Pretty sure that’s just NIMBYs.
Honestly I’d take homeless any time of the year over the culture that is fostered in those Russian type block houses. It’s far worse.
To be fair new social housing looks like this:
Not enough trees and first batch was mostly single-room(as in one bedroom, one kitchen, one toilet and one bathroom in appartment), but better than humant colony.
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.
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.
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.
Hey cool you described the meme
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More like “This doesn’t exist, we’re going to deal with it just one minute” 🤗
I really like russian appartement complexs, there is always green surrounding the buildings…I hate russia though
this confused me
never fails to amaze me how “progressive” types do a complete 180 as soon as someone mentions solving the homeless problem by giving them homes
edit: i rest my case
This more because of the local planning in a lot of western countries. Authoritarian countries force housing through much easier
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
There is only the illusion of a market. Construction codes and lack of construction sites prevent that there is a surplus that drives down costs.
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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
Yeah no. There is no way 20% of the Chinese population is homeless. Your source is a US government website, I’m sure they’re not biased about China.
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
300 million homeless in China? What the hell, that’s like almost the entire population of the US.
Not sure why or from where this quote comes from. In germany and poland we have many such apartment houses that are very affordable
There are hundreds of right wing memes talking about how “communist archetecture is depressing” with pictures like this one
It comes from America, where capitalist simps preach the virtues of idiots who buy companies and act like it makes them paragons of humanity.
Where living in such apartments would be hell because they’d expect them to be built out of sticks and cardboard, as it is common in the USA. Someone sneezes in the south end on the 2nd floor, the guy on the 12th floor north end goes bless you.
Buildings in Europe are built from proper building materials, concrete, steel, glass, and bricks. Not cardboard and sticks and paper. Hence living in them is actually much nicer than one used to US buildings would expect.
The presence of picture 1 in no way prevents the presence of picture 2.
Now i can work for myself and earn for a better home, but under communism id most likely have to live in a building like top picture
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”
i don’t care about people who don’t care about themselves
“Billionaires’ opinions on my marketable skills are the foundation of my self-worth, and everyone who doesn’t think the way I do deserves to rot in the gutter.”
i don’t work for a billionaire, and you don’t have to either. Also, if you have no skills that’s your own fault.
Actually the only thing profiting from my work (except me of course) is my government, from tax. Im ok with that, within reasonable limits.
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.
always shot in autumn or winter when it’s overcast.
To me this adds a lot to the charm. I’d love to live there (at least for some time)!
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.
I sure am
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.
That’s a load of nonsense, experienced builder or not. Heating is part of building a house just like the other plumbing, electrical and joinery work.
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.
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.
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.
What is your argument here?
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 understand this!
So modern building standards, materials, technologies and completed products are better than old?
I don’t see many people taking out the cavity insulation to make their homes more old style.
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.
Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m2 (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 m2 (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.)
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.
That’s arguably one of the biggest advantages people claim capitalism has: managing finite resources
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Yeahhhhh…
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.
So it doesn’t actually meet minimum standards?
It meets the law but it sure as hell doesn’t meet the safety.
Laws usually follow industry standard safety guidelines.
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.
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.
Seizure won’t fix it.
Why not? Why not let people have nice things?
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.
They literally sacrificed quality and safety to maximize profits and you call that good? Come on… You’re being too biased.
That’s literally not what I said.
You called the thing I criticized “one of the biggest advantages”.
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.
Por que no los dos?
It’s something capitalists claim. Communism claims to distribute things equitably and they have to fight over efficiency. Capitalism is the opposite.
Communism claims to distribute things equitably
No, communism claims to distribute things fair.
they have to fight over efficiency.
Same does any other economic system, but define efficiency differently.
Fair on both counts.
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.
yes they are, they outperform american’s cardboard house
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.
We have absolutely made strides in material technologies for construction over the last 50 years. Take asbestos for example.
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?
Not just that but internal insulation and fireguarding has come a long way.
Capitalism has you thinking that these are our only options
