As a Singaporean, the government does much more than what you described for public housing. The government builds a cohesive neighbourhood with commercial malls, schools, public transport stops / stations, parks, etc integrated together. This makes sure people are able to live there, rather than being stuck in some “Low income area” devoid of amenities like the USA. Also the sheer scale of the public housing program cannot be matched, like you said the USA has only 1 million public housing units total, while 80+% of the houses in Singapore are public housing.
IIRC it was something like 60 or 70% of the UK populace who used to live in social housing pre-Thatcher. There was certainly a private market and people who always lived in a private rent or ownership, but everyone always knew that at a minimum they’d at least have state provided housing as a last resort. That doesn’t exist anymore, sadly. Everyone still technically has the right to request it, but the total availability is so low, most people never get an offer. The last time I was looking I did actually get an offer… 2 years after I’d put it in and had already moved!
@@tysonq7131 LMAO, Singapore is a technocrat paradise, you CAN'T be homeless there. If you have a Singapore's passport, you have public housing privilege. If you're a migrant worker, you live in subsidized public tenement buildings. It's literally impossible for you to be homeless, also because it's straight up illegal.
@@tonysoviet3692 Okay well a simple Google search reveals you’re wrong. It’s impossible for there to be 0 homeless in any society. Also the fact that being homeless is illegal makes me think they probably throw a lot of them in jail. I’m looking for a realistic representation of how effective this housing is.
The biggest thing is to not concentrate them in one area, creating a "slum". Low-income housing needs to be spread out so that every city has a share of it. In California, Newsom is passing laws that are bypassing local city zoning restrictions. This is what needs to happen on a national level, or else you'll just get NIMBYs pushing everything out to the cities least capable of supporting all the low-income residents.
This. In Singapore, not only do most people (over 80%) live in public housing, but all public housing units are entirely mixed-income, with multimillionaires living on the same floor as people making minimum wage.
@@kirkrotger9208 ...And their education system is supposedly great too. I wonder how Singapore accomplished all that...? Tell me something, is there an epidemic of out-of-wedlock homes and fatherlessness in that small nation? If not, as I suspect, HOW do they accomplish that? Is it just culture?
At the same time, sprawling north american cities and CBDs surrounded by suburbs make it difficult/impractical to place Public housing outside of certain areas, like near malls or regional rail stations, because otherwise you're forcing people with low income to live a completely car dependent life style.
The problem is zoning laws. The only way to even be able to build enough housing is to abolish most of the zoning code. Zoning laws have created a severe housing shortage and have crippled the American economy (see Moretti for reference).
This. If the solution was just add more housing then the shit they build 45 minutes drive from jobs and schools would be doing the job. There’s so much more to affordable housing than the government just adding stock and calling it a day. How is it the middle and lower class rented or bought townhouses and tenements in the 30s and as soon as Euclidean zoning existed this stopped, and now we keep talking about legislating in new solutions rather than legislating out the problem?
Yes. We need to stop letting wealthy land owners determine what everyone else can do with their land. Upzoning is a necessary process for the healthy growth and development of a city but single family home owners seem to think a city can add tens of thousands of jobs and yet still keep all the single family suburban style neighborhoods from the 50's and 60's. The thing is those neighborhoods don't need to be demolished for block apartments or anything but they do need to be allowed to change and develop over time by adding things like townhomes, quadplexes, or even small lot 2-3 story apartment buildings.
In general zoning laws are not a bad thing. For example, without zoning laws youcould build a refinery in the middle of a residential area. It is in how zoning laws are designed and applied. You could perfectly well zone new building areas for middle density /mixed density and mixed use. If this is not possible with existing zoning laws, they should be adapted, but to completely abolish zoning laws would be like throwing out the child with the bathing water.
In the Netherlands, town and suburban houses are most often row houses, 3 stories high. Now they are building a lot of social housing (our version of public housing) in towns but they keep the apartment blocks up to 3 floors high, so they fit in with the town feeling and look.
Oh, that won't work in the U.S. The problem, as he rightfully identified, are NIMBYs. I don't know how it works in the Netherlands, but NIMBYs are people who already own housing in neighborhoods. Their biggest fear is a price drop with their homes. And that price drop would happen if, for example, public housing, of any size and of any sort, was built nearby. Hence NIMBYs resist public housing being built in their neighborhoods at all costs--loudly and very nastily--so that they can keep their real estate prices up on their own properties. I would imagine that most of the Dutch have very different, more community-oriented attitudes with regards to placing public housing in their neighborhoods.
Why do locals not rebel against the politicians or whoever is responsible for building them? Is it due to the national voting system whereby people vote nationally so there is no local district rep for them to complain to which insulates the govt from local concerns? Or are they just less NIMBY?
@@theuglykwan it’s not that there less nimby it’s just that public housing isn’t viewed as something bad . In the US we have a lot of backwards thinking like how we view public transportation and public housing as negatives or something that decreases land value when in most of the world it’s the opposite and viewed as necessary for a good functioning community.
My small city has a housing authority for poor people who are disabled or elderly, but not for families. Families usually are left to rely on the vouchers to get pay for rentals. The Housing Authority buildings are universally fairly well maintained, and unlike other "low income housing" buildings, the safety and accessibility features (smoke detectors and elevators) are always functional. This leads me to believe housing projects didn't suck because of poor people but because of bureaucratic mismanagement. Also if crime and drugs were a problem, replacing tall towers with midrises would make these buildings easier to manage and police.
Although a lot of public housing complexes were built with Federal funding they didn't subsidize maintenance costs. In a lot of places in order to have enough money for maintenance they would have had to have damn near every apartment filled at a time when a lot of US cities were shrinking.
They make them suck on purpose because 1) they dont think poor people deserve nice things & 2) to further stigmatize public services and make them seem undesirable and thus you are undesirable if you need to use them.
IDK about midrises having less crime. In Sweden all the areas where crime is rising are 4-5 storey public housing developments. Different buildings might pose particular issues for police when breaching but crime itself is caused by people not architecture. One of the issues with low income housing is balancing it with maintaining a tax base who can actually afford to maintain the buildings and services.
@@rwatertree In American cities crime is on the rise in low density neighborhoods. There are underlying issues social issues, contributing to crime, of course it's not limited to the buildings people live in. But the public safety challenges inherent to high rises do go away with mid rise buildings. (Police, Firefighters, and Paramedics get to you quicker if they don't have to run up 30 flights of stairs) I think your second paragraph hits the nail on the head. Regionalization has to be the answer. In America Housing should be paid for by states or counties, not individual cash strapped cities. Let the suburbs subsidize the cities for a change #strongtowns
I feel like this missed the important "local option" for social housing. Seattle's Initiative 135, which will be on the ballot in November, creates a public developer, owned by the city, which will build public housing for everyone under 120% area median income (creating great mixed income developments for individuals, couples, and families)
Hopefully that wins, because that sounds far more realistic than somehow getting enough Senators to agree to even attempt a public housing initiative, let alone create a cohesive and effective proposal rather than sabotaging it so it can be scrapped in 5 years after its planned ineffectiveness becomes apparent.
Who pays for this government theft of private resources? If people cannot afford to live in an area, why do they not simply move to a more affordable location?
How does a public developer work? Are the builders going to be employed by the city or is it just going to be an agency that hires private firms to execute its plans?
@J Mac, many people cannot afford to live in Seattle because of government policy: there are hard limits in the zoning code on how much housing can get built. If you don’t like public housing on the theory that the government shouldn’t be bailing people out of an expensive housing market, then I hope you also feel strongly that the government should back off restricting housing construction and driving up prices.
@City Beautiful you should talk about how social housing works in Vienna, Austria. About half the city lives in social housing that is integrated into neighborhoods with mixed incomes, this practice reduces the likelihood of slums since it avoids concentrated poverty
@@Mantis858585 This means nothing. And besides that, the foreign-born population in Vienna was nearly 40% back in 2012, so I can only imagine this has increased with population growth.
2 года назад+19
Vienna is a great example of what cities should do when they own land: *Keep it! Use it! Do not sell it.*
@ Definitely. Cities are supposed to serve their residents, across all incomes, not raise money from selling to developers unless those developers are required to build mixed use mixed income housing.
What about mixed-use public housing? Basically, it would be retail-commercial on the ground floor, maybe some office space on the floor above, and then three or four stories of public housing units above that. - Businesses that lease the building would share some of the maintenance cost, and they would have a vested interest in keeping the building in good working order to keep their customers. - It would also ensure nearby and readily accessible commercial services for the residents, and jobs available on the ground floor would be open to them if they needed one. - Keeping the housing above ground floor might also decrease the likelihood of break-ins, which in turn would keep the crime rate lower. I realize this would require changing zoning laws, but that aside, I'd like to hear what other people think of this idea.
tbh, i think most residential buildings could be mixed use. I would love to live in an apartment that is on top of a grocery store so that grocery shopping is just a matter of going down the elevator. Or a bar, or whatever else. For a neighborhood to be truly walkable, residential areas need to have commercial stuff mixed into it. And what better way to do that than to have the buildings themselves be mixed use?
It's fun watching Americans invent things we in Europe use for decades lol I'm from Serbia and there's plenty of buildings especially new ones which have bussiness at ground floor... for example a grocery store.. and above that you have housing... so if you need groceries... just come down and get it Lmao ... no need to drive like 30 min to a store or something xD
Isn't this common? I live in one 40 story high rise building right across the road of one of the biggest Universities here and a 5 min walk from 2 Light rail stations. It's not public housing though it's by a private real estate company. Our ground floor has a grocery, 2 convenience stores, laundries, a petshop, dentists, barbershops and salons, a lawyer office, some realty companies, a cafe, tea shops, and food places. 2nd floor are offices. 3rd to 7th are parking spaces with some cheap auxiliary units. 8th to 40th floor are all housing units. Here in the national capital region of the Philippines it's common to see mixed use high rise housing in densely populated areas. And in my hometown they're beginning to build more mixed high rise to cope with the expanding need for more offices and population.
Good public housing should be mixed in with private housing, and near public transport. Proximity to public transport is one of the biggest factors in an individual's ability to escape poverty, and keeping public and private, particularly middle and upper income private, housing will help ensure services and infrastructure is good quality and well maintained. The goal of public housing should be to put people in a position that they would not need public housing in the future.
Access to transportation *IS* the most important factor in escaping poverty. Things like going to school, getting interviews, or finding job opportunities/training are steps needed to escape poverty. How are you supposed to go to school, get interviews, or find opportunities? Teleport? One who lives in poverty has a high chance of not being able to afford a car, and the transit services in poor regions of the US either are unreliable or don't exist at all. Good public housing needs to be near reliable transit and in mixed areas as you said.
@@intreooaccess to transportation is one major reason why Soviet housing units were very successful. It gave them easy access to downtown and other workplaces, i.e. nearby mines and factories.
@@ianhomerpura8937 i'm confused. if you work in a mine or factory, wouldn't you want easy access to those things? Obviously you wouldn't want to be near enough to take in their externalities (like toxic gas) but having those things reachable by train seems like a good thing
My girlfriend lives in public housing in Berlin and actually everyone envy her for her apartment. Rent is incredibly cheap, it’s located in a hip area right in the city center and everything is maintained well. Her dad also found a social housing apartment and it’s very new with a big balcony, quiet neighborhood and good public transportation access. And that’s nothing compared to Vienna‘s quality public housing. This concept works, I hope the US could step away from their fear of „socialism“ and actually implement good policies that make people‘s life objectively better.
The place to start is losing the "low income" stigma. *Everybody* needs somewhere to live, regardless of their income. When I moved in 2019 I looked closely at the real estate market here in Kamloops and had a first chat with my bank about a mortgage. Vancouver was out of the question, even for somebody who makes six figures. Kamloops was doable. In the meantime prices have gone through the roof and I'm totally priced out of the market. I live in a (market) rental building instead.
The irony here in Kamloops is that a very successful housing prefab company is sited here… Northern Trailer. They know how to build work camps on very short time lines. And did, with the Mission Flats housing. Though they’re ugly and isolated. What Kamloops, and most North American cities and town, needs is mixed-use densification. We need to mix residential, retail, school and offices. We have to break the chains of car-dependence. And we could do double-duty of building to Passive House standard to reduce GHG emission from heating & cooling.
I wholeheartedly agree. The US and Canadian housing system seems designed to look down on "low income" people. It's why renters get looked down upon ("you're just wasting money on rent") and housing advantages accrue to the wealthiest homeowners instead of helping people who actually need it. In truth, everyone needs a place to live and if you wanted to actually tackle homelessness and poverty, then the housing issue needs to be addressed. If not, and housing just becomes a financial investment more than a place to live, then you get places like Vancouver where housing seems reserved for the already wealthy. It always baffles me when people complain that their neighborhood isn't full of young families anymore when it's because home values have skyrocketed so much that young families can't afford the area at this point.
@@jmac3327 Kamloops housing is still a half to a third of Vancouver housing. Despite that even the Kamloops housing is unaffordable. I have no idea how Vancouverites manage. The only less expensive housing in Canada is stuff that has next to no amenities or paid employment options. Those who do opt for rural housing but still need paid employment put up with long commutes.
For a country so obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism, it's pretty bizzarre how many restrictions there are when it comes to things that you can build in cities. On a macro scale(R1 zoning) to micro(regulating what the front of your yard has to look like).
The writer of “Donut economics” puts it this way: There is No such thing as a free market. If the government doesn’t make rules then the company/person with the most money will simply make all the rules.
It would amaze you but those strong restrictions only came much after that laissez faire capitalism. Much comes down to the 1937 and 1949 Housign act the first creating the Federal Housing Association .
Just one word: Vienna. This city is one of the if not THE most liveable cities in the world. With almost half of the residential buildings owned by either the city itself or housing cooperatives, low social segregation and a high standard of living. If you or anyone in the world want to have a successfull example of how things can be done - there it is.
Throughout this entire housing crisis, my opinion has mainly been "Build a million Karl Marx-Hofs, you cowards". Somehow we're trapped in an ironic NIMBY-induced hell of neither deregulating residential zoning nor allowing the government to spur new home construction.
@@grandmascreampie5372 I don't see how cultural differences could prevent the necessary policy changes. It's just amatter of political will and the amount of people who are willing to express it.
One of the major reasons that public housing is difficult in the US is because a lot of the regulations and systems meant to "help" people are intentionally underfunded and made inconvenient to access because politicians are under the false impression that if they make support structures good, then people will just rely on them. It's a very old fashioned and damaging perspective.
@@NPRoberto It just speaks to the reality of humankind where not every race/ethnicity is equally good, hardworking and peaceful and its plain stupid to pretend this isn't true just because you don't want to offend certain people and get them angry and up in arms.
@@NPRoberto people DO rely on welfare tho. There are families that have 3 generations living in section 8. There are women who have multiple kids outside of relationships for the govt benefits. People don’t want to change the zoning because they don’t want to live next to welfare mammies.
Over here in Germany (or more specifically in Berlin) a big part housing is public through state owned companies. The buildings are usually in relatively good shape and rents are relatively low.
I've also read that Germany has laws that make it very difficult for individuals and corporations to buy housing for the explicit purpose of making a profit off of it. There are very tight controls on rents, and taxes on the sale of property are incredibly high. This discourages the type of housing speculation that drives up prices and rents through the roof, like here in the U.S. Germany thus can keep housing affordable for everyone as a result.
@@Luboman411 the last sentence is not entirely true and that's due to the fact that we have a shortage of housing as well and that for newly built housing there are much fewer rules regarding rents. So all that's available on the market are flats that are quite expensive to rent. But if you're lucky enough to already live somewhere from where you don't need to move it's quite good.
