poverty is absolutely a culture and mindset, as well as a lack of resources. This is not the same thing as GOP Christians saying people could pick themselves up by their own bootstraps if they just fucking change their mindset.
Did it occur to you that they didn't say generational poverty was a culture on top of lack of resources, but that the lack of resources actively wasn't a part of what makes someone impoverished. That sounds a lot like bootstrap mentality to me.
I have close friends who grew up under the poverty line, and to tell me that their life experiences were nothing but their mentality was a kick to the teeth.
We have the resources to be able to properly address material lack. Is the flawed mentality really the impoverished mentality, or is it the one that finds a certain percentage of the population to be an acceptable, even natural, even necessary poverty rate? The mentality that supposes that every member of society should earn their own privilege to exist? It seems like one of these mentalities is much, much more harmful than a set of defense mechanisms that protect individuals psychologically from systems that are literally designed to exploit them.
We should not be trying to mold poor people into being ideal wage laborers. We should be making society more inhabitable to human beings.
Yeah, you should have told the homeless charity you just joined the truth about homelessness!
It was a religious charity org. They weren't spreading or accepting any evidence-based truth.
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.
Kruschev housing outperforms new apartments? That's the opposite of what we see of Russia in North America.
I am simply not believing that 50 year old apartment blocks are outperforming new ones by any metric.
I'm glad you're happy and there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in my country that are just fine but they are not outperforming anything.
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.
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.
air tight, less moisture, more efficient heating, permanent hot water, triple glazed windows.
And why "I moved from unmaintained house" is argument against old housing? I have all those things in 50 years old house.
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.
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.
They literally sacrificed quality and safety to maximize profits and you call that good? Come on... You're being too biased.
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.
That's arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources.
No, it's not capitalism, this is definition of economy itself. Which by the way includes communism.
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.)
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?
I'd gladly live in one of those apartments in the first picture if it meant that everyone could have a home
I’d gladly walk my ass out to the wilderness rather than live in an apartment block, but at least then there’d be an extra spot.
The nice thing is in an anarchist society you could do just that, and no one would stop you
I'd personally prefer to be surrounded by people
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?
bruh...
You believe that housing is not a basic human right, yet you say to me, "bruh..."
Just gonna pre-emptively block your bootlicking ass
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!
Fuck both these pictures.
"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.
...Why did you reinterpret the premise of their statement into something entirely different and then attack them for it?
I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong, but that was mean.
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.
Fuck you doubly.
You agreed with me and then said fuck you? Weird take but okay.
What if we made the commie block apartments 140 m² each?
That would be a sensible next step, as long as the end goal is having reasonable amount of indoor and outdoor space for everyone to own.
There comes a point where it's not all about the m². You can give me 1000m² but if it's in a windowless box with one door in and out, it's not really meeting the quality bar.
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'd say those were made from at least 3 walls worth of wall.
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.
I find brutalism beautiful. Wish we could have more of it in my country but solid concrete, especially preformed, performs poorly under shear.
It's gotten so "brutalist" is almost synonymous with "earthquake-prone".
How soundproof were they? I’m in an apartment with shitty drywall and sometimes I hear my neighbors fart.
As far as I knew I never even had neighbors or I at least never heard any.
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.
it's not detached from supply at all, single house zoning and mandatory minimum parking make for a whole lot of trouble in the US
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.
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.
Largely agree with all your other points though.
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.
Rich people don't really move into these luxury apartment. They buy it as an investment, use it as a holiday home, etc.
The bottom picture also has a high rise apartment building in the background.
Imagine we could take care of the poor while at the same time not revert to a totalitarian dictatorship. Like if we could do both?
That's complete nonsense though, obviously. We get either to take care of the poor and go full Stalin or not and not. /s
Don't worry, they've outlawed homelessness. Problem solved!
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.
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.
It's social murder just so the more fortunate don't have to look at the consequences of an unjust system. 
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.
