POVERTY IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG
POVERTY IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG
237 comments
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The world will never recover until poverty is seen not as a character flaw, but as a failure of society itself to provide for the most vulnerable.
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That's the ticket. The most hardworking people I've ever met are also some of the poorest.
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I hate how when there is any picture of Soviet blocks it's always shot in autumn or winter when it's overcast. I live in an ex Soviet country and when these bad boys are maintained they can outperform new apartments, be it in functionality, amenities or price.
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always shot in autumn or winter when it’s overcast.
To me this adds a lot to the charm. I'd love to live there (at least for some time)!
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I'd gladly live in one of those apartments in the first picture if it meant that everyone could have a home
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If everyone thought like this, everyone would have a home.
And 50 or so people would own all of the rest of the land and do nothing with it because we're too fucking stupid to realize that a system that wants us all to live in 50m² micro apartments is a load of shit, and strung together by a greedy few.
There is enough land for us all to live comfortably, but a fraction of a percent don't want anyone to use most of the land for anything useful so hey let's just give up and take almost-squalor because at least it not squalor!
Fuck both these pictures.
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"Land-usage" is such a narrow-minded way to think about the implicit wants and needs of society. You sound like you've never been to actual cities, or never got your head far enough out of your arse to actually experience one.
North American suburban sprawl already proves that "enough land for us all to live comfortably" is a terrible way to live sociable lives and drains the economy due to massive swathes of those lands being used for roads and the maintenance of said roads.
I implore you to take a trip to almost any European city, and see for yourself what actual "comfortable living" for most people looks like.
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What if we made the commie block apartments 140 m² each?
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bruh...
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You believe that housing is not a basic human right, yet you say to me, "bruh..."
Just gonna pre-emptively block your bootlicking ass
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The USSR didn't do much good but those apartment buildings are definitely good. I used to live in a soviet apartment building and the funny thing about that was that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything. They were thick as hell and fully concrete.
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Every wall was a wall and not a cardboard decoration of a wall
FTFY. Not all of them were load-bearing, mind you, they were just proper walls made of wall.
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I'd say those were made from at least 3 walls worth of wall.
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Appartments in panel buildings have load bearing walls inside.
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Okay, I just went from "eh, commie blocks are gross but better than tents" to "fuck all the other apartments, bring on the commie blocks". Buildings in the US are built so ridiculously cheaply that in a lot of lower-rent buildings you can hear everything.
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How soundproof were they? I’m in an apartment with shitty drywall and sometimes I hear my neighbors fart.
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As far as I knew I never even had neighbors or I at least never heard any.
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I'm living in a soviet-built tenement block, and the only time I've heard anything from a neighbour is when the guy living above me dropped a bowling ball.
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Not from Eastern Europe, but from India. Most buildings are made from bricks. Good enough to block most of the sound from adjacent apartment.
In fact, some builders started using drywalls and there has been a pushback because drywall is considered poor quality material by people here. Which it absolutely is when the country has 4 months of monsoon every year. Drywall doesn't play well with moisture, does it?
https://thelogicalindian.com/exclusive/krishnaraj-rao-lodha-builders/
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I find brutalism beautiful. Wish we could have more of it in my country but solid concrete, especially preformed, performs poorly under shear.
It's gotten so "brutalist" is almost synonymous with "earthquake-prone".
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that every wall was a load bearing wall since all of them could hold up everything.
It seems you lived in panel building. There are limitations to it like you should not add horisontal chases becaue it reduces load capacity or can't replan appartment because it will be destruction of load bearong wall. So wiring better be done in factory-made in-wall concrete tubes.
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This is kinda like saying we need more farms to solve hunger.
The cost of housing is very detached from supply. For rentals, companies bought up housing and just jacked up the price, because renters are a semi captive client base.
New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.
Even for home buyers, they’re facing a major up hill battle going against existing home owners who have access to the capital of their current homes, and even worse corporate home buyers.
This isn’t to say supply isn’t an issue and we can ignore it, but we need to stop housing from just being an investment vehicle. Otherwise we’re just going to get garbage housing at prices no one can afford.