I used to live in Strausberg and Köpenick for a while and I knew the eastern parts of Berlin quite well and I loved it there, and the "public housing" neighborhoods with all the greenery were really pretty. But if America is building these alongside freeways, as shown in the old video, then they have what they have.
@@Luboman411 Also Germany's population is declining meaning that the housing stock is designed for a higher population compared to now. This is likely another major factor
I'm generally in the build housing co-ops camp which is generally ignored. The problem I have with public housing is what happens when you have someone running the system that doesn't believe in the thing they are running? With co-ops, they do need funding from the government, but after they are established, can effectively self financing. Why co-ops would be better is that they would be owned by the occupiers unlike public housing which is owned by a probably disinterested county. Which would give the people there a reason to not ruin the place. Co-ops can already have income limits and generally set the rent low enough to just break even. This is the opposite mentality of a normal landlord which is high rents, low quality housing. A co-op are high quality low cost. We already have a legal framework for this, its called limited equity co-ops where share value is limited to grow at a set formula. So it can be set at cost and capped at some function of inflation plus a set percent. This will mostly help lower middle income people and could help people with lower income with grants or existing rent aid programs.
I will like to say these co-ops should not be tied to the shareholder like traditional co-ops. It should be non profit membership driven. Each cooperative should have several businesses lining it to make it sustainable. And businesses should not just be restricted to the lowest floors. There's more, but my comment speaks more about cooperative communities instead of singular buildings. Yes! We need buildings. But we need cooperative communities that would enhance this idea further.
@@TessHKM I think they call it a maintenance fee. It covers repairs to the unit. While with co-ops you own a share of the company managing the cooperative, condominiums you own it as a property like you would a house or building. So you can have a mortgage and gain in it value overtime. While with a cooperative, you right it off as a business asset on your taxes.
The question isn't whether public housing is good, it's whether the US is willing to commit to doing it right like other countries have. And sadly I think the answer is a resounding no.
The thing you leave out is that many countries don't have do deal with the kind of people that the US and Canada have to deal with who are far more violent and difficult. Then you have countries like Sweden, France and the UK who do have to deal with these kinds of people and look at what's happened to them? Same long term problems with these people who can't ever seem to improve themselves while not destroying the countries that welcomed them.
The United States has a geographical advantage in that we aren't really lacking for space like many other places that need these high rises - we just use it terribly inefficiently and are deluding ourselves for as long as possible before doing what must be done. In my area for instance, I've seen mid-rises just casually going up, corporate businesses at the floor level (grocery store with parking underground) and housing for hundreds of people. Across the street, mid-rise office buildings for other businesses. This area used to be just straight up strip malls. I've noticed very little increased congestion as people can merely walk to the store or dentist nearby. Medium density is the answer and we can just spread it out and not really even notice the difference. The solutions are likely to be found locally and federal funding should probably not go to these big 'government' projects and just to subsidize private/pubic partnerships.
That's really interesting to hear they converted a typical stripmall area into something more dense. What state are you in, if you don't mind me asking.
I live in Connecticut and the NIMBYs are terrible. In Westport, for example, the same people who have "All are welcome here," signs in the front yards showed up in droves to oppose a developer trying to build a new apartment building with SOME affordable units. What we really need is a radical change in zoning laws creating far more dense housing, and we need to restrict the amount of luxury apartments. It is especially bad in places like NYC where tons of luxury apartments sit unoccupied because they are nothing more than a money laundering scheme.
Watching this from Eastern Europe, which is known for concrete, grey blocks I have to admit that those units at 5:47 look freaking horrific. I've seem my share of "projects" and while they might not be terrific they have some greenery in between, so when maintained properly can be liveable. No wonder those American blocks turned into slums if they're slabs of concrete packed back to back...
Some people call that "brutalist architecture" i call it a hellscape. All they needed was some trees and "park like" infrastructure around the grounds to look decent, and then vet the residents to provide some level of piece of mind for the residents. (If you don't have piece of mind as soon as you get a better work situation you leave and don't look back, this will create a slum if only those who can't escape are willing to live there. Its basically the same as how districts where smoke from factories fell are still the poor parts of cities like London 100years after the factories closed, the air pollution drove away anyone who could move leaving behind a slum)
2 года назад+14
It's probably intentional: Build it poorly to remind the people in it that they're poor and need to work their asses off to get the hell out - just like infrequently serviced bus stops with car advertisements. Problem is, that's never an effective strategy - especially not when there are so very many barriers to well-paying employment in the US.
@@georgewagner7787 blablabla bootstraps blablabla... And how do these available Jobs pay compared to prices for housing and food? What kind of health insurance do they provide?
(West)German living in Wrocław, Poland right now: I was surprised how nice "block-neighborhoods" can be, especially in the summer. Nice apartments, playgrounds, parks, doctors offices, supermarkets and a tram stop within 5 minutes walking distance. Because of the well working public transportation, people have 15 minute access to city center. It's not bad at all. When the blocks aren't build super close to each other, there's also a lot of sun on the balconies, nice views etc.
Connecticut General Statute 8-30g gives building developers the ability to bypass local zoning for the purposes to meeting affordable housing requirements. It's not public housing by any stretch, but it has had me building mixed use apartment complexes near transit stations for the last 5 years and shows no signs of slowing down.
@@oscarr5734 Probably. I'm only an electrician, I don't really get to see the part that happens before ground is broken. A lot of my work has been in suburb towns along the MTA track in the northeast corridor, but I've done work in New Haven and Hartford.
@@oscarr5734 Yes, although it really depends on where they are built, on major routes and former strip malls face less criticism than right next to someone's backyard. The main criticism is that only 10% of the units are considered affordable, and the rest have units that go for well over what the average person can afford here ($2000-2500/mo for a 1br, heck you can buy your own house for a bit more than half that). On one hand, it's great for local tax revenue, on the other hand it does little to nothing to help the vast majority of people to afford living here. These developments largely target very wealthy individuals fleeing NY State's taxes and cost of living. At least these types of developments tend to not bring massive amounts of crime that large scale public housing developments did so previously, so I guess they have that going for them. Tbh, if we could get mixed use zoning at least in downtowns and major transit corridors, it would make everything more walkable and affordable, but I fear they'll never allow it. Idk where these mixed use developments are being built, but it surely isn't in most of suburbia.
I've been binge-watching a ton of these urbanist channels over the past few months, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like there's just no escaping the self-serving dynamics of American capitalism and politics. Even so-called urbanists who proclaim love for their cities for many years will often change their tune when problems around poverty, crime, mixed ethnicities and cultures, higher taxes, etc., pop up in their neighborhoods, and they flee to the suburbs in waves. Any solution that isn't to the satisfaction of the upper and middle classes is just never going to go far. I think transit is the key to getting things like public housing off the ground again, because there are ways to sell the upper classes on the benefits of transit without making it feel like there's a homeless person camping in their back yard. Then we can build up affordable communities along transit corridors so that they remain integrated with existing communities and aren't so locked into poverty.
I forgot to mentioned public transit in my comment, but yes, it will be a key ingredient. The problem with proposing transit as a main ingredient to building public housing, is that it takes a lot longer to implement. And it is usually so costly that is it often get shelved many years in the future. And once it gets built we get a cookie cutter design. So in the long run implementing improved bus service might be the best way to go. Also. Building segregated low income housing is a thing of the pass. It is not self sustainable, because the government have proven time and time again, it's not meant to be.
@@qolspony taking some lanes on the road and making them bus exclusive could be a good first step. and no adding another lane to compensate. We really need to give incentive for people to stop using their car unnecessarily. Being stuck in traffic while a bus flies past you could be that incentive
I got this argument from a motorhead, on why public transport should be improved and how to sell the idea to upper classes: "More people on the bus, less cars on the road, more road for you."
Greatly increasing the standard Federal tax deduction means that a couple who own their home and make $70,000 usually do not benefit from deducting mortgage interest. People with much higher cost homes do benefit from deducting mortgage interest and people at the highest end of the earned income Spectrum benefit from many other avenues of deductions to taxable income.
I don't think you understand cleaning up the tax code. In 2017, the standard deduction went from $12,700 to ~$24,000 as part of the tax law change. The result was 60% of homeowners getting back more money on their taxes in 2019 than they did in 2017, and made their taxes easier. In order to yield $12,000 in interest to deduct you had to have a $400k mortgage with a 4% rate, which was higher than most mortgage holders. Even those with larger or higher rate mortgages can still deduct that interest if it exceeds $24k. Meanwhile if you made $70k, you too paid less taxes as a result of the 2017 tax law change. Complaining people who earn more money and being able to deduct interest doesn't change anything that wasn't there before, and as a result of falling interest rates for mortgages, it was already effecting fewer people. As for selling 99 year leases for public housing - good luck. 30% of public housing in North Carolina is already delinquent in payment of rent, and if you take a drive through this public housing, you would blush at the BMW's, Mercedes and Lexus' in front of the buildings. The problem is not housing, it's budgeting and priorities.
As always, there's no magic bullet. But I'd love to see quality public housing in our cities. Here in the Washington D.C. area, there's a desperate need & there's plenty of land open to it. The above-ground Metro station areas would be great places to develop into mixed use, mixed income structures, instead of giant parking lots. I know there's been some talk lately about doing something like that, but knowing this area, it'll be nothing but tiny, one-bedroom places that start at $700,000 and still come with two parking spaces, even though they're built above Metro stations/transit hubs.
There’s so much parking off many of the redline stops but I can already hear the Gaithersburg/Rockville/Bethesda/Friendship Heights NIMBY’s crying about their home/luxury condo prices falling.
@@MarloSoBalJr It would definitely be a good spot to build up. But I do think it's important to make sure the housing isn't segregated (in any way), so I'd hope they'd also redevelop some empty or essentially useless lots within the city core, too. At least the RFK site isn't too far from a Metro stop, so that's a check in its favor, for sure. It's too bad the FBI building wasn't demolished. It's an eyesore & would have been a great spot for a mixed use, mixed income building/neighborhood block.
@@PhD_JD_MD_PurebreadOwner Oh, yeah. I pass through East Falls Church, West Falls Church & Vienna all the time. All three use tons of space for parking, but would be so much better with mixed use, mixed income development. Vienna has added a bunch of housing in recent years, but only housing & I don't think any of it is mixed income. I think it's all high-end. I've heard one of the Falls Church stops is supposed to be getting something. Who knows when. At least Dunn Loring has built up well, even though again, I think it's mostly high end & the whole Dunn Loring area is surrounded by offensively huge strodes that make it less than pleasant as a pedestrian if you want to get to the also nice, but too car-heavy Mosaic District.
too many people that hold office have no interest in fixing the housing shortage because they are either in the pockets of big hedge funds like black rock that are buying up all the houses they can or they directly own and buy properties themselves to rent. Consequently not solving anything is in their best interest... so yeah I dont see any solution anytime soon !
In NYC, there are 40k apartments sitting empty because they are unlivable, and yet because they sit under rent restrictions, there's no financial incentive for the landlords to renovate, or investors to purchase and rehabilitate. In this case, I believe the public sector is failing the public. If you release those 40k apartments to the private sector to rent at market rate, that's 40000 apartments that can drive the price of rent down. You could even allow a one-time market rate adjustment followed by rent stabilization (which NYC loves to do but does not manage effectively), but that's still 40 thousand household opportunities that would effectively cool the demand and drive prices down, even if every single apartment was redone to the t's. the NYCHA is the biggest landlord in the city and it is consistently rated as the worst. in most big cities, the government just does not know how to handle being a landlord, governments and bureaucracy move way too slow for something such as the housing market.
It's so interesting how all the problems of the last 100 years of city planning compound one another. The housing crisis is exacerbated by poor city planning and design (that is, privileging suburbs and car development over compact city spaces that folks can live in). Poor city planning is exacerbated by elite capture and NIMBYism, which itself is a byproduct of suburbanization and the way that homeownership is intimately tied to wealth building. All of it is a function of how bad capitalism is at addressing concrete needs. The solution to the housing crisis isn't just Soviet style public housing, it's fixing everything. Hell, democratic political reform is necessary to make any of this happen.
I disagree that capitalism is to blame. Property developers would be happy to build housing, but there are so many regulations and hoops to jump through to actually do it. Therefore they either don't build or only build where there are less regulations. Capitalism works, but only when the government gets out of the way.
@@cambenson4402 everyone who says this generally has no clue what socialism actually is. the problem is capitalism and you’re mistaken if you think capitalism won’t find a way to end up like this again. no the solution isn’t government ownership, its public ownership i.e co-ops. you are definitely right that the problem is the regulation, but lets not forget who lobbied and continues to lobby for that regulation in the first place.
@@cambenson4402 however, it is also capitalism that fuels people to artificially jack up their property values by massively decreasing and blocking new housing developments, making demand much more higher than existing supply.
How about starting with relaxing zoning? More often than not developers want to build but can't. The next step would be to implement Georgism (taxation of land instead of real estate) to incentivize using land instead of holding on to it.
Blocks and blocks of purely residential public housing just creates concentrated poverty and deserted wastelands with no commercial aspect and often sketchy streets at off-peak foot traffic times of day; instead, why not build mixed use buildings with light commercial at the base, and mixed residential with some low and some middle income targets? This would create some additional jobs to the residents, keep the streets feeling like a community rather than a wasteland, would diversify the neighbourhood crowd and feel to something more natural, and importantly for government funded housing, the commercial at street level would partially fund the building's upkeep.
I don't think that LOW income towers work, I think that they will always fail. You are concentrating way too many low income residents in one location and you also disconnect the residents from the neighborhood. Upzoning areas is much better without any of the massive downsides of towers, you still increase the amount of housing available, but instead of concentrating all the low income residents in one location you spread them out which reduces the negative impact that they can have. (For example not having enough money to fix their houses so their houses slowly deteriorate.)
@@theuglykwan You have to look at the details though, if the towers you are talking about in Singapore are the ones that @CityBeautful is talking about, notice how the government SELLS those houses. So while the prices may still be low and affordable, it still requires the person getting that house to be able to make enough money to buy the house. The fact is that most of the people that would be living in this towers in the US would NOT be able to afford to buy the house. Signapore and Honk Kong also tend to be quite well off places, so while there might be "low income" people in those places, compared to the low income people in the US the SIgnapore and HK people have a lot more money. It's exactly because it's the house, where people are mostly left to fend for themselves that it wouldn't. It might work in some places in Europe because there is a lot more support and social safety net, but those things don't really exist in the US. Also in Europe you tend to pay more in taxes, so the government would have more money to make something like this work. (I don't know the taxes in SG and HK, but I imagine it's also higher compared to the US.). But even if it was economically viable, it might not be a good idea. Americans are already quite isolated from eachother to begin with, with everyone living in their own "private island homes" and then while outside being in their 2 ton metal boxes. There is very little social interactions between people. I think these towers would only make that worse. These towers also isolate the people living in them. People that have the options will not want to live near these towers, so the people living in them will only be able to see and interact with other people that are in the same rough situation as them, whereas if you upzone an area those people that wouldn't want to live next to these people would need to go much further away, which they might not see as being worth it. They might be more willing to live next to these "poor" people when they are living in upzone houses because instead of being right next to 300 of them, they would only be living next to 30 of them.
Low income doesn't have to mean no consumption or people living in poverty. For example students are by definition low income, but I would like to see dorm style units targetted toward this segment of the population. Providing low cost units would move a great deal of people out of family or other market rentals and increase availability/lower cost. You can also include first floor shops and such given high consumption rates which keeps the area vibrant woth eyes on the street for safety. I think low income towers in general can work as well, but you certainly have to provide transit and green space so that people are able to leave thier box.
Another thing that can help is Social Housing. Vienna apparently has it, where the gov't rents the units to both low and middle income tenants, both paying different rents. The idea is interesting as it means the medium income renters are subsizing the lower income ones. And since you have middle income ppl living there, there is no "concentration of poverty" problem. The lower income ppl can piggy back off of the political power the middle income ppl have to make sure the area is kept invested.