Make it unconstitutional for a municipality to let anyone go unhoused? Based, love it.
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.
Capitalism has you thinking that these are our only options
For big cities, density is key.
The other options are, sadly, hours away.
Yeah, but I didn't have to pay anything for those people to live in tents. I keep my money out of their lazy hands.
/s, deeply, if it isn't obv.
/s
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.
Hostile architecture makes my blood boil. We've really let more money be invested into hurting people that need help than to actually help them.
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.
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].
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.
You're showing exactly what I said.
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.
Yeah. Visceral reaction to apartments. Peace.
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.
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.
Why do you think people are living this way? Do you think it's personal failure or maybe desperation? Where else do they have to go? If you tear down the buildings but don't address the root problem, do you think they will just stop existing or will they be forced to find a new spot to live? Were these places always this way? What would you like me to call them?
Please continue making assumptions about my personal life and deriding me for my choice of words rather than contributing something useful. I try to meet people where they are at, which means speaking to what they know. In this case, you seem to know the symptom, but not the cause.
hardly
The empire is doing great. The people? Ehh not so much.
Pretty sure that’s just NIMBYs.
What is this trying to say???
Or that people living in block housing is preferable to some living in suburbs and some being homeless.
We could have both you know. Suburbistan for those that like it and apartments for those who like it. And homelessness for no one.
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).
That's a bad take.
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
There's also the third group of people who realizes that homelessness is a complex problem that won't be solved by more housing.
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.
I don’t think it fails, but it does come from a specific cultural perspective.
Those are “ugly Soviet buildings” built by the government. That already communicates cost and the unwillingness to bear it in the US.
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?
Exactly. It's not hard to keep the exterior of those buildings looking nice. You just have to pay someone to maintain it.
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.
Some might say the big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong enough to prop up an entire political party.
But it is not exclusive to them, of course. Some are just very bad about it.
For many it literally is a choice, and framing homelessness as something that no one has control over is problematic.
I'm a liberal, buddy. Homelessness is a very complex issue that won't be solved by building more housing.
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.
Page 4
I think it's a confused message. Not the best meme.
But the basic idea is that homelessness is caused by people preferring houses ("urban sprawl") rather than apartment complexes.
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.
It's one of the worst memes ever.
This makes the most sense to me so far
It's trying to say that low income housing is the solution to homelessness.
It's wrong, but that's the point it's trying to make.
seems like it's trying to imply that homeless people are homeless because houses are too expensive.
as if the guys in the bottom pic could afford a department in the top picture, but have to live in a tent because housing is expensive.
I think what the meme does say is that OP is mentally 12.
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.
your average homeless will sell the house in 5 microseconds for crack money or sign it away under duress.
homeless people need safer shelters, healthcare, detoxing, therapy, coaching and resources to help them out of the downward spiral they are in.
throwing free housing to vulnerable people suffering from addiction and mental illnesses is one of the stupidest things I have heard.
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.
Uh, the billionaires don't see that. Even the millionaires can avoid seeing that.
Who is this society guy? He sounds stupid
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.
this confused me
Whenever there is a major affordability housing project, it usually gets shut down by its area residents who get to have a say. They'll often say things like how it's unsightly because it blocks their views or overshadows their detached homes. Which in turn decreases their own house value. There are plethora of reasons, but I believe that is the one OP is making. NIMBY in other words. Alternatively, OP may be making comments about how government housing projects is socialism/communism and some people are rejecting simply on that basis.
Lack of supply in housing is a severe crisis in certain regions, like Toronto for example, which is now rated as the #1 housing bubble in the world according to some banks with the biggest reason being lack of supply. There's an estimated shortage of nearly 6 million homes for the Canadian population, most of which is around Toronto. The rapid housing prices is in turn making homelessness spike up.
Indirectly, but effectively, the local population is saying they'd rather have tents pitched near their homes rather than an affordable apartment near by.
