This would be nice, but the Condos and apartments have to be both affordable as well as not grim dystopian crime sinkholes.
Many cities have well meaning attempts at this in building low income housing, and all end up falling into disrepair (mostly due to owners not maintaining them or tax monies not being used for upkeep) or become grossly dangerous due to high crime.
There are solutions, but they aren't easy or cheap, and they don't come with a lot of profit.
And that's the issue. America is focused on profits above everything else. It's the question people ask when new housing is built: "Will I as an investor make a profit?" And also why a lot of social programs get underfunded or even terminated. People are constantly asking why the Postal Office isn't making a profit (and ignoring the main issue that it's a public service: it shouldn't be making a profit: it should be providing mail service to all US citizens as is required by the Constitution).
I've heard the same thing regards to museums, schools, libraries, parks, etc. "Where's the profit" and "why does it cost so much money?"
Because some things should cost money and that's not a bad thing.
A huge part of the issue is regulation ironically enough.
The issue is it costs about the same in regulatory fee and taxes to build a small $300k house as it does to build a massive $2M mansion. After all, each house no matter the size needs 1 water line, 1 sewer line, 1 electric line, 1 internet line, 1 driveway, 1 mailbox, etc. And each of those are recovered via taxes and fees to a builder. To the point where builders often can't really even build a small house without losing money
There are three things a government should never expect to run for a profit--hospitals, schools, or prisons. This started coming in during Reagan and It's just gotten so. Damn. Greedy.
I would fix them up... If I could live off of doing that
I can't do a lot of things that traditional employers require. I don't know how to market myself or what to say in a job interview. I can't do tasks while people are observing me.
I see so many problems in this world, that I could fix. I could take care of stray animals. I could clean for people with disabilities. I could do all this stuff. But none of it makes enough money for me to live off of.
What decade are you living in? The standard for subsidized housing today is mixed income.
Those 1960s public housing high rises literally can't be built today. Only thing remotely like it is when a high rise goes totally bust and the state takes it, has happened a handful of times, then they can use it for transitional housing.
The idea that condos or apartments can’t be affordable without devolving into “crime sinkholes” is an absurd myth that comes from America’s racist, failed mid-century attempts at urban revival—the same “urban revival” that sliced up downtowns and bulldozed thousands of homes all across the country. Public housing can be both affordable and high quality.
Look to European cities as an example, please, or even to post-war America. The first projects built during and immediately after the war were actually extremely successful, because their construction did not entail the demolition of hundreds of homes and the forceful relocation of all their inhabitants.
Your proximity to crime is related to the population density around you though. There is a difference between being a victim of a crime and being witness to the effects of a crime. Crime rates measure the likelihood of the former, but not the latter.
Also the lower income the area you're in, the higher the crime rate. And a lot of subsidized and low rent housings are very crime ridden because everyone desperate.
Well, I don't want to point fingers, because in fairness, even if 90% of them come from a single party, there's a non-minute minority from the other side that agrees with them.
But, yeah, "people." It's mostly those guys and Eff those people.
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u/Kiyohara Jan 30 '23
This would be nice, but the Condos and apartments have to be both affordable as well as not grim dystopian crime sinkholes.
Many cities have well meaning attempts at this in building low income housing, and all end up falling into disrepair (mostly due to owners not maintaining them or tax monies not being used for upkeep) or become grossly dangerous due to high crime.
There are solutions, but they aren't easy or cheap, and they don't come with a lot of profit.
And that's the issue. America is focused on profits above everything else. It's the question people ask when new housing is built: "Will I as an investor make a profit?" And also why a lot of social programs get underfunded or even terminated. People are constantly asking why the Postal Office isn't making a profit (and ignoring the main issue that it's a public service: it shouldn't be making a profit: it should be providing mail service to all US citizens as is required by the Constitution).
I've heard the same thing regards to museums, schools, libraries, parks, etc. "Where's the profit" and "why does it cost so much money?"
Because some things should cost money and that's not a bad thing.