Vienna has one of the best social housing policies in my opinion and i think the U.S. government could replicate it fairly easily. 1. Social buildings are interspersed instead of concentrated in one location. 2. The buildings look normal instead of like ugly towers so they don't stand out. 3. Everyone can apply for social housing, this removes the stigma of being a "poor people house" because even middle-class families, students, elderly etc. can get to live there. 4. Social housing must be rented for a regulated lowest possible price. 5. In case the government makes profits from renting social housing it is required to use that money to build more social housing, which not only saves tax money because the social housing can pay for itself over time, but also makes sure new social housing is build constantly. 6. The city of Vienna owns around ~25% of all housing in the city, this keeps private developers in check because they can't buy up all the housing and artificially increase prices. I probably forgot a few things but Vienna shows social housing can be incredibly successful if done right.
Because it is too means tested… My idea is that even executives could apply for public housing as long as they don’t have any other places to live. It could be smaller but that’s it.
I agree. Countries should simply see it as part of their job to provide housing for anyone who needs it. It's much cheaper to provide than to treat the social problems that arise from a failed housing market.
1. Let the free market do as much as it can. Eliminate minimum parking requirements, restrictive zoning, height restrictions, red tape, etc etc. 2. Remove all policies that favor and subsidize house ownership over condo ownership. Housing is housing. 3. Universal housing allowance in the form of tax credits. Basically, a subsidy for the low income people and a tax cut to everybody else. Potentially additional assistance to a few. 4. Public housing if supply is still too low. Public housing in the model of Vienna and Singapore. Mixed income, meeting diverse needs, well maintained.
@@dekaredfire Blame environmentalists and NIMBY’s. A corporation can “bribe” the government to allow a mid rise to be built. But they can’t bribe the voters.
cities could just develop their land themselves with midrise buildings with loads of apartments and some retail space for rent. intentionally set the rates a bit below market rate, keeping people from falling through the crack in the first place while expanding supply enough to stabilize the private market back to something almost resembling sanity. even keep the rents which would be more income than just the taxes on that land in private hands
That's exactly what they did w/ Pruitt Igoe and the other failed housing projects. They didn't have the effect of keeping people from falling through the cracks, quite the opposite, because they basically tied their occupants to failing local economies and high crime areas.
@@rwatertree I'm advocating for something more comprehensive than building a few towers entirely disconnected from the rest of the city. much more akin to housing systems like in Vienna
This system has to be combined with social security safety net systems in general, including health insurance etc. Public housing does not necessarily mean "dirt poor", at least here in Europe it does not. Thousands of families live in city-owned apartments which are very much "middle class", or at least both have jobs and some social benefits to it, and rent is regulated. The ONLY situation when a ghetto like situation occurs in my country is when PRIVATE owners of basically boarding houses offer their studios to families of four and cash on subsidies from the city (i.e. they have certain rent and no debtors).
It's the same mentality towards public transit as well in both the USA and my country; taking buses is seen to be done only by poor people while owning a car is a sign of financial stability
In Europe there are many good examples for public housing. For example Vienna has a lot of public housing mixed into the city. Other cities in Europe are similar and at the moment we are building a lot of public housing because the demand is so high and prices in the cities are skyrocketing.
in Oakland, CA there's a bunch of 4 story 'low income' housing projects that had to be built practically incognito else they would "accidentally burn down"
To add some background information for the clip at 3:07. That’s in Oklahoma City and was caused by a truck driver who ignored the height restriction and drove right through the bridge. The city, itself, acted quickly and got the bridge repaired fast.
A problem not mentioned about federal vouchers (section 8) from the landlord's perspective is the headache that comes with it. I've had personal experience working for property managers that participate in section 8 and their units are routinely neglected, destroyed, and abandoned without notice by the tenant. They end up losing money from the loss of rent and the cost of rehab. It only takes a few bad experiences like this to scare landlords away from the voucher program as a whole.
that’s different from what I’ve heard and seen, I’ve heard and have known of people who take care of their apartments Cuz apparently the hoops you have to go through to get the voucher in the first place, it’s not worth losing just messing up at one place, so they try to keep their place in order so that they can keep their voucher for the next apartment, Because apparently once you lose it, it’s not something you can easily get back, there’s a whole waiting list and you have to go through the whole process again, so it makes no sense that people would just go messing up their apartment so frivolously after they work so hard to get the voucher in the first place. maybe the property managers you worked for were just so shitty that this is what behavior they induced in their renters
Here in France we have 4.5 million social houses or apartments with 10 million people living in it. Plus, it is admitted that way more is needed and there are public policies being forcing cities to build more of them.
@@GUITARTIME2024 Sorry, my mistake. It's the concept of public housing, but the french word for it translates to "logement social" which literally would be "social houses". The public part of our healthcare system for example is called "social security"
One time i changed a flat tire on my car... but i didnt put the lug nuts on tight enough and they all came off. Therefore changing flat tires is a failed policy that is always doomed to fail. I just drive around on flats all the time now. I am very intelligent and forward thinking.
Projects like Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe got lots of headlines but were NOT representative of public housing as a whole. I have known friends who lived in public housing projects in Seattle which ARE NOT high-rise slums. When I lived in Oakland, some of the BEST housing in West Oakland (obviously the best-maintained) was public housing.
Tower-blocks are great for when the conditions of housing have deteriorated to destitution and an area has declined to slum-like conditions. Giving residents a necessary upgrade from a structurally-unstable shanty-town setting to a complete package of basic necessities, albeit in a crude concrete casing? I would take that in a heartbeat.
@Shane Keena wow, that’s the best you got, well at least they’re not in a shanty town. Now they will share a run down building with some people of a bad element.
@@coreyjames8338 Hey, sometimes you have to embrace that side of things though. Sometimes you have to work with that course of action, not against it. Graft in commercial space, dovetailing a decent mixed-use element while still respecting the great innovations the modernists have made. Not every neighborhood needs to be super charming and "human-scale" when us humans have made literally every building in the known universe, even modernist ones. Every building we know about is considered human-scale.
There is a LOT going on in Turkey that's wrong at the moment, but when I visited years ago I was impressed with their public housing. At the time the government was building high rises and you could apply to buy a condo in them. You'd get a special 30 year lease at 0% interest (this is now pegged to inflation) and once you paid it off the condo was yours. I'd love to see something like that available here, like a special FHA loan where you don't need a down payment to buy in a mid-rise condo building, and where the HOA could be regulated but ultimately controlled by the homeowners. You could even have a mix of premium and affordable units so there's less cost to the taxpayer! Ah, dreams.
Although use has issues (hard to get a mortgage, the program is optional, recent shortgages/increases in the market), Section 8 has something called the homeownership program. It is a really great program for people with Section 8 Rental
It's wild that US public housing is so drastically different than even public housing up here in Canada. You hear about some individual buildings with bad reputations, but in general public housing's reputation isn't that bad, not nearly as bad as SRO NOAH units on the private sector for example.
As someone moving from a 1000 a month shack to a slightly bigger 1600 a month apartment with AC... I just want to be able to afford to live. We only qualified for the new apartment because my roommate has 3 official jobs and I have great references and we applied RIGHT BEFORE my credit score tanked because I had to spend all my money on deposits and fees missed some credit card payments... (We literally couldn't stay in our previous place any more. The wiring was poorly done and have the place didn't have power at all and we couldn't cook or turn on certain lights without shorting out the place. All other places in our city, Houston, were even more expensive and required even higher income (despite the fact that me and my roommate make the AVERAGE for our city) for 2 beds and 1 bath not even near downtown, like we'd want to live near it anyway)...
Concentration of poverty is a serious issue with this concept and that needs to be addressed. creating mixed housing mandates surrounding the building of new large scale developments forces real-estate developers (who almost always get state money and tax exemptions to develop) to take care of some of the problem, and building codes could enforce that low/No income apartments have to be intermixed with units and cant be more than 10% of all units in the building. More over, creating housing priority rules for the affordable units that always put families with children, elderly and disabled first in line (or only in line) would help prevent the social problems from making their way into housing units. That being said, i would agree that perhaps many Americans still have a bad taste for the HUD housing around their cities and towns, and it may not be as deserving as it once was....but not for great reasons either. Since the disparagement of poor communities of color, large amounts of unmarried men have ended up in legal troubles. this puts them in jail and when they get out, they are unable to qualify for public housing even if they have kids and their significant other wants to take them back in. The long term effect means that, HUD units are primarily occupied by families with children (mostly women led families), the disabled, and the elderly. As a result, current HUD communities are still concentrated and low quality of living, but they tend not to be the center of community issues. The low income residential areas are where things get rough and dangerous, maintenance goes down and abandoned Houses and other buildings create decomposing communities. These are the rough neighborhoods that would make anyone unaccustomed to the deterioration and chaos, feel very uncomfortable if they found themselves lost in the area. If your city has a Crime map, you can almost always locate exactly where these run down residential areas are and its usually dead smack central neighborhood between two main roads with lateral streets connecting and away from the public housing that sits adjacent along the edge of the same neighborhood. This has a potential upside. Increment development minded people can help make public housing better and use those areas as platforms for urban renewal since they have lower crime. I've seen examples in my own neighborhood, and the end result is that a mixed income neighborhood forms as nicer community amenities make the low priced residential homes appealing to the young and hip. over time, the increasing value of homes makes large developers interested and the open land from torn down homes leaves space for occasional mid to high income lofts. the final product is a community with high/mid/low housing all in close proximity and a safer more equitable and diverse community forms.
Germany has interesting models too. The gov't leaves construction and renting out to private investors. Building permits on high-value land (city; very very seldomly suburbs) are only given out if x% of the units to be erected are specifically only offered to public housing use. x=30 is targeted. It leads to a deconcentration of poverty that 1970s highrises have a bad reputation for. If the building owner cuts maintenance short, even the wealthier residents may be affected - and they would figuratively revolt if that were to happen. The other element is that buildings are generally less than 6 stories *because* of the bad reputation of the high-rises.
What if we build the high rise building with a mixed income population, 30% in the lowest segment, 40% for middle class, and 30% the upper floors luxurious apartments?
IMHO the Singapore model is a better choice. Anyone can purchase HDB housing, and it costs the same for everyone. Low-income households are able to receive assistance if they can't afford the price. Importantly, a building is not stratified by income. Low-income residents can wind up living right next to higher-income residents. (It's possible the very top floor or floors do command a price premium...but if so, it's a relatively modest one.) The wealthiest people generally don't live in public housing. But with over 80% of housing being public, most people do, and a wide range of economic classes are represented in public housing.
So here a re a few cents. Public housing investment and management needs to take place on a local level like municipal. Federal management never works in these cases, since these entities are too remote to know local demand and needs. They can however contribute to financing. Selling off units to people that are already considered poor might only contribute to their own debt spiral, so rent controlled leasing would work much better. Combining this with redeveloping city centers to be more liveable might also be a good idea, since the will probably be less resistance by residential NIMBYs from the suburbs.
In Hong Kong, 30% of housing are public housing, but very unfortunately we still don't have enough of those (waiting time for that is ~5 years in average and more extreme case is that you need to wait 10+ years). Really the poorest people are eligible, however there are other program to fill the gap between public housing and private market, say selling the flats by government at discounted rates, similar to those in Singapore's HDB flat
Yeah no shit. Last time when the government wanted to build more public housing the rich and the middle class were so against it, as increase in housing supply led to the devaluation of their properties. The economy is addicted to real estate speculation
@Zaydan Naufal Not sure what programs you are talking about? In HK public housing are still being built at a pretty massive scale, while the supply is large, the demand for that is even larger.
@Zaydan Naufal There are couple things happened in the late 90s and early 2000s. The government has launched the 85000 housing unit scheme between 1998-2001, which aims to built at least 85000 flats per year. As the supply goes up to the point tha that exceed the demand by a lot, and also after the asia finanical crisis and SARS outbreak, the housing prices has decreased more than 50% during 1997 and 2003 (after SARS outbreak). Afterwards, the government sort of "stablise" the housing prices in the private sector and stopped all construction and selling of HOS flat( subsidised flats) in 2003, as to reduce the supply of housing. Those flats are either being reallocated as public renting houses or kept emptied until 2010s to be sold. Public housing during those period did not stopped, but only renting estates are being constructed.
I can see a lot of NIMBYs in the comment section. What you guys don't understand is most of the world is not filled with single family homes and cars and highways. Almost every major city has good PUBLIC TRANSPORT (so poor people can travel from far where the housing/renting cost is low) and mixed use HOUSING. (Not mixed with factories as mentioned in some stupid comments rather high rise, mid rise and individual houses). The only thing preventing US from doing these are THE EGO that america should look like everyone having huge houses and cars while these can be feasible in extremely low population density and higher incomes on average, its absolutely not a feasible choice when you have literally the third largest population in the world. As long as everyone is brainwashed by the riches that suburban sprawl is the only way to live, your people and environment won't survive the abusive land use of the sprawl and highways... P.S. you don't even need bike lanes when you got really good public transport, food for thought!
As a person, who lived majority of his life in country, where this type of buildings dominates others, I’ll tell you this: it’s great when there are like 5 floors in this kind of buildings. People know each other, neighbors care about what’s going on. It becomes like second family. With smaller buildings nearby area looks like garden, people grow flowers, trees, bushes. Cats of residents walking around, children playing, old people walking around, man drinking something like in “King of the hill” show. If there are more floors (12+) it becomes terrible ghetto like place, where no one knows each other, no one cares. All those traffic jams in elevators and near the house too.
The point is for higherise building to work very well you have to spend a lot of money to make it work good. Additional elevators, in unit laundry or additional floor for utilities.
Public housing is a good idea if the municipal government wants all the townspeople to live in a building like it is in Whittier, AK. And it's only if real estate possession is an embargo.
Here in São Paulo we have a PPP, (Public Private Partnership), wich is an ideia were a conpany cunstruct the house and, because of that, has the right to administrat the the stores in the ground floor.
The issue in nyc is every multi family development has to have a certain number of “affordable units”. These “affordable units” still cost like $2,500 for a one bedroom. Too many loopholes in the affordable housing scheme
Tangentially related: here in CA we made a rule that developers have to build a percentage of affordable housing OR pay into a fund. The result has been that everyone decides to pay into the fund. So now we have this massive fund that we can use to build affordable housing. Sounds great right? EXCEPT all the NIMBYs come out every time the state tries to build so projects keep failing to come to fruition… This is part of why I’ve come to the conclusion that the housing issues in America won’t be truly solved until we figure out a way to limit the power of NIMBY’s.
That percentage rule works pretty well in Hamburg but now they had to increase state aid for it because of the high cost but that way the city has still controll about a lot of affordable housing. Compared to Stuttgart Munich or Frankfurt it is pretty affordable.
Put them in downtown parking lots. The NIMBY could have a parking structure and everyone else would have a nice mixed use mall that helps to densify downtown.
The issue is that the regulation is aimed at developers; in France there is a similar system, except that it's cities that must put money into a fund if they don't have 25% social housing. This means there is a massive market for developers that built mostly affordable housing since a good portion of desirable land is reserved for it.
I feel like public housing (both building new and managing what we have) is just another thing that could be funded if only the rich paid their fair share of taxes. As for getting the land for that housing, it's become clear that a lot of office type work can be done from home, so there don't need to be office complexes for that, and such buildings could be repurposed for housing. When it comes to NIMBYs, they don't want this housing near them not only because they just simply don't want it there, but they don't want to be reminded of the systemic issues that lead to the necessity of public housing and prefer to have those issues be out of sight and therefore out of mind.