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it's not detached from supply at all, single house zoning and mandatory minimum parking make for a whole lot of trouble in the US
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New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.
The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.
Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.
Largely agree with all your other points though.
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I get that argument and I think there’s some merit to it since like you said this whole thing is muddled. But the counter point is often those vacated units are in another town or city. So in the way overly simplified scenario, if 36 “programmers” move to the city, the vacated units through out the country don’t help the “bus drivers” who are tied to the area.
Again we largely agree, I just wanted to illustrate even the simple assumptions like building more is good isn’t always that straight forward in this fucked up system.
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The obvious and immediate flaw with the 36 people moving into luxury apartments is, that's not usually how luxury apartments work. Particularly in certain markets, it's more and more common for luxury housing to be temporary homes, vacation homes that are turned into investments the rest of the year, e.g. air BNB. So a lot of the time, you get 36 regular homes destroyed, for 12 luxury apartments that get bought up by either people or companies that either then rent them out or keep them empty most of the year, with no increase in available housing.
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Rich people don't really move into these luxury apartment. They buy it as an investment, use it as a holiday home, etc.
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I don't think: "ah, buildings again. I'd rather live in camps featuring trash scent."
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The bottom picture also has a high rise apartment building in the background.
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Except it's owned by rent oligopolist.
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I understand the point. But France has done this and ended up with giant ghettos filled with si much crime that no emergency services whatsoever go there anymore.
In the US, they built giant housing projects like this where poverty was concentrated and the same thing happened. Crime installed itself in those projects and these neighbourhoods became dangerous ghettos.
Picture 1 is not the solution you think you want.
The condo building where I live is not so big. And it was built with 25% dedicated to social housing where poor families and underpaid workers can live comfortably in an apartment unit as big as my condo unit, which I paid nearly $400k CAD, for the price of about $650 CAD per month. This allows them to integrate with everyone else and live with everyone else and near where all the jobs are.
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This is absolutely correct. Concentrating poverty is something that happens in most counties, but is very detrimental to society at large. Wikipedia has a decent article to get a toe in the water: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty
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they built giant housing projects like this where poverty was concentrated
Maybe this is because 30-story humant colony in the middle of nowhere without public transit will always be ghetto no matter who lives there.
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Don't worry, they've outlawed homelessness. Problem solved!
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Literally though. And there's a whole practice of hostile architecture that makes it harder and more uncomfortable to be homeless.
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Make it unconstitutional for a municipality to let anyone go unhoused? Based, love it.
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Capitalism has you thinking that these are our only options
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The other options are, sadly, hours away.
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I don't get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
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There's a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they're scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don't even realize that they're racing to the bottom. By today's standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let's build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let's build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let's ban airbnb, and let's severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we're gonna have to build some high rises, but let's not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.
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You're showing exactly what I said.
apartment building, essentially because they're scared of poor people
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don't know if you hold that idea, but you're repeating it
ugly skyscrapers
You've now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
individuals have less choice, less freedom
Now you say apartments are against freeeeeddooomm lol.
actively exploited
As if you can't own a condo.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
building housing at all costs
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
Yeah. Visceral reaction to apartments. Peace.
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never fails to amaze me how "progressive" types do a complete 180 as soon as someone mentions solving the homeless problem by giving them homes
edit: i rest my case
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I don't think "progressives" have any issue with housing the homeless. The issue is where.
Go to a conservative (or indeed any) neighbourhood and tell them you'll be building 200 apartments nearby to house rough sleepers, see how that goes down.
Most homeless are invisible to us anyway. They hold down jobs, they have gym memberships, they just sleep in their car, or on a mate's sofa every so often. Nobody would have a problem with them moving in nearby.
It's the aggressive beggars, addicts, and shitting in shop doorways (and these three are the same person) that nobody wants anywhere near them. These are who most people think of when they hear the word "homeless". Most of them need more treatment than just a roof. We don't have enough of that either.