Imagine thinking living in an apartment with heat, water, furniture, dishwasher, clothes washer, electricity, all the amenities, is the same as living in a tent. Exactly what the meme says: brainwashed society.
I’m just saying the two are part of the same picture, both literally and metaphorically. Often when people go against these they point to the homeless in cities. I get and agree with the point, I just don’t agree with the presentation; maybe some similar picture for the bottom in a suburb would do
both literally and metaphorically.
Imagine thinking that tents must be associated with apartments. And that apartments must be associated with tents.
See meme again: brainwashed society.
Again, I'm not saying that tents must be associated with apartments. I'm saying that people who oppose things like apartments often associate homelessness with density in their arguments.
China has 300m homeless people though?
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
The source of your source
Yes. Well spotted....
The author is Zhaohui Su who is Chinese and works for:
a School of Public Health, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China
b Center on Smart and Connected Health Technologies, Mays Cancer Center, School of Nursing, UT Health San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78229, USA
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
More like "This doesn't exist, we're going to deal with it just one minute" 🤗
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.
Yes, occasionally hearing your neighbors is just as inhumane as having no shelter, water and heating.
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.
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.
the types of people they house
That's gonna be a yikes from me, scoob
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?
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.
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.
If you have urban sprawl, you're not having reliable public transport. You need density to make it work.
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.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/america-land-use/ provides a nice visualization.
Only 2% of USA's landmass is used for our urban areas. There is plenty of "Open Space" (3%), "Shrubland" (24%), Grassland (17%) to utilize.
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.
How is it inhumane? Have you only ever lived in apartments made of paper walls?
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.
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.
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.
Literally to whom does this apply? Get in touch with reality.
I am always highly amused by uninformed opinions on the Internet.
Here is a news report from this week regarding Portuguese middle-class families that just started to live in tents due to high housing costs: https://sicnoticias.pt/...
Get in touch with reality.
Many people in the USA
The high rises are have right angles. I'm guessing that's those are the edgy bits
Making sure people have ample access to basic human rights such as shelter is pretty extreme
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.
Hi, person living in one of the richest most capitalist countries (Switzerland). We have such blocks.
So no.
Lemmy is run by left wingers
I would have to agree 100%. Would be better if you weren't on here though lol.
As someone who's from a former Communist country, the downfall of communism was met with a dramatic rise in homelessness.
But you probably shouldn't trust a random person on lemmy saying "as someone from Communist country", this info easily verifiable with a web search.
Here's the first link I get searching "homelessness after communism":
Sarcasm or unironic? Hard to tell these days lol
What a stupid snivelling American sophomoric bullshit opinion.
The bottom problem is drug addiction, not capitalism.
The top photo isn't about what it's like to fucking look at , it's about what it's like to live in.
And I can tell you that there is plenty of crime there.
What a stupid sniveling fascist freshman bullshit opinion
Material Conditions lead them to that drug abuse
Capitalism made those material conditions literally unavoidable
Crime is easier to deal with when you live inside of four walls with a roof and a locking door as opposed to a motherfucking tent.
I know you dont give a fuck, but your arguments are DUMBBB. Are you being purposely disingenuous or are you just stupid?
Material Conditions lead them to that drug abuse
This is how I know you have exactly zero life experience, and clearly never given the topic more than a moments thought.
You call me dumb - but are you seriously saying that the only reason people become substance abusers is because of poverty?
Think about that for just thirty seconds.
there's no worse/better they're both worse
oh no you've been a victim of misinformation oh dear 🙄
I know right? It'd be downright awful.
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.
Mmm, irony
Now i can work for myself and earn for a better home
"I'm winning at the capitalist crapshoot, so everyone else must be as well"
Ah yes, because everyone on the streets "don't care about themselves".
People are usually on the streets because they have no other choice.
Empathy and understanding others is literally free.
@lemmy.ml
go to feed...
@lemmy.ml
go to feed...
I don’t think anybody thinks that.
save