No my friend, if said work can be done from home, then there is no ducking need for that person to be living in this specific city altogether. He will be just fine living say an hour drive away in some small town or in the middle of the woods as well, where property is much cheaper. You basically eliminate two land uses simultaneously: remote workers (obviously not in their entirety, but still in easily noticeable numbers) move out, and demand on office real estate gets reduced considerably, given that they only need a fraction of the workforce on deck every business day.
@@lifebloodcore2106 not everyone wants to live in the CITY. that’s the point. Especially if your perfectly walkable city happens to be NYC with skyrocketing crime rate, or SanFrancisco with poop on the streets. Also some people would prefer an actual HOUSE they own to an apartment they most likely rent. My point is - people are different, not everybody thinks, acts and want the same things you do. If only more people could see through the grand delusion they’ve created (often semi-unconsciously) in their own heads, that all or even wast portion of people are like them (they are not) in their beliefs, priorities and desires, this country would have been way better off.
Public housing didn’t fail as a policy it fell front to bad urban planning look at the ones in St. Louis beautiful buildings were demolished for ugly public housing in the 50s and 60s in my opinion they should be outside the city with railways connecting them into the core downtown but times are different nowadays there’s nothing in downtown except parking lots skyscrapers and coffee shops
This is extra painful as a Canadian, and more specifically as a resident of Vancouver Island. We have no supply…it’s so squeezed that housing is doubling in cost every two years. It can’t keep going like this. All the home owners here think they are investment geniuses just for being born sooner and buying homes. They expect it to appreciate and would rage if it did not. Yet in Calgary where I was born, housing values are largely flat over the last ten years because housing is just shelter, not your main investment vehicle/commodity.
Love these videos, would love to also learn about rural areas, can we have some Rural America side episodes. I want to know about unincorporated towns, how these places function.
Renters are naturally negligent. Even in the luxury housing market, there are plenty of renters who neglect basic maintenance like changing a filter out of an AC unit.
I just want to say, I appreciate your content and really love watching your videos. Most channels like yours are into fearmongering and negative based. You are upbeat, happy, and bring out the flaws in a positive way. Thank you for that.
If they want to build public housing, make sure it has: - Local shops, maybe 1st floor - Transportation connection - public services like education, fire, etc. - parks, greens and spaces
@@Lildizzle420 in most of the US, the ground floor or first floor is not allowed to have shops because of zoning laws. personally I like to see it to be a mix because I would like to live somewhere where I could walk to get small things at a grocery rather than always drive.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 In most of our cities, office or residential above retail is perfectly legal. In New Urban communities, it is the default. In typical postwar suburbs, not so much.
Public housing or no public housing. Tower blocks and condominiums are designed like hotels, they are poorly designed for families and discourages meeting neighbors and building that community. Compared to Asian condos, North American condos makes you hate condos.
Agreed, Public housing is fine, but NOT tower blocks, not when they are aimed at lower income residents, that's just asking for trouble which WILL come. 4-6 floors at most when it comes to public housing for lower income residents in my opinion.
@@Arjay404 Tower-blocks are great for when the conditions of housing have deteriorated to destitution and an area has declined to slum-like conditions. Giving residents a necessary upgrade from a structurally-unstable shanty-town setting to a complete package of basic necessities, albeit in a crude concrete casing? I would take that in a heartbeat.
Interesting video. I lived in an old "affordable housing" apartment in Arlington, VA for 5 years. I had to check to make sure that this wasn't the same as public housing, and it isn't. That apartment had its share of recurring mold and cockroach issues, and other problems like annually faulty heaters / a/c, but at least it was convenient to the metro. But for the purposes of this comment, the interesting thing is that the apartment complex (a cluster of many around 4-story buildings) had some open space. Luxury condos were popping up everywhere at the time in the DC area (mid-2000s). Apparently some luxury company approached the affordable housing company and struck a deal to be able to build on the open space. Two identical high-rises (about 20 stories) were built next to each other in the open space. One was for luxury condos, and the other was for new affordable housing. So as an existing resident I had first dibs for the waiting list and moved in as soon as it opened. It was beautiful; the quality was as good as any new middle- to upper-middle-class apartment of the time. There weren't any luxury or brand-name appliances or what not, but it was 10 times better than the original building. The cockroaches ended up moving in to the shared laundry rooms after less than a year, but oh well... I loved living there for almost 2 years before I left town. Shiniest and nicest place I've ever lived in. The idea that a deal like this can be made should be spread all over the country. Luxury building are popping up everywhere. Why can't there be more 1+1 buildings like in Arlington? That would satisfy so many people's needs and keep low-income residents in the cities.
My country (Australia) has lots of 50yrs plus semi retired and retired communities, which deliberately sells their housing units for below market value, if they were to sell in any area but a retirement village. My thought is that this concept could be used for first home buyers, to give people a foot in the door of the property market and allow communities of young families to develop. They don't need to be the two or three bedroom free standing homes that many retirement villages are. They can even be apartment buildings with parks, shops, public transport and schools located as close to them as possible.
I think a big part of the reason why public housing is so unpopular is that the public housing that was built from the 50s to the 70s were for the most hideous eyesores. Had the governments of that time built public housing that was aesthetically pleasing and human-scaled (townhouses up to five story apartment buildings), public housing would probably have a better reputation in the U.S. and would thus be more commonplace.
Tower-blocks are great for when the conditions of housing have deteriorated to destitution and an area has declined to slum-like conditions. Giving residents a necessary upgrade from a structurally-unstable shanty-town setting to a complete package of basic necessities, albeit in a crude concrete casing? I would take that in a heartbeat.
As someone who lives in NYC's public housing, I believe we need new affordable housing but in a way its livable and not in dire need of repairs such as the ones here, I am quite surprised to hear you've lived in public housing too, I wish i can know more about your experience living as a public housing resident.
"government shouldn't be in the business of X" is a fancy way of saying "X is not a right". This applies to food, education, housing, health care, etc.
I think a great follow up to this video would be a video on mixed-income social housing, perhaps international applications and implementation at the state level.
I think we need to be far more flexible in what we provide as public housing. For example, I would like to see publicly opperated dorms with shared kitchens (and potentially washrooms) to provide very low cost rooms offered at a few hundred dollars a month. These would disproportionately be used by students, but it would open up current rentals they occupy. Fannie Mae directly fund construction, and provide loans for coops. Although, tbh, you could solve the majority of the issue with upzoning and shifting taxes off of building value and on to land value to push time property costs and increase return on capital.
@@LucasDimoveo The only grey area I get squeemish with on that point is should Walmart be allowed to build small apartments for workers on site. I want to say yes but then I remember every book I've ever read
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 i think if you define a legal minimum they have to meet for quality of life reasons then it should be possible to not have a distopia end result. Basically mandate that for corporate on site housing to be used as permanent residences for workers that a certain minimum of amenities and maintenance be included. (Obviously this is only as good as the standards and enforcement of them so its not a guarantee of avoiding a distopian outcome)
@@jasonreed7522 Even if the housing is nice though, do I want part of the population living and working in a box store with limited ability to go anywhere else? Plus it gives your employer direct control over your housing which is problematic. Its hard to say I'd rather homeless people then a 100% serf society, but I think I'll say it.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 very fair arguments, but for arguments sake living on the same campus you work at will save you alot of expenses owning a car. The problem being 99% of Walmarts are built on stroads so unless you owned a car you wouldn't have an easy time going anywhere other than box stores. (Making the only reason to stay in such a unit the rent, which hopefully is damn near free compared to any other apartments you could rent in the city) I definitely agree with you on the dangers of building "serf housing" everywhere, its just a concept that has had economic sense throughout history. (Like servents living in a castle, not that we want to return to such a society)
I work in building maintenance for a couple of public housing units, and it's a really good tool for people who need help. It takes the stress off of them when it comes to shelter, and can help them get their lives together. We are also under funded, so a lot of stuff sometimes cant be fixed or fixed right
@@crash.override Is it, though? There's a beautiful tract on the edge of my neighborhood that would make a lovely park, but the city wants to build an 80% subsidized housing complex on the site, less than a hundred yards from the neighborhood elementary school and on top of one of the most congested intersections in this part of the city. They already decommissioned the water tower that serves that area and there's no room for additional power lines. There are no major employers within 5 miles and every intersection within 3 miles already has a full crew of meth-addled beggars. The people who live on the street behind the tract JUST had their property taxes go up by 94% (in ONE year) and, if this palace of concentrated poverty is built, will see their property values dwindle to tenement levels while their taxes remain sky-high. You are clearly too young to understand basic economics and have only reactionary buzzwords upon which to fall back.
I do think zoning is another issue, if an area is restricted to certain type of housing which can often be detached housing, this causes issues with low density reducing space for housing and unaffordable housing.
The thing is the public housing issue is connected to it because obviously if the government decides to build housing there then it has de facto zoned it for whatever type of housing it's building. The government is not just allowing a certain type of housing to be built but paying for it as well.
Most rental housing is public, or as we call it, social rentals. In my hometown Groningen, the Netherlands, every new housing project has to build a minimum of social rentals to make sure neighborhoods are socially mixed.
All of Stuvy town in NYC was a housing project... so they don't all get demolished, some get converted through adaptive transformation re-use, which is much more cost-efficient, time efficient, and better for the environment and the neighborhood than the solutions you have suggested.
The government taking land is never going to work but I would love to see the vacant buildings and lots that stay empty for years and years used for something. Maybe they could be "encouraged" to lease the land to the city to develop some Singapore style leasehold condos and rental units. At least the new units would be located in the heart of existing neighborhoods instead of planted out near the highway somewhere.
I'm an American in a large urban city in India. My area has two affordable housing initiatives from the government (I think the state government.) One is the "affordable housing scheme" which has to sell flats in small high rise apartments at a flat rate per sq ft set up by the government. These are sold by 'lottery' (basically just qualified buyers apply and then they randomly select from them.) The builders usually build them as 1, 2 or 3 bedroom flats but they are made as efficiently as possible so often are 400-800 sq ft. There are also some units in the development which the builder gets to sell, at the same rate, outside of the lottery for pure profit, hence incentivising them to build and also allowing buyers who missed the lottery to get in. Generally these societies (Indian way of saying apartment complex or really in this case, condo complex) have moderate amenities like playgrounds and parks. Many different builders are granted permits to build these affordable housing schemes every year, so they often compete with each other through who can provide better amenities. The downside is generally the lottery happens 3-5 years before the complex is actually finished being built and there have been scandals where builders ran off with the money or went bankrupt. But mostly, it works. Second is EWS housing. Every society, be they high rise or low rise, who is being built has to set aside a certain percentage of flats to be for the "Economically Weaker Sector". Basically for those poor enough to qualify but who also have enough money to pay. These flats aren't as nice (often are just 200-300 sq ft) but are inexpensive and since they are being built in more high end societies they often come with nice amenities like access to swimming pools and fancy manicured parks etc. After being built, the buyers of these flats cannot be sell them to anyone who also doesn't qualify for EWS for 5 years. This does two things: makes sure that they're being used to house EWS residents for at least 5 years and also 5 years later allows affordable flats to enter the market that are sellable to anyone. Often people who make too much to get in on EWS initially but either can't afford an affordable housing scheme house or doesn't need more than a studio apartment can buy EWS flats. Also, this means anywhere anything is being built even if it's for the uber wealthy there is also going to be inexpensive homes built. The downside is often these homes are sort of segregated away from the rest of the society-- in the society I rent in they're across the street from all the rest of the flats for example-- and I hear from Indian friends that a lot of EWS flats are actually sold to people who don't qualify for EWS but just have fake paperwork because of corruption. Still, it's more than America does to help their poor become homeowners and make sure all neighborhoods have a mix of economic classes. I feel like growing areas in America could learn from this... But they won't. Lol.
And here's the numbers from a more reasonable country: 22% public housing, 21% rented, 7% Cooperatives and 49% owned. Welcome to Denmark. This includes everything, normal houses, apartments, rooms, weird shit and so. Also, Public Housing are usually non-profit associations, any profits are either saved up for renovations and improvements or outright used for improvements.
The "free market" has failed us on housing as it has failed us in every other sector. Every major U.S. city has a housing shortage and when altruistic developers deign to build, they always opt for luxury apartments, unless they are legally required to include a few affordable housing units. I've lived in countries with robust, liveable, thoughtfully-designed public housing and the same could happen in the U.S. if we rearranged our budgetary priorities.
In some places, low income simply means low income. Unfortunately, in America (and many other places), low income can mean all sorts of trouble. It's hard to argue with NIMBYs in those cases.
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As a Singaporean, the government does much more than what you described for public housing. The government builds a cohesive neighbourhood with commercial malls, schools, public transport stops / stations, parks, etc integrated together. This makes sure people are able to live there, rather than being stuck in some “Low income area” devoid of amenities like the USA. Also the sheer scale of the public housing program cannot be matched, like you said the USA has only 1 million public housing units total, while 80+% of the houses in Singapore are public housing.
IIRC it was something like 60 or 70% of the UK populace who used to live in social housing pre-Thatcher.
There was certainly a private market and people who always lived in a private rent or ownership, but everyone always knew that at a minimum they’d at least have state provided housing as a last resort.
That doesn’t exist anymore, sadly. Everyone still technically has the right to request it, but the total availability is so low, most people never get an offer. The last time I was looking I did actually get an offer… 2 years after I’d put it in and had already moved!
That's awesome. Are there many homeless people there? How much taxes do you pay?
@@tysonq7131 LMAO, Singapore is a technocrat paradise, you CAN'T be homeless there. If you have a Singapore's passport, you have public housing privilege. If you're a migrant worker, you live in subsidized public tenement buildings. It's literally impossible for you to be homeless, also because it's straight up illegal.
@@tonysoviet3692 Okay well a simple Google search reveals you’re wrong. It’s impossible for there to be 0 homeless in any society. Also the fact that being homeless is illegal makes me think they probably throw a lot of them in jail. I’m looking for a realistic representation of how effective this housing is.
Yeah, how about mixed use public housing developments?
The biggest thing is to not concentrate them in one area, creating a "slum". Low-income housing needs to be spread out so that every city has a share of it. In California, Newsom is passing laws that are bypassing local city zoning restrictions. This is what needs to happen on a national level, or else you'll just get NIMBYs pushing everything out to the cities least capable of supporting all the low-income residents.
But isn't that against localism?
This. In Singapore, not only do most people (over 80%) live in public housing, but all public housing units are entirely mixed-income, with multimillionaires living on the same floor as people making minimum wage.
@@kirkrotger9208 ...And their education system is supposedly great too.
I wonder how Singapore accomplished all that...?
Tell me something, is there an epidemic of out-of-wedlock homes and fatherlessness in that small nation? If not, as I suspect, HOW do they accomplish that? Is it just culture?
@@marlonmoncrieffe0728 for sure. Localism is a great thing, but it does have some downsides.
At the same time, sprawling north american cities and CBDs surrounded by suburbs make it difficult/impractical to place Public housing outside of certain areas, like near malls or regional rail stations, because otherwise you're forcing people with low income to live a completely car dependent life style.
The problem is zoning laws. The only way to even be able to build enough housing is to abolish most of the zoning code. Zoning laws have created a severe housing shortage and have crippled the American economy (see Moretti for reference).
This. If the solution was just add more housing then the shit they build 45 minutes drive from jobs and schools would be doing the job. There’s so much more to affordable housing than the government just adding stock and calling it a day. How is it the middle and lower class rented or bought townhouses and tenements in the 30s and as soon as Euclidean zoning existed this stopped, and now we keep talking about legislating in new solutions rather than legislating out the problem?