I've no issue with my taxes helping all these people. I'm happy to pay tax to reduce the chances of me personally being robbed by somebody in desperate poverty.
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I think fears about the homeless robbing you are massively overblown. I've been panhandled hundreds of times, and the worst response I've ever gotten is a dirty look.
I also think that the people shitting on public, etc. are more likely to be mentally ill than addicted (although they could be both). The reason is that Drugs Are Really Expensive. Also, I'm not aware of any addiction that causes you to shit in public, but it's easy to find mental illnesses that would.
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The left leaning rich progressives are all hypocrites when it comes to investing, money, housing, tech, jobs, waste, emissions, and more.
Who knew the people who have the most to gain from capitalism would be so willing to also suck the dick of it for their own personal gain. Imagine that.
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Creating the projects by concentrating poverty into towers of terror is no better than having skid rows.
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you cant give a home to everybody smartass
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Yeah, but I didn't have to pay anything for those people to live in tents. I keep my money out of their lazy hands.
/s, deeply, if it isn't obv.
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/s
And for those unaware, the cost of homelessness does exist, and it is quite high. We pay for it through emergency services (police, doctors, ambulance, hospital beds), waste removal services, etc.
The problem needs fixed, and part of the solution is commie blocks unironically.
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You are forgetting the cost of building "asshole design" infrastructure, like spikes under bridges, instead of building affordable housing.
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Very much so. Legal system, downtown areas, medical care… all face expenses of one sort or other, and those get passed on to the consumer and taxpayer. But a lot of people that don’t have to deal with the homeless because they live in a poor and/or rural area, or are incredibly hostile to homeless, that it’s fine for them to push the indirect tax onto areas that don’t have that demographic.
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Pretty sure that’s just NIMBYs.
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Who is this society guy? He sounds stupid
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Oh good, more edgy agenda posts
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What's edgy about it?
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The high rises are have right angles. I'm guessing that's those are the edgy bits
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Making sure people have ample access to basic human rights such as shelter is pretty extreme
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Literally to whom does this apply? Get in touch with reality.
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I am always highly amused by uninformed opinions on the Internet.
Here is a news report from this week regarding Portuguese middle-class families that just started to live in tents due to high housing costs: https://sicnoticias.pt/pais/2023-09-18-Todos-os-dias-chega-mais-gente-crise-na-habitacao-empurra-familias-para-tendas-4917d440
Get in touch with reality.
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Many people in the USA
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What is this trying to say???
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Of course people would rather homeless people have housing instead of living in tent cities everywhere. But they also don’t have any desire to pay for it when it comes time to do something and of course make moral arguments against the homeless.
These are two different groups of people
The first, who are on board with state housing projects, are the common people who still have empathy for their fellow people
The second, who are totally on board with homelessness because the housing projects are "too expensive", belong to the political and economic elite
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It's also forgetting that a significant portion of homeless people are homeless by choice, or are homeless for reasons that just providing housing won't resolve.
People have this idea that all homeless people are just regular people who experienced hard times, but that's just a minority. Most homeless are mentally ill people who won't take their meds or drug addicts who aren't willing to quit.
It sucks, and they shouldn't have to live on the streets, but you can't force people to change.
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I don’t think it fails, but it does come from a specific cultural perspective.
Those are “ugly Soviet buildings” built by the government. That already communicates cost and the unwillingness to bear it in the US.
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It's trying to say that low income housing is the solution to homelessness.
It's wrong, but that's the point it's trying to make.
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No, not really. But it's easy to read that into it.
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I think it's a confused message. Not the best meme.
But the basic idea is that homelessness is caused by people preferring houses ("urban sprawl") rather than apartment complexes.
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It assumes you can recognize Soviet housing block, designed to quickly house as many people as possible. It has nothing to do with a preference for houses over apartments.
If you look through the rest of the photos in the source article, ask if living like they do is worse than homeless in a tent.
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This makes the most sense to me so far
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seems like it's trying to imply that homeless people are homeless because houses are too expensive.
as if the guys in the bottom pic could afford a department in the top picture, but have to live in a tent because housing is expensive.