Yes. We need to stop letting wealthy land owners determine what everyone else can do with their land. Upzoning is a necessary process for the healthy growth and development of a city but single family home owners seem to think a city can add tens of thousands of jobs and yet still keep all the single family suburban style neighborhoods from the 50's and 60's. The thing is those neighborhoods don't need to be demolished for block apartments or anything but they do need to be allowed to change and develop over time by adding things like townhomes, quadplexes, or even small lot 2-3 story apartment buildings.
In general zoning laws are not a bad thing. For example, without zoning laws youcould build a refinery in the middle of a residential area. It is in how zoning laws are designed and applied. You could perfectly well zone new building areas for middle density /mixed density and mixed use. If this is not possible with existing zoning laws, they should be adapted, but to completely abolish zoning laws would be like throwing out the child with the bathing water.
Say that to Republicans
@@Freshbott2 Public housing is a proven solution, Look at Singapore or Vienna. The government can do good stuff, Reaganism fooled you.
In the Netherlands, town and suburban houses are most often row houses, 3 stories high.
Now they are building a lot of social housing (our version of public housing) in towns but they keep the apartment blocks up to 3 floors high, so they fit in with the town feeling and look.
Oh, that won't work in the U.S. The problem, as he rightfully identified, are NIMBYs. I don't know how it works in the Netherlands, but NIMBYs are people who already own housing in neighborhoods. Their biggest fear is a price drop with their homes. And that price drop would happen if, for example, public housing, of any size and of any sort, was built nearby. Hence NIMBYs resist public housing being built in their neighborhoods at all costs--loudly and very nastily--so that they can keep their real estate prices up on their own properties. I would imagine that most of the Dutch have very different, more community-oriented attitudes with regards to placing public housing in their neighborhoods.
@@Luboman411 In the US you have a lot more say in what happens in your neighbourhood
@@lourencovieira5424 and that is stupid to a point. Especially for an those rich people who only think about themselves.
Why do locals not rebel against the politicians or whoever is responsible for building them? Is it due to the national voting system whereby people vote nationally so there is no local district rep for them to complain to which insulates the govt from local concerns? Or are they just less NIMBY?
@@theuglykwan it’s not that there less nimby it’s just that public housing isn’t viewed as something bad . In the US we have a lot of backwards thinking like how we view public transportation and public housing as negatives or something that decreases land value when in most of the world it’s the opposite and viewed as necessary for a good functioning community.
My small city has a housing authority for poor people who are disabled or elderly, but not for families. Families usually are left to rely on the vouchers to get pay for rentals. The Housing Authority buildings are universally fairly well maintained, and unlike other "low income housing" buildings, the safety and accessibility features (smoke detectors and elevators) are always functional. This leads me to believe housing projects didn't suck because of poor people but because of bureaucratic mismanagement.
Also if crime and drugs were a problem, replacing tall towers with midrises would make these buildings easier to manage and police.
Although a lot of public housing complexes were built with Federal funding they didn't subsidize maintenance costs. In a lot of places in order to have enough money for maintenance they would have had to have damn near every apartment filled at a time when a lot of US cities were shrinking.
They make them suck on purpose because 1) they dont think poor people deserve nice things & 2) to further stigmatize public services and make them seem undesirable and thus you are undesirable if you need to use them.
If you could allocate proper resources onto the maintenance, then tall towers are not an issue at all.
IDK about midrises having less crime. In Sweden all the areas where crime is rising are 4-5 storey public housing developments. Different buildings might pose particular issues for police when breaching but crime itself is caused by people not architecture.
One of the issues with low income housing is balancing it with maintaining a tax base who can actually afford to maintain the buildings and services.
@@rwatertree In American cities crime is on the rise in low density neighborhoods. There are underlying issues social issues, contributing to crime, of course it's not limited to the buildings people live in. But the public safety challenges inherent to high rises do go away with mid rise buildings. (Police, Firefighters, and Paramedics get to you quicker if they don't have to run up 30 flights of stairs)
I think your second paragraph hits the nail on the head. Regionalization has to be the answer. In America Housing should be paid for by states or counties, not individual cash strapped cities. Let the suburbs subsidize the cities for a change #strongtowns
I feel like this missed the important "local option" for social housing. Seattle's Initiative 135, which will be on the ballot in November, creates a public developer, owned by the city, which will build public housing for everyone under 120% area median income (creating great mixed income developments for individuals, couples, and families)
Hopefully that wins, because that sounds far more realistic than somehow getting enough Senators to agree to even attempt a public housing initiative, let alone create a cohesive and effective proposal rather than sabotaging it so it can be scrapped in 5 years after its planned ineffectiveness becomes apparent.
Who pays for this government theft of private resources? If people cannot afford to live in an area, why do they not simply move to a more affordable location?
@@jmac3327 you can't be serious you neo feudalist tosser.
How does a public developer work? Are the builders going to be employed by the city or is it just going to be an agency that hires private firms to execute its plans?
@J Mac, many people cannot afford to live in Seattle because of government policy: there are hard limits in the zoning code on how much housing can get built. If you don’t like public housing on the theory that the government shouldn’t be bailing people out of an expensive housing market, then I hope you also feel strongly that the government should back off restricting housing construction and driving up prices.
@City Beautiful you should talk about how social housing works in Vienna, Austria. About half the city lives in social housing that is integrated into neighborhoods with mixed incomes, this practice reduces the likelihood of slums since it avoids concentrated poverty
Lucky that Austria is full of mostly Austrians.
@@Mantis858585 This means nothing. And besides that, the foreign-born population in Vienna was nearly 40% back in 2012, so I can only imagine this has increased with population growth.
Vienna is a great example of what cities should do when they own land: *Keep it! Use it! Do not sell it.*
@ Definitely. Cities are supposed to serve their residents, across all incomes, not raise money from selling to developers unless those developers are required to build mixed use mixed income housing.
@@Mantis858585 always telling on yourselves without trying.
What about mixed-use public housing? Basically, it would be retail-commercial on the ground floor, maybe some office space on the floor above, and then three or four stories of public housing units above that.
- Businesses that lease the building would share some of the maintenance cost, and they would have a vested interest in keeping the building in good working order to keep their customers.
- It would also ensure nearby and readily accessible commercial services for the residents, and jobs available on the ground floor would be open to them if they needed one.
- Keeping the housing above ground floor might also decrease the likelihood of break-ins, which in turn would keep the crime rate lower.
I realize this would require changing zoning laws, but that aside, I'd like to hear what other people think of this idea.
That is exactly what Singapore, Japan, and Austria did.
@@luelou8464 easy fix, change the regulations.
tbh, i think most residential buildings could be mixed use. I would love to live in an apartment that is on top of a grocery store so that grocery shopping is just a matter of going down the elevator. Or a bar, or whatever else. For a neighborhood to be truly walkable, residential areas need to have commercial stuff mixed into it. And what better way to do that than to have the buildings themselves be mixed use?
It's fun watching Americans invent things we in Europe use for decades lol
I'm from Serbia and there's plenty of buildings especially new ones which have bussiness at ground floor... for example a grocery store.. and above that you have housing... so if you need groceries... just come down and get it Lmao ... no need to drive like 30 min to a store or something xD
Isn't this common? I live in one 40 story high rise building right across the road of one of the biggest Universities here and a 5 min walk from 2 Light rail stations. It's not public housing though it's by a private real estate company. Our ground floor has a grocery, 2 convenience stores, laundries, a petshop, dentists, barbershops and salons, a lawyer office, some realty companies, a cafe, tea shops, and food places. 2nd floor are offices. 3rd to 7th are parking spaces with some cheap auxiliary units. 8th to 40th floor are all housing units. Here in the national capital region of the Philippines it's common to see mixed use high rise housing in densely populated areas. And in my hometown they're beginning to build more mixed high rise to cope with the expanding need for more offices and population.
Good public housing should be mixed in with private housing, and near public transport. Proximity to public transport is one of the biggest factors in an individual's ability to escape poverty, and keeping public and private, particularly middle and upper income private, housing will help ensure services and infrastructure is good quality and well maintained.
The goal of public housing should be to put people in a position that they would not need public housing in the future.
Is there any evidence that this is the case?
@@jmac3327 Section 8 is a form of mixed housing. Every place that started
getting Sec 8 usually has gone downhill.
Mixed housing is a bad idea.
Access to transportation *IS* the most important factor in escaping poverty. Things like going to school, getting interviews, or finding job opportunities/training are steps needed to escape poverty. How are you supposed to go to school, get interviews, or find opportunities? Teleport? One who lives in poverty has a high chance of not being able to afford a car, and the transit services in poor regions of the US either are unreliable or don't exist at all. Good public housing needs to be near reliable transit and in mixed areas as you said.
@@intreooaccess to transportation is one major reason why Soviet housing units were very successful. It gave them easy access to downtown and other workplaces, i.e. nearby mines and factories.
@@ianhomerpura8937 i'm confused. if you work in a mine or factory, wouldn't you want easy access to those things? Obviously you wouldn't want to be near enough to take in their externalities (like toxic gas) but having those things reachable by train seems like a good thing
My girlfriend lives in public housing in Berlin and actually everyone envy her for her apartment. Rent is incredibly cheap, it’s located in a hip area right in the city center and everything is maintained well. Her dad also found a social housing apartment and it’s very new with a big balcony, quiet neighborhood and good public transportation access. And that’s nothing compared to Vienna‘s quality public housing. This concept works, I hope the US could step away from their fear of „socialism“ and actually implement good policies that make people‘s life objectively better.
The place to start is losing the "low income" stigma. *Everybody* needs somewhere to live, regardless of their income.
When I moved in 2019 I looked closely at the real estate market here in Kamloops and had a first chat with my bank about a mortgage. Vancouver was out of the question, even for somebody who makes six figures. Kamloops was doable. In the meantime prices have gone through the roof and I'm totally priced out of the market. I live in a (market) rental building instead.
The irony here in Kamloops is that a very successful housing prefab company is sited here… Northern Trailer. They know how to build work camps on very short time lines. And did, with the Mission Flats housing. Though they’re ugly and isolated.
What Kamloops, and most North American cities and town, needs is mixed-use densification. We need to mix residential, retail, school and offices. We have to break the chains of car-dependence. And we could do double-duty of building to Passive House standard to reduce GHG emission from heating & cooling.
I wholeheartedly agree. The US and Canadian housing system seems designed to look down on "low income" people. It's why renters get looked down upon ("you're just wasting money on rent") and housing advantages accrue to the wealthiest homeowners instead of helping people who actually need it. In truth, everyone needs a place to live and if you wanted to actually tackle homelessness and poverty, then the housing issue needs to be addressed.
If not, and housing just becomes a financial investment more than a place to live, then you get places like Vancouver where housing seems reserved for the already wealthy. It always baffles me when people complain that their neighborhood isn't full of young families anymore when it's because home values have skyrocketed so much that young families can't afford the area at this point.
Perhaps you should consider moving to a location that is more affordable.
When crime, substance abuse, mental illness, failure in education and poverty stop being correlated then the low income stigma will be gone.
@@jmac3327 Kamloops housing is still a half to a third of Vancouver housing. Despite that even the Kamloops housing is unaffordable. I have no idea how Vancouverites manage.
The only less expensive housing in Canada is stuff that has next to no amenities or paid employment options. Those who do opt for rural housing but still need paid employment put up with long commutes.
For a country so obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism, it's pretty bizzarre how many restrictions there are when it comes to things that you can build in cities. On a macro scale(R1 zoning) to micro(regulating what the front of your yard has to look like).
@Leto Atreides
Is should tell you that the U.S. is not actually obessed with laissez-faire capitalism then.
LIKE WHY IS SINGLE FAMILY ZONING A THING
I THOUGHT IT WAS BAD ENOUGH IN AUSTRALIA
The writer of “Donut economics” puts it this way: There is No such thing as a free market. If the government doesn’t make rules then the company/person with the most money will simply make all the rules.
@@SaveMoneySavethePlanet except in this case it’s the government causing the problem. That’s not an opinion it’s a factb
It would amaze you but those strong restrictions only came much after that laissez faire capitalism.
Much comes down to the 1937 and 1949 Housign act the first creating the Federal Housing Association .
Just one word: Vienna.
This city is one of the if not THE most liveable cities in the world. With almost half of the residential buildings owned by either the city itself or housing cooperatives, low social segregation and a high standard of living. If you or anyone in the world want to have a successfull example of how things can be done - there it is.
Throughout this entire housing crisis, my opinion has mainly been "Build a million Karl Marx-Hofs, you cowards". Somehow we're trapped in an ironic NIMBY-induced hell of neither deregulating residential zoning nor allowing the government to spur new home construction.
Rotterdam had that to, and it resulted in big problems.
i think you're forgetting that there is a huge cultural difference between Austria and the US
@@grandmascreampie5372 I don't see how cultural differences could prevent the necessary policy changes. It's just amatter of political will and the amount of people who are willing to express it.
@@untruelie2640 Nah they're right, I forgot that Austrians don't live in houses and just get folded up into boxes for the night after 7 pm
One of the major reasons that public housing is difficult in the US is because a lot of the regulations and systems meant to "help" people are intentionally underfunded and made inconvenient to access because politicians are under the false impression that if they make support structures good, then people will just rely on them. It's a very old fashioned and damaging perspective.
Not to mention that many politicians are landlords
It’s not incorrect that people will rely on them that’s just humanity
@@onyxg7171 that speaks to a really low opinion of humanity, which is just a you problem.
@@NPRoberto
It just speaks to the reality of humankind where not every race/ethnicity is equally good, hardworking and peaceful and its plain stupid to pretend this isn't true just because you don't want to offend certain people and get them angry and up in arms.
@@NPRoberto people DO rely on welfare tho. There are families that have 3 generations living in section 8. There are women who have multiple kids outside of relationships for the govt benefits. People don’t want to change the zoning because they don’t want to live next to welfare mammies.
Over here in Germany (or more specifically in Berlin) a big part housing is public through state owned companies. The buildings are usually in relatively good shape and rents are relatively low.
I've also read that Germany has laws that make it very difficult for individuals and corporations to buy housing for the explicit purpose of making a profit off of it. There are very tight controls on rents, and taxes on the sale of property are incredibly high. This discourages the type of housing speculation that drives up prices and rents through the roof, like here in the U.S. Germany thus can keep housing affordable for everyone as a result.
@@Luboman411 the last sentence is not entirely true and that's due to the fact that we have a shortage of housing as well and that for newly built housing there are much fewer rules regarding rents. So all that's available on the market are flats that are quite expensive to rent.
But if you're lucky enough to already live somewhere from where you don't need to move it's quite good.
Shush. “State owned companies” is gonna scare away freedom loving Americans who believes in God and private free market economy
I used to live in Strausberg and Köpenick for a while and I knew the eastern parts of Berlin quite well and I loved it there, and the "public housing" neighborhoods with all the greenery were really pretty. But if America is building these alongside freeways, as shown in the old video, then they have what they have.
@@Luboman411 Also Germany's population is declining meaning that the housing stock is designed for a higher population compared to now. This is likely another major factor
I'm generally in the build housing co-ops camp which is generally ignored. The problem I have with public housing is what happens when you have someone running the system that doesn't believe in the thing they are running? With co-ops, they do need funding from the government, but after they are established, can effectively self financing. Why co-ops would be better is that they would be owned by the occupiers unlike public housing which is owned by a probably disinterested county. Which would give the people there a reason to not ruin the place. Co-ops can already have income limits and generally set the rent low enough to just break even. This is the opposite mentality of a normal landlord which is high rents, low quality housing. A co-op are high quality low cost. We already have a legal framework for this, its called limited equity co-ops where share value is limited to grow at a set formula. So it can be set at cost and capped at some function of inflation plus a set percent. This will mostly help lower middle income people and could help people with lower income with grants or existing rent aid programs.
This is one thing allowed in some European countries as well, curious why it hasn't caught on in the US.
ruclips.net/video/AdBEqH8hGjQ/видео.html
I will like to say these co-ops should not be tied to the shareholder like traditional co-ops. It should be non profit membership driven.
Each cooperative should have several businesses lining it to make it sustainable. And businesses should not just be restricted to the lowest floors. There's more, but my comment speaks more about cooperative communities instead of singular buildings.
Yes! We need buildings. But we need cooperative communities that would enhance this idea further.
maybe i'm dumb, but are you just describing a condo association?
@@TessHKM I think they call it a maintenance fee. It covers repairs to the unit. While with co-ops you own a share of the company managing the cooperative, condominiums you own it as a property like you would a house or building. So you can have a mortgage and gain in it value overtime. While with a cooperative, you right it off as a business asset on your taxes.
The question isn't whether public housing is good, it's whether the US is willing to commit to doing it right like other countries have. And sadly I think the answer is a resounding no.
Yeah unfortunately property owners have it all and it is used more as a profit than a basic need
The thing you leave out is that many countries don't have do deal with the kind of people that the US and Canada have to deal with who are far more violent and difficult. Then you have countries like Sweden, France and the UK who do have to deal with these kinds of people and look at what's happened to them? Same long term problems with these people who can't ever seem to improve themselves while not destroying the countries that welcomed them.
@@UzumakiNaruto_ Which "kind of people" are you accusing of being "violent and difficult"? Please name them.
The United States has a geographical advantage in that we aren't really lacking for space like many other places that need these high rises - we just use it terribly inefficiently and are deluding ourselves for as long as possible before doing what must be done. In my area for instance, I've seen mid-rises just casually going up, corporate businesses at the floor level (grocery store with parking underground) and housing for hundreds of people. Across the street, mid-rise office buildings for other businesses. This area used to be just straight up strip malls.
I've noticed very little increased congestion as people can merely walk to the store or dentist nearby. Medium density is the answer and we can just spread it out and not really even notice the difference. The solutions are likely to be found locally and federal funding should probably not go to these big 'government' projects and just to subsidize private/pubic partnerships.
It's telling when the US is the size of a continent and we still ended up with a housing crisis because we wasted our vast amounts of land LOL
That's really interesting to hear they converted a typical stripmall area into something more dense. What state are you in, if you don't mind me asking.
I live in Connecticut and the NIMBYs are terrible. In Westport, for example, the same people who have "All are welcome here," signs in the front yards showed up in droves to oppose a developer trying to build a new apartment building with SOME affordable units. What we really need is a radical change in zoning laws creating far more dense housing, and we need to restrict the amount of luxury apartments. It is especially bad in places like NYC where tons of luxury apartments sit unoccupied because they are nothing more than a money laundering scheme.
Watching this from Eastern Europe, which is known for concrete, grey blocks I have to admit that those units at 5:47 look freaking horrific. I've seem my share of "projects" and while they might not be terrific they have some greenery in between, so when maintained properly can be liveable. No wonder those American blocks turned into slums if they're slabs of concrete packed back to back...
Some people call that "brutalist architecture" i call it a hellscape.
All they needed was some trees and "park like" infrastructure around the grounds to look decent, and then vet the residents to provide some level of piece of mind for the residents. (If you don't have piece of mind as soon as you get a better work situation you leave and don't look back, this will create a slum if only those who can't escape are willing to live there. Its basically the same as how districts where smoke from factories fell are still the poor parts of cities like London 100years after the factories closed, the air pollution drove away anyone who could move leaving behind a slum)
It's probably intentional: Build it poorly to remind the people in it that they're poor and need to work their asses off to get the hell out - just like infrequently serviced bus stops with car advertisements. Problem is, that's never an effective strategy - especially not when there are so very many barriers to well-paying employment in the US.
Barriers? There are more jobs than people right now. I think a lot of people put barriers in front of themselves
@@georgewagner7787 blablabla bootstraps blablabla...
And how do these available Jobs pay compared to prices for housing and food? What kind of health insurance do they provide?
(West)German living in Wrocław, Poland right now: I was surprised how nice "block-neighborhoods" can be, especially in the summer. Nice apartments, playgrounds, parks, doctors offices, supermarkets and a tram stop within 5 minutes walking distance. Because of the well working public transportation, people have 15 minute access to city center. It's not bad at all. When the blocks aren't build super close to each other, there's also a lot of sun on the balconies, nice views etc.
Connecticut General Statute 8-30g gives building developers the ability to bypass local zoning for the purposes to meeting affordable housing requirements. It's not public housing by any stretch, but it has had me building mixed use apartment complexes near transit stations for the last 5 years and shows no signs of slowing down.
Interesting. Have these developments ever faced pushback from the existing residents? Are these in major urban areas or smaller towns?
@@oscarr5734 Probably. I'm only an electrician, I don't really get to see the part that happens before ground is broken. A lot of my work has been in suburb towns along the MTA track in the northeast corridor, but I've done work in New Haven and Hartford.
@@oscarr5734 Yes, although it really depends on where they are built, on major routes and former strip malls face less criticism than right next to someone's backyard.
The main criticism is that only 10% of the units are considered affordable, and the rest have units that go for well over what the average person can afford here ($2000-2500/mo for a 1br, heck you can buy your own house for a bit more than half that). On one hand, it's great for local tax revenue, on the other hand it does little to nothing to help the vast majority of people to afford living here. These developments largely target very wealthy individuals fleeing NY State's taxes and cost of living. At least these types of developments tend to not bring massive amounts of crime that large scale public housing developments did so previously, so I guess they have that going for them. Tbh, if we could get mixed use zoning at least in downtowns and major transit corridors, it would make everything more walkable and affordable, but I fear they'll never allow it. Idk where these mixed use developments are being built, but it surely isn't in most of suburbia.
America has plenty of housing for low-income people. We call it prison, and it makes contractors billions every year at taxpayer's expense.
Yes already too much. The contractors will make more money building inferior housing. To the benefit of those with political connections.
You're absolutely right. Bring back the death penalty.
Lol too true
No, this video is talking about housing for innocent people who don't want to be imprisoned.
I've been binge-watching a ton of these urbanist channels over the past few months, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like there's just no escaping the self-serving dynamics of American capitalism and politics. Even so-called urbanists who proclaim love for their cities for many years will often change their tune when problems around poverty, crime, mixed ethnicities and cultures, higher taxes, etc., pop up in their neighborhoods, and they flee to the suburbs in waves. Any solution that isn't to the satisfaction of the upper and middle classes is just never going to go far. I think transit is the key to getting things like public housing off the ground again, because there are ways to sell the upper classes on the benefits of transit without making it feel like there's a homeless person camping in their back yard. Then we can build up affordable communities along transit corridors so that they remain integrated with existing communities and aren't so locked into poverty.
I forgot to mentioned public transit in my comment, but yes, it will be a key ingredient.
The problem with proposing transit as a main ingredient to building public housing, is that it takes a lot longer to implement. And it is usually so costly that is it often get shelved many years in the future. And once it gets built we get a cookie cutter design.
So in the long run implementing improved bus service might be the best way to go.
Also. Building segregated low income housing is a thing of the pass. It is not self sustainable, because the government have proven time and time again, it's not meant to be.
@@qolspony taking some lanes on the road and making them bus exclusive could be a good first step. and no adding another lane to compensate. We really need to give incentive for people to stop using their car unnecessarily. Being stuck in traffic while a bus flies past you could be that incentive
I got this argument from a motorhead, on why public transport should be improved and how to sell the idea to upper classes:
"More people on the bus, less cars on the road, more road for you."
Greatly increasing the standard Federal tax deduction means that a couple who own their home and make $70,000 usually do not benefit from deducting mortgage interest. People with much higher cost homes do benefit from deducting mortgage interest and people at the highest end of the earned income Spectrum benefit from many other avenues of deductions to taxable income.
I don't think you understand cleaning up the tax code.
In 2017, the standard deduction went from $12,700 to ~$24,000 as part of the tax law change. The result was 60% of homeowners getting back more money on their taxes in 2019 than they did in 2017, and made their taxes easier. In order to yield $12,000 in interest to deduct you had to have a $400k mortgage with a 4% rate, which was higher than most mortgage holders. Even those with larger or higher rate mortgages can still deduct that interest if it exceeds $24k.
Meanwhile if you made $70k, you too paid less taxes as a result of the 2017 tax law change. Complaining people who earn more money and being able to deduct interest doesn't change anything that wasn't there before, and as a result of falling interest rates for mortgages, it was already effecting fewer people.
As for selling 99 year leases for public housing - good luck. 30% of public housing in North Carolina is already delinquent in payment of rent, and if you take a drive through this public housing, you would blush at the BMW's, Mercedes and Lexus' in front of the buildings. The problem is not housing, it's budgeting and priorities.
As always, there's no magic bullet. But I'd love to see quality public housing in our cities. Here in the Washington D.C. area, there's a desperate need & there's plenty of land open to it. The above-ground Metro station areas would be great places to develop into mixed use, mixed income structures, instead of giant parking lots. I know there's been some talk lately about doing something like that, but knowing this area, it'll be nothing but tiny, one-bedroom places that start at $700,000 and still come with two parking spaces, even though they're built above Metro stations/transit hubs.
There’s so much parking off many of the redline stops but I can already hear the Gaithersburg/Rockville/Bethesda/Friendship Heights NIMBY’s crying about their home/luxury condo prices falling.
RFK Stadium site (following the demolition in 2023) would be a great spot for this development.
@@MarloSoBalJr It would definitely be a good spot to build up. But I do think it's important to make sure the housing isn't segregated (in any way), so I'd hope they'd also redevelop some empty or essentially useless lots within the city core, too. At least the RFK site isn't too far from a Metro stop, so that's a check in its favor, for sure. It's too bad the FBI building wasn't demolished. It's an eyesore & would have been a great spot for a mixed use, mixed income building/neighborhood block.
@@PhD_JD_MD_PurebreadOwner Oh, yeah. I pass through East Falls Church, West Falls Church & Vienna all the time. All three use tons of space for parking, but would be so much better with mixed use, mixed income development. Vienna has added a bunch of housing in recent years, but only housing & I don't think any of it is mixed income. I think it's all high-end. I've heard one of the Falls Church stops is supposed to be getting something. Who knows when. At least Dunn Loring has built up well, even though again, I think it's mostly high end & the whole Dunn Loring area is surrounded by offensively huge strodes that make it less than pleasant as a pedestrian if you want to get to the also nice, but too car-heavy Mosaic District.
too many people that hold office have no interest in fixing the housing shortage because they are either in the pockets of big hedge funds like black rock that are buying up all the houses they can or they directly own and buy properties themselves to rent. Consequently not solving anything is in their best interest... so yeah I dont see any solution anytime soon !
Walkable public housing with actual stores,libraries and not just liquor stores 🤯
In NYC, there are 40k apartments sitting empty because they are unlivable, and yet because they sit under rent restrictions, there's no financial incentive for the landlords to renovate, or investors to purchase and rehabilitate. In this case, I believe the public sector is failing the public. If you release those 40k apartments to the private sector to rent at market rate, that's 40000 apartments that can drive the price of rent down. You could even allow a one-time market rate adjustment followed by rent stabilization (which NYC loves to do but does not manage effectively), but that's still 40 thousand household opportunities that would effectively cool the demand and drive prices down, even if every single apartment was redone to the t's. the NYCHA is the biggest landlord in the city and it is consistently rated as the worst. in most big cities, the government just does not know how to handle being a landlord, governments and bureaucracy move way too slow for something such as the housing market.
It's so interesting how all the problems of the last 100 years of city planning compound one another. The housing crisis is exacerbated by poor city planning and design (that is, privileging suburbs and car development over compact city spaces that folks can live in). Poor city planning is exacerbated by elite capture and NIMBYism, which itself is a byproduct of suburbanization and the way that homeownership is intimately tied to wealth building. All of it is a function of how bad capitalism is at addressing concrete needs. The solution to the housing crisis isn't just Soviet style public housing, it's fixing everything. Hell, democratic political reform is necessary to make any of this happen.
Agree, except where you characterize this as "capitalism". It's not "capitalism", it's "feudalism", and the solution is capitalism, not socialism.
Brilliantly summed up!
I disagree that capitalism is to blame. Property developers would be happy to build housing, but there are so many regulations and hoops to jump through to actually do it. Therefore they either don't build or only build where there are less regulations. Capitalism works, but only when the government gets out of the way.
@@cambenson4402 everyone who says this generally has no clue what socialism actually is. the problem is capitalism and you’re mistaken if you think capitalism won’t find a way to end up like this again. no the solution isn’t government ownership, its public ownership i.e co-ops.
you are definitely right that the problem is the regulation, but lets not forget who lobbied and continues to lobby for that regulation in the first place.
@@cambenson4402 however, it is also capitalism that fuels people to artificially jack up their property values by massively decreasing and blocking new housing developments, making demand much more higher than existing supply.
How about starting with relaxing zoning? More often than not developers want to build but can't.
The next step would be to implement Georgism (taxation of land instead of real estate) to incentivize using land instead of holding on to it.
Blocks and blocks of purely residential public housing just creates concentrated poverty and deserted wastelands with no commercial aspect and often sketchy streets at off-peak foot traffic times of day; instead, why not build mixed use buildings with light commercial at the base, and mixed residential with some low and some middle income targets?
This would create some additional jobs to the residents, keep the streets feeling like a community rather than a wasteland, would diversify the neighbourhood crowd and feel to something more natural, and importantly for government funded housing, the commercial at street level would partially fund the building's upkeep.
You're basically describing how Singaporean public housing works.
I don't think that LOW income towers work, I think that they will always fail.
You are concentrating way too many low income residents in one location and you also disconnect the residents from the neighborhood. Upzoning areas is much better without any of the massive downsides of towers, you still increase the amount of housing available, but instead of concentrating all the low income residents in one location you spread them out which reduces the negative impact that they can have. (For example not having enough money to fix their houses so their houses slowly deteriorate.)
"Towers of segregation"
This. Exactly this.
Might not work in most countries but it seems to work in Hong Kong. Maybe Singapore unless Singapore builds mixed units.
@@theuglykwan You have to look at the details though, if the towers you are talking about in Singapore are the ones that @CityBeautful is talking about, notice how the government SELLS those houses.
So while the prices may still be low and affordable, it still requires the person getting that house to be able to make enough money to buy the house. The fact is that most of the people that would be living in this towers in the US would NOT be able to afford to buy the house.
Signapore and Honk Kong also tend to be quite well off places, so while there might be "low income" people in those places, compared to the low income people in the US the SIgnapore and HK people have a lot more money.
It's exactly because it's the house, where people are mostly left to fend for themselves that it wouldn't. It might work in some places in Europe because there is a lot more support and social safety net, but those things don't really exist in the US. Also in Europe you tend to pay more in taxes, so the government would have more money to make something like this work. (I don't know the taxes in SG and HK, but I imagine it's also higher compared to the US.).
But even if it was economically viable, it might not be a good idea. Americans are already quite isolated from eachother to begin with, with everyone living in their own "private island homes" and then while outside being in their 2 ton metal boxes. There is very little social interactions between people. I think these towers would only make that worse.
These towers also isolate the people living in them. People that have the options will not want to live near these towers, so the people living in them will only be able to see and interact with other people that are in the same rough situation as them, whereas if you upzone an area those people that wouldn't want to live next to these people would need to go much further away, which they might not see as being worth it. They might be more willing to live next to these "poor" people when they are living in upzone houses because instead of being right next to 300 of them, they would only be living next to 30 of them.
Low income doesn't have to mean no consumption or people living in poverty. For example students are by definition low income, but I would like to see dorm style units targetted toward this segment of the population. Providing low cost units would move a great deal of people out of family or other market rentals and increase availability/lower cost. You can also include first floor shops and such given high consumption rates which keeps the area vibrant woth eyes on the street for safety.
I think low income towers in general can work as well, but you certainly have to provide transit and green space so that people are able to leave thier box.
Another thing that can help is Social Housing. Vienna apparently has it, where the gov't rents the units to both low and middle income tenants, both paying different rents. The idea is interesting as it means the medium income renters are subsizing the lower income ones. And since you have middle income ppl living there, there is no "concentration of poverty" problem. The lower income ppl can piggy back off of the political power the middle income ppl have to make sure the area is kept invested.
Would definitely recommend this video about housing in Vienna.
ruclips.net/video/AdBEqH8hGjQ/видео.html
Vienna has one of the best social housing policies in my opinion and i think the U.S. government could replicate it fairly easily.
1. Social buildings are interspersed instead of concentrated in one location.
2. The buildings look normal instead of like ugly towers so they don't stand out.
3. Everyone can apply for social housing, this removes the stigma of being a "poor people house" because even middle-class families, students, elderly etc. can get to live there.
4. Social housing must be rented for a regulated lowest possible price.
5. In case the government makes profits from renting social housing it is required to use that money to build more social housing, which not only saves tax money because the social housing can pay for itself over time, but also makes sure new social housing is build constantly.
6. The city of Vienna owns around ~25% of all housing in the city, this keeps private developers in check because they can't buy up all the housing and artificially increase prices.
I probably forgot a few things but Vienna shows social housing can be incredibly successful if done right.
Because it is too means tested… My idea is that even executives could apply for public housing as long as they don’t have any other places to live. It could be smaller but that’s it.
I agree. Countries should simply see it as part of their job to provide housing for anyone who needs it. It's much cheaper to provide than to treat the social problems that arise from a failed housing market.
1. Let the free market do as much as it can. Eliminate minimum parking requirements, restrictive zoning, height restrictions, red tape, etc etc.
2. Remove all policies that favor and subsidize house ownership over condo ownership. Housing is housing.
3. Universal housing allowance in the form of tax credits. Basically, a subsidy for the low income people and a tax cut to everybody else. Potentially additional assistance to a few.
4. Public housing if supply is still too low. Public housing in the model of Vienna and Singapore. Mixed income, meeting diverse needs, well maintained.
Ironic that in a supposedly liberal free market economy like the USA and Canada, residential zoning and housing laws can be so draconian.
5. Abolish HOAs.
@@dekaredfire Blame environmentalists and NIMBY’s. A corporation can “bribe” the government to allow a mid rise to be built. But they can’t bribe the voters.
cities could just develop their land themselves with midrise buildings with loads of apartments and some retail space for rent. intentionally set the rates a bit below market rate, keeping people from falling through the crack in the first place while expanding supply enough to stabilize the private market back to something almost resembling sanity. even keep the rents which would be more income than just the taxes on that land in private hands
That's exactly what they did w/ Pruitt Igoe and the other failed housing projects. They didn't have the effect of keeping people from falling through the cracks, quite the opposite, because they basically tied their occupants to failing local economies and high crime areas.
@@rwatertree I'm advocating for something more comprehensive than building a few towers entirely disconnected from the rest of the city. much more akin to housing systems like in Vienna
This system has to be combined with social security safety net systems in general, including health insurance etc. Public housing does not necessarily mean "dirt poor", at least here in Europe it does not. Thousands of families live in city-owned apartments which are very much "middle class", or at least both have jobs and some social benefits to it, and rent is regulated. The ONLY situation when a ghetto like situation occurs in my country is when PRIVATE owners of basically boarding houses offer their studios to families of four and cash on subsidies from the city (i.e. they have certain rent and no debtors).
It's the same mentality towards public transit as well in both the USA and my country; taking buses is seen to be done only by poor people while owning a car is a sign of financial stability
In Europe there are many good examples for public housing. For example Vienna has a lot of public housing mixed into the city. Other cities in Europe are similar and at the moment we are building a lot of public housing because the demand is so high and prices in the cities are skyrocketing.
in Oakland, CA there's a bunch of 4 story 'low income' housing projects that had to be built practically incognito else they would "accidentally burn down"
To add some background information for the clip at 3:07. That’s in Oklahoma City and was caused by a truck driver who ignored the height restriction and drove right through the bridge. The city, itself, acted quickly and got the bridge repaired fast.
Public housing isn't necessary if we just get rid of zoning laws
Get rid of single family zoning too
Yes. That kind of policy is unrealistic in a high population area.
A problem not mentioned about federal vouchers (section 8) from the landlord's perspective is the headache that comes with it. I've had personal experience working for property managers that participate in section 8 and their units are routinely neglected, destroyed, and abandoned without notice by the tenant. They end up losing money from the loss of rent and the cost of rehab. It only takes a few bad experiences like this to scare landlords away from the voucher program as a whole.
that’s different from what I’ve heard and seen, I’ve heard and have known of people who take care of their apartments Cuz apparently the hoops you have to go through to get the voucher in the first place, it’s not worth losing just messing up at one place, so they try to keep their place in order so that they can keep their voucher for the next apartment, Because apparently once you lose it, it’s not something you can easily get back, there’s a whole waiting list and you have to go through the whole process again, so it makes no sense that people would just go messing up their apartment so frivolously after they work so hard to get the voucher in the first place. maybe the property managers you worked for were just so shitty that this is what behavior they induced in their renters
Thank you a lot for another informative and useful video about urban planning.
Please make a video about infill projects too.
Here in France we have 4.5 million social houses or apartments with 10 million people living in it. Plus, it is admitted that way more is needed and there are public policies being forcing cities to build more of them.
Why do they have to be "social" housing.
@@GUITARTIME2024 Sorry, my mistake. It's the concept of public housing, but the french word for it translates to "logement social" which literally would be "social houses".
The public part of our healthcare system for example is called "social security"
One time i changed a flat tire on my car... but i didnt put the lug nuts on tight enough and they all came off.
Therefore changing flat tires is a failed policy that is always doomed to fail. I just drive around on flats all the time now.
I am very intelligent and forward thinking.
Projects like Cabrini-Green and Pruitt-Igoe got lots of headlines but were NOT representative of public housing as a whole. I have known friends who lived in public housing projects in Seattle which ARE NOT high-rise slums. When I lived in Oakland, some of the BEST housing in West Oakland (obviously the best-maintained) was public housing.
Tower-blocks are great for when the conditions of housing have deteriorated to destitution and an area has declined to slum-like conditions. Giving residents a necessary upgrade from a structurally-unstable shanty-town setting to a complete package of basic necessities, albeit in a crude concrete casing? I would take that in a heartbeat.
@Shane Keena wow, that’s the best you got, well at least they’re not in a shanty town. Now they will share a run down building with some people of a bad element.
@@coreyjames8338 Hey, sometimes you have to embrace that side of things though. Sometimes you have to work with that course of action, not against it. Graft in commercial space, dovetailing a decent mixed-use element while still respecting the great innovations the modernists have made. Not every neighborhood needs to be super charming and "human-scale" when us humans have made literally every building in the known universe, even modernist ones. Every building we know about is considered human-scale.
There is a LOT going on in Turkey that's wrong at the moment, but when I visited years ago I was impressed with their public housing. At the time the government was building high rises and you could apply to buy a condo in them. You'd get a special 30 year lease at 0% interest (this is now pegged to inflation) and once you paid it off the condo was yours. I'd love to see something like that available here, like a special FHA loan where you don't need a down payment to buy in a mid-rise condo building, and where the HOA could be regulated but ultimately controlled by the homeowners. You could even have a mix of premium and affordable units so there's less cost to the taxpayer!
Ah, dreams.
Helping people stay poor is what we are #1 at in the World!
The US is the wealthiest & most powerful nation in the world though.
Although use has issues (hard to get a mortgage, the program is optional, recent shortgages/increases in the market), Section 8 has something called the homeownership program. It is a really great program for people with Section 8 Rental
You can't just "allocate" more dollars into something that produces lesser returns.
It's wild that US public housing is so drastically different than even public housing up here in Canada. You hear about some individual buildings with bad reputations, but in general public housing's reputation isn't that bad, not nearly as bad as SRO NOAH units on the private sector for example.
Land Value Tax only (Georgism) sounds like it would also work. It steers the market towards using land to its best economic value.
As someone moving from a 1000 a month shack to a slightly bigger 1600 a month apartment with AC... I just want to be able to afford to live. We only qualified for the new apartment because my roommate has 3 official jobs and I have great references and we applied RIGHT BEFORE my credit score tanked because I had to spend all my money on deposits and fees missed some credit card payments... (We literally couldn't stay in our previous place any more. The wiring was poorly done and have the place didn't have power at all and we couldn't cook or turn on certain lights without shorting out the place. All other places in our city, Houston, were even more expensive and required even higher income (despite the fact that me and my roommate make the AVERAGE for our city) for 2 beds and 1 bath not even near downtown, like we'd want to live near it anyway)...
Concentration of poverty is a serious issue with this concept and that needs to be addressed. creating mixed housing mandates surrounding the building of new large scale developments forces real-estate developers (who almost always get state money and tax exemptions to develop) to take care of some of the problem, and building codes could enforce that low/No income apartments have to be intermixed with units and cant be more than 10% of all units in the building. More over, creating housing priority rules for the affordable units that always put families with children, elderly and disabled first in line (or only in line) would help prevent the social problems from making their way into housing units. That being said, i would agree that perhaps many Americans still have a bad taste for the HUD housing around their cities and towns, and it may not be as deserving as it once was....but not for great reasons either. Since the disparagement of poor communities of color, large amounts of unmarried men have ended up in legal troubles. this puts them in jail and when they get out, they are unable to qualify for public housing even if they have kids and their significant other wants to take them back in. The long term effect means that, HUD units are primarily occupied by families with children (mostly women led families), the disabled, and the elderly. As a result, current HUD communities are still concentrated and low quality of living, but they tend not to be the center of community issues. The low income residential areas are where things get rough and dangerous, maintenance goes down and abandoned Houses and other buildings create decomposing communities. These are the rough neighborhoods that would make anyone unaccustomed to the deterioration and chaos, feel very uncomfortable if they found themselves lost in the area. If your city has a Crime map, you can almost always locate exactly where these run down residential areas are and its usually dead smack central neighborhood between two main roads with lateral streets connecting and away from the public housing that sits adjacent along the edge of the same neighborhood. This has a potential upside. Increment development minded people can help make public housing better and use those areas as platforms for urban renewal since they have lower crime. I've seen examples in my own neighborhood, and the end result is that a mixed income neighborhood forms as nicer community amenities make the low priced residential homes appealing to the young and hip. over time, the increasing value of homes makes large developers interested and the open land from torn down homes leaves space for occasional mid to high income lofts. the final product is a community with high/mid/low housing all in close proximity and a safer more equitable and diverse community forms.
Germany has interesting models too. The gov't leaves construction and renting out to private investors. Building permits on high-value land (city; very very seldomly suburbs) are only given out if x% of the units to be erected are specifically only offered to public housing use. x=30 is targeted. It leads to a deconcentration of poverty that 1970s highrises have a bad reputation for. If the building owner cuts maintenance short, even the wealthier residents may be affected - and they would figuratively revolt if that were to happen. The other element is that buildings are generally less than 6 stories *because* of the bad reputation of the high-rises.
What if we build the high rise building with a mixed income population, 30% in the lowest segment, 40% for middle class, and 30% the upper floors luxurious apartments?
Rich people wouldn't voluntarily live in the same building as poor people.
@@nathanashley623 Oh well.... More for the rest of us.
IMHO the Singapore model is a better choice. Anyone can purchase HDB housing, and it costs the same for everyone. Low-income households are able to receive assistance if they can't afford the price. Importantly, a building is not stratified by income. Low-income residents can wind up living right next to higher-income residents. (It's possible the very top floor or floors do command a price premium...but if so, it's a relatively modest one.)
The wealthiest people generally don't live in public housing. But with over 80% of housing being public, most people do, and a wide range of economic classes are represented in public housing.
So here a re a few cents. Public housing investment and management needs to take place on a local level like municipal. Federal management never works in these cases, since these entities are too remote to know local demand and needs. They can however contribute to financing.
Selling off units to people that are already considered poor might only contribute to their own debt spiral, so rent controlled leasing would work much better.
Combining this with redeveloping city centers to be more liveable might also be a good idea, since the will probably be less resistance by residential NIMBYs from the suburbs.
In Hong Kong, 30% of housing are public housing, but very unfortunately we still don't have enough of those (waiting time for that is ~5 years in average and more extreme case is that you need to wait 10+ years). Really the poorest people are eligible, however there are other program to fill the gap between public housing and private market, say selling the flats by government at discounted rates, similar to those in Singapore's HDB flat
Yeah no shit. Last time when the government wanted to build more public housing the rich and the middle class were so against it, as increase in housing supply led to the devaluation of their properties. The economy is addicted to real estate speculation
@Zaydan Naufal Not sure what programs you are talking about? In HK public housing are still being built at a pretty massive scale, while the supply is large, the demand for that is even larger.
@Zaydan Naufal There are couple things happened in the late 90s and early 2000s. The government has launched the 85000 housing unit scheme between 1998-2001, which aims to built at least 85000 flats per year. As the supply goes up to the point tha that exceed the demand by a lot, and also after the asia finanical crisis and SARS outbreak, the housing prices has decreased more than 50% during 1997 and 2003 (after SARS outbreak). Afterwards, the government sort of "stablise" the housing prices in the private sector and stopped all construction and selling of HOS flat( subsidised flats) in 2003, as to reduce the supply of housing. Those flats are either being reallocated as public renting houses or kept emptied until 2010s to be sold.
Public housing during those period did not stopped, but only renting estates are being constructed.
I can see a lot of NIMBYs in the comment section. What you guys don't understand is most of the world is not filled with single family homes and cars and highways. Almost every major city has good PUBLIC TRANSPORT (so poor people can travel from far where the housing/renting cost is low) and mixed use HOUSING. (Not mixed with factories as mentioned in some stupid comments rather high rise, mid rise and individual houses). The only thing preventing US from doing these are THE EGO that america should look like everyone having huge houses and cars while these can be feasible in extremely low population density and higher incomes on average, its absolutely not a feasible choice when you have literally the third largest population in the world. As long as everyone is brainwashed by the riches that suburban sprawl is the only way to live, your people and environment won't survive the abusive land use of the sprawl and highways... P.S. you don't even need bike lanes when you got really good public transport, food for thought!
As a person, who lived majority of his life in country, where this type of buildings dominates others, I’ll tell you this: it’s great when there are like 5 floors in this kind of buildings. People know each other, neighbors care about what’s going on. It becomes like second family. With smaller buildings nearby area looks like garden, people grow flowers, trees, bushes. Cats of residents walking around, children playing, old people walking around, man drinking something like in “King of the hill” show.
If there are more floors (12+) it becomes terrible ghetto like place, where no one knows each other, no one cares. All those traffic jams in elevators and near the house too.
So... Europe?
The point is for higherise building to work very well you have to spend a lot of money to make it work good.
Additional elevators, in unit laundry or additional floor for utilities.
Wien has some pretty well maintained high rise buildings that are really good affordable housing.
@@Coolsomeone234 Nah
@@Coolsomeone234 kinda in-between - Russia. We still have lots of those great 5 floor buildings , built in 50s - 80s Soviet Union
Public housing is a good idea if the municipal government wants all the townspeople to live in a building like it is in Whittier, AK. And it's only if real estate possession is an embargo.
Here in São Paulo we have a PPP, (Public Private Partnership), wich is an ideia were a conpany cunstruct the house and, because of that, has the right to administrat the the stores in the ground floor.
The issue in nyc is every multi family development has to have a certain number of “affordable units”. These “affordable units” still cost like $2,500 for a one bedroom. Too many loopholes in the affordable housing scheme
Tangentially related: here in CA we made a rule that developers have to build a percentage of affordable housing OR pay into a fund.
The result has been that everyone decides to pay into the fund. So now we have this massive fund that we can use to build affordable housing. Sounds great right? EXCEPT all the NIMBYs come out every time the state tries to build so projects keep failing to come to fruition…
This is part of why I’ve come to the conclusion that the housing issues in America won’t be truly solved until we figure out a way to limit the power of NIMBY’s.
IMO only solution is to build new dense urban centers on empty, compact plots of land.
They should limit how much can be spend into the fund.
That percentage rule works pretty well in Hamburg but now they had to increase state aid for it because of the high cost but that way the city has still controll about a lot of affordable housing.
Compared to Stuttgart Munich or Frankfurt it is pretty affordable.
Put them in downtown parking lots. The NIMBY could have a parking structure and everyone else would have a nice mixed use mall that helps to densify downtown.
The issue is that the regulation is aimed at developers; in France there is a similar system, except that it's cities that must put money into a fund if they don't have 25% social housing. This means there is a massive market for developers that built mostly affordable housing since a good portion of desirable land is reserved for it.
George was right. A land value tax could free up a lot more land for development if it becomes unprofitable to hold onto it without use.
I feel like public housing (both building new and managing what we have) is just another thing that could be funded if only the rich paid their fair share of taxes.
As for getting the land for that housing, it's become clear that a lot of office type work can be done from home, so there don't need to be office complexes for that, and such buildings could be repurposed for housing.
When it comes to NIMBYs, they don't want this housing near them not only because they just simply don't want it there, but they don't want to be reminded of the systemic issues that lead to the necessity of public housing and prefer to have those issues be out of sight and therefore out of mind.
No my friend, if said work can be done from home, then there is no ducking need for that person to be living in this specific city altogether. He will be just fine living say an hour drive away in some small town or in the middle of the woods as well, where property is much cheaper.
You basically eliminate two land uses simultaneously: remote workers (obviously not in their entirety, but still in easily noticeable numbers) move out, and demand on office real estate gets reduced considerably, given that they only need a fraction of the workforce on deck every business day.
@@egorkhristov2467 living in a walkable city is still practical even if you don’t work there because you still have amenities within easy reach
@@lifebloodcore2106 not everyone wants to live in the CITY. that’s the point. Especially if your perfectly walkable city happens to be NYC with skyrocketing crime rate, or SanFrancisco with poop on the streets. Also some people would prefer an actual HOUSE they own to an apartment they most likely rent.
My point is - people are different, not everybody thinks, acts and want the same things you do.
If only more people could see through the grand delusion they’ve created (often semi-unconsciously) in their own heads, that all or even wast portion of people are like them (they are not) in their beliefs, priorities and desires, this country would have been way better off.
Public housing didn’t fail as a policy it fell front to bad urban planning look at the ones in St. Louis beautiful buildings were demolished for ugly public housing in the 50s and 60s in my opinion they should be outside the city with railways connecting them into the core downtown but times are different nowadays there’s nothing in downtown except parking lots skyscrapers and coffee shops
This is extra painful as a Canadian, and more specifically as a resident of Vancouver Island. We have no supply…it’s so squeezed that housing is doubling in cost every two years. It can’t keep going like this. All the home owners here think they are investment geniuses just for being born sooner and buying homes. They expect it to appreciate and would rage if it did not. Yet in Calgary where I was born, housing values are largely flat over the last ten years because housing is just shelter, not your main investment vehicle/commodity.
Love these videos, would love to also learn about rural areas, can we have some Rural America side episodes. I want to know about unincorporated towns, how these places function.
Renters are naturally negligent. Even in the luxury housing market, there are plenty of renters who neglect basic maintenance like changing a filter out of an AC unit.
I just want to say, I appreciate your content and really love watching your videos. Most channels like yours are into fearmongering and negative based. You are upbeat, happy, and bring out the flaws in a positive way. Thank you for that.
Yes, it’s a pleasure to watch this channel. I learn so much and always look forward to new content.✌️🇦🇺🏳️🌈
If they want to build public housing, make sure it has:
- Local shops, maybe 1st floor
- Transportation connection
- public services like education, fire, etc.
- parks, greens and spaces
those things already exist in urban areas, the only thing missing is the affordable housing. the downtown cores have all those amenities
@@Lildizzle420 in most of the US, the ground floor or first floor is not allowed to have shops because of zoning laws. personally I like to see it to be a mix because I would like to live somewhere where I could walk to get small things at a grocery rather than always drive.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 In most of our cities, office or residential above retail is perfectly legal. In New Urban communities, it is the default. In typical postwar suburbs, not so much.
The government should be a "supplier of last resort" to plan, build, and sell or lease housing at cost to the general public if a shortage exists.
Public housing or no public housing. Tower blocks and condominiums are designed like hotels, they are poorly designed for families and discourages meeting neighbors and building that community. Compared to Asian condos, North American condos makes you hate condos.
Agreed, Public housing is fine, but NOT tower blocks, not when they are aimed at lower income residents, that's just asking for trouble which WILL come. 4-6 floors at most when it comes to public housing for lower income residents in my opinion.
@@Arjay404 Tower-blocks are great for when the conditions of housing have deteriorated to destitution and an area has declined to slum-like conditions. Giving residents a necessary upgrade from a structurally-unstable shanty-town setting to a complete package of basic necessities, albeit in a crude concrete casing? I would take that in a heartbeat.
Interesting video. I lived in an old "affordable housing" apartment in Arlington, VA for 5 years. I had to check to make sure that this wasn't the same as public housing, and it isn't. That apartment had its share of recurring mold and cockroach issues, and other problems like annually faulty heaters / a/c, but at least it was convenient to the metro. But for the purposes of this comment, the interesting thing is that the apartment complex (a cluster of many around 4-story buildings) had some open space. Luxury condos were popping up everywhere at the time in the DC area (mid-2000s). Apparently some luxury company approached the affordable housing company and struck a deal to be able to build on the open space. Two identical high-rises (about 20 stories) were built next to each other in the open space. One was for luxury condos, and the other was for new affordable housing. So as an existing resident I had first dibs for the waiting list and moved in as soon as it opened. It was beautiful; the quality was as good as any new middle- to upper-middle-class apartment of the time. There weren't any luxury or brand-name appliances or what not, but it was 10 times better than the original building. The cockroaches ended up moving in to the shared laundry rooms after less than a year, but oh well... I loved living there for almost 2 years before I left town. Shiniest and nicest place I've ever lived in.
The idea that a deal like this can be made should be spread all over the country. Luxury building are popping up everywhere. Why can't there be more 1+1 buildings like in Arlington? That would satisfy so many people's needs and keep low-income residents in the cities.
Because there's very limited appetite from the wealthy people who move into luxury apartments to reside next to people living in "affordable housing".
There is nothing wrong with the public housing structure. The problem is the people’s behavior living in them.
My country (Australia) has lots of 50yrs plus semi retired and retired communities, which deliberately sells their housing units for below market value, if they were to sell in any area but a retirement village. My thought is that this concept could be used for first home buyers, to give people a foot in the door of the property market and allow communities of young families to develop. They don't need to be the two or three bedroom free standing homes that many retirement villages are. They can even be apartment buildings with parks, shops, public transport and schools located as close to them as possible.
I think a big part of the reason why public housing is so unpopular is that the public housing that was built from the 50s to the 70s were for the most hideous eyesores. Had the governments of that time built public housing that was aesthetically pleasing and human-scaled (townhouses up to five story apartment buildings), public housing would probably have a better reputation in the U.S. and would thus be more commonplace.
Tower-blocks are great for when the conditions of housing have deteriorated to destitution and an area has declined to slum-like conditions. Giving residents a necessary upgrade from a structurally-unstable shanty-town setting to a complete package of basic necessities, albeit in a crude concrete casing? I would take that in a heartbeat.
As someone who lives in NYC's public housing, I believe we need new affordable housing but in a way its livable and not in dire need of repairs such as the ones here, I am quite surprised to hear you've lived in public housing too, I wish i can know more about your experience living as a public housing resident.
"government shouldn't be in the business of X" is a fancy way of saying "X is not a right". This applies to food, education, housing, health care, etc.
The government pumps over a hundred billion annually into rent payments. It’s already in the business of housing.
I think a great follow up to this video would be a video on mixed-income social housing, perhaps international applications and implementation at the state level.
I think we need to be far more flexible in what we provide as public housing. For example, I would like to see publicly opperated dorms with shared kitchens (and potentially washrooms) to provide very low cost rooms offered at a few hundred dollars a month. These would disproportionately be used by students, but it would open up current rentals they occupy. Fannie Mae directly fund construction, and provide loans for coops.
Although, tbh, you could solve the majority of the issue with upzoning and shifting taxes off of building value and on to land value to push time property costs and increase return on capital.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. People need a roof over their heads for as cheap as possible ASAP
@@LucasDimoveo The only grey area I get squeemish with on that point is should Walmart be allowed to build small apartments for workers on site. I want to say yes but then I remember every book I've ever read
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 i think if you define a legal minimum they have to meet for quality of life reasons then it should be possible to not have a distopia end result.
Basically mandate that for corporate on site housing to be used as permanent residences for workers that a certain minimum of amenities and maintenance be included. (Obviously this is only as good as the standards and enforcement of them so its not a guarantee of avoiding a distopian outcome)
@@jasonreed7522 Even if the housing is nice though, do I want part of the population living and working in a box store with limited ability to go anywhere else? Plus it gives your employer direct control over your housing which is problematic.
Its hard to say I'd rather homeless people then a 100% serf society, but I think I'll say it.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 very fair arguments, but for arguments sake living on the same campus you work at will save you alot of expenses owning a car. The problem being 99% of Walmarts are built on stroads so unless you owned a car you wouldn't have an easy time going anywhere other than box stores. (Making the only reason to stay in such a unit the rent, which hopefully is damn near free compared to any other apartments you could rent in the city)
I definitely agree with you on the dangers of building "serf housing" everywhere, its just a concept that has had economic sense throughout history. (Like servents living in a castle, not that we want to return to such a society)
I work in building maintenance for a couple of public housing units, and it's a really good tool for people who need help. It takes the stress off of them when it comes to shelter, and can help them get their lives together. We are also under funded, so a lot of stuff sometimes cant be fixed or fixed right
NIMBYism may be the single biggest root problem in the US.
It's just thinly-veiled classism, and occasionally racism.
@@crash.override Is it, though? There's a beautiful tract on the edge of my neighborhood that would make a lovely park, but the city wants to build an 80% subsidized housing complex on the site, less than a hundred yards from the neighborhood elementary school and on top of one of the most congested intersections in this part of the city. They already decommissioned the water tower that serves that area and there's no room for additional power lines. There are no major employers within 5 miles and every intersection within 3 miles already has a full crew of meth-addled beggars. The people who live on the street behind the tract JUST had their property taxes go up by 94% (in ONE year) and, if this palace of concentrated poverty is built, will see their property values dwindle to tenement levels while their taxes remain sky-high. You are clearly too young to understand basic economics and have only reactionary buzzwords upon which to fall back.
i love that you have a traintrackr in the background
I do think zoning is another issue, if an area is restricted to certain type of housing which can often be detached housing, this causes issues with low density reducing space for housing and unaffordable housing.
The thing is the public housing issue is connected to it because obviously if the government decides to build housing there then it has de facto zoned it for whatever type of housing it's building. The government is not just allowing a certain type of housing to be built but paying for it as well.
Most rental housing is public, or as we call it, social rentals. In my hometown Groningen, the Netherlands, every new housing project has to build a minimum of social rentals to make sure neighborhoods are socially mixed.
Throughout the video I had trouble with volume changes, could you normalise volume? Other than that, everything is great.
All of Stuvy town in NYC was a housing project... so they don't all get demolished, some get converted through adaptive transformation re-use, which is much more cost-efficient, time efficient, and better for the environment and the neighborhood than the solutions you have suggested.
F nimbys. Rezone single family housing. The market will solve the rest
Yes , but they should build 36 -40 first hi units
Can They at least look nice... please
If they get actual funding, then yeah
as long as nice isint modern
The government taking land is never going to work but I would love to see the vacant buildings and lots that stay empty for years and years used for something. Maybe they could be "encouraged" to lease the land to the city to develop some Singapore style leasehold condos and rental units. At least the new units would be located in the heart of existing neighborhoods instead of planted out near the highway somewhere.
Mark my word he will be at a million subscribers by the end of the year.
I'm an American in a large urban city in India. My area has two affordable housing initiatives from the government (I think the state government.)
One is the "affordable housing scheme" which has to sell flats in small high rise apartments at a flat rate per sq ft set up by the government. These are sold by 'lottery' (basically just qualified buyers apply and then they randomly select from them.) The builders usually build them as 1, 2 or 3 bedroom flats but they are made as efficiently as possible so often are 400-800 sq ft. There are also some units in the development which the builder gets to sell, at the same rate, outside of the lottery for pure profit, hence incentivising them to build and also allowing buyers who missed the lottery to get in. Generally these societies (Indian way of saying apartment complex or really in this case, condo complex) have moderate amenities like playgrounds and parks. Many different builders are granted permits to build these affordable housing schemes every year, so they often compete with each other through who can provide better amenities. The downside is generally the lottery happens 3-5 years before the complex is actually finished being built and there have been scandals where builders ran off with the money or went bankrupt. But mostly, it works.
Second is EWS housing. Every society, be they high rise or low rise, who is being built has to set aside a certain percentage of flats to be for the "Economically Weaker Sector". Basically for those poor enough to qualify but who also have enough money to pay. These flats aren't as nice (often are just 200-300 sq ft) but are inexpensive and since they are being built in more high end societies they often come with nice amenities like access to swimming pools and fancy manicured parks etc. After being built, the buyers of these flats cannot be sell them to anyone who also doesn't qualify for EWS for 5 years. This does two things: makes sure that they're being used to house EWS residents for at least 5 years and also 5 years later allows affordable flats to enter the market that are sellable to anyone. Often people who make too much to get in on EWS initially but either can't afford an affordable housing scheme house or doesn't need more than a studio apartment can buy EWS flats. Also, this means anywhere anything is being built even if it's for the uber wealthy there is also going to be inexpensive homes built. The downside is often these homes are sort of segregated away from the rest of the society-- in the society I rent in they're across the street from all the rest of the flats for example-- and I hear from Indian friends that a lot of EWS flats are actually sold to people who don't qualify for EWS but just have fake paperwork because of corruption. Still, it's more than America does to help their poor become homeowners and make sure all neighborhoods have a mix of economic classes. I feel like growing areas in America could learn from this... But they won't. Lol.
And here's the numbers from a more reasonable country: 22% public housing, 21% rented, 7% Cooperatives and 49% owned. Welcome to Denmark.
This includes everything, normal houses, apartments, rooms, weird shit and so.
Also, Public Housing are usually non-profit associations, any profits are either saved up for renovations and improvements or outright used for improvements.
I'd love to hear some examples from that "weird shit" category!
Just get rid of regulations driving the price up.
that's exactly the point for NIMBYs. they do NOT want the prices to go down.
The "free market" has failed us on housing as it has failed us in every other sector. Every major U.S. city has a housing shortage and when altruistic developers deign to build, they always opt for luxury apartments, unless they are legally required to include a few affordable housing units. I've lived in countries with robust, liveable, thoughtfully-designed public housing and the same could happen in the U.S. if we rearranged our budgetary priorities.
In some places, low income simply means low income. Unfortunately, in America (and many other places), low income can mean all sorts of trouble. It's hard to argue with NIMBYs in those cases.
Also in America race and class often go hand in hand.