I think what the meme does say is that OP is mentally 12.
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Not sure why or from where this quote comes from. In germany and poland we have many such apartment houses that are very affordable
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It comes from America, where capitalist simps preach the virtues of idiots who buy companies and act like it makes them paragons of humanity.
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Where living in such apartments would be hell because they'd expect them to be built out of sticks and cardboard, as it is common in the USA. Someone sneezes in the south end on the 2nd floor, the guy on the 12th floor north end goes bless you.
Buildings in Europe are built from proper building materials, concrete, steel, glass, and bricks. Not cardboard and sticks and paper. Hence living in them is actually much nicer than one used to US buildings would expect.
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The presence of picture 1 in no way prevents the presence of picture 2.
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Public/social housing (presumably what's being proposed here) sure as hell would beat tent cities. Who the hell wants to stay in a tent rather than an actual home? Housing co-ops work if you've already got some amount of money, too.
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I'm having trouble telling the difference between the two.
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As someone who lives in a former communist country, I can tell you that “commie blocks” most definitely don't fix homelessness.
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As someone who's from a former Communist country, the downfall of communism was met with a dramatic rise in homelessness.
But you probably shouldn't trust a random person on lemmy saying "as someone from Communist country", this info easily verifiable with a web search.
Here's the first link I get searching "homelessness after communism":
https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca29.1.03/277
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Aren’t these basically the same picture? Like the second photo has a literal apartment building on the right of the background
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Imagine thinking living in an apartment with heat, water, furniture, dishwasher, clothes washer, electricity, all the amenities, is the same as living in a tent. Exactly what the meme says: brainwashed society.
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What are you talking about dude? Those are homes with doors, locks, heat, and a bed. Compared to a tent?
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No. The only bigger problem I have with the first image is permanence; the situation in the second picture is easier to clean up.
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I really like russian appartement complexs, there is always green surrounding the buildings...I hate russia though
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I'm from eastern Europe and those green spaces are usually not very well managed. And they also end up looking kinda sad when you live there.
Rusty playgrounds, plants not managed and growing all over the place in a not very aesthetically pleasing way, completely destroyed or very quickly patched up walkways.
I do think it's still better than the American suburbs, but it could be so so much better if cities invested more into making these areas enjoyable to be in.
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I do think it's still better than the American suburbs, but it could be so so much better if cities invested more into making these areas enjoyable to be in.
Agreed. If anything is mismanaged it will be shitty, if something was mismanaged for 30 years and did not fall on itself, then it was built good.
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I hate russia though
You probably hate Putin instead.
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To be fair new social housing looks like this:
Not enough trees and first batch was mostly single-room(as in one bedroom, one kitchen, one toilet and one bathroom in appartment), but better than humant colony.
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The murals are a nice touch, let's see how the white paint looks in 50 years though.
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As in 50 years or 50 years without any maintanance and in complete neglect.
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Right, well even though San Diego might have state park beach front property, we shouldn't have a tent city filling it up. This quickly becomes unhygienic, and crime rises, among other issues.
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Honestly I'd take homeless any time of the year over the culture that is fostered in those Russian type block houses. It's far worse.
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Have you ever lived in one? I do, it's actually really nice people. In mine, there's basically 2 big groups: families with young children and the elderly.
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oh no you've been a victim of misinformation oh dear 🙄
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Is this really even a meme? Just seems like some random slice of depression.
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This more because of the local planning in a lot of western countries. Authoritarian countries force housing through much easier
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China has 300m homeless people though?
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Depending on how one defines homelessness, China has either a very tiny homeless population or an extremely large one. Compared to other countries, there very few vagrants: people living on the streets of China's cities without means of support. But if one counts the people who migrated to cities without a legal permit (hukou), work as day laborers without job security or a company dormitory, and live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on the edge of cities, there are nearly 300 million homeless
The source of your source
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300 million homeless in China? What the hell, that's like almost the entire population of the US.
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Yeah no. There is no way 20% of the Chinese population is homeless. Your source is a US government website, I'm sure they're not biased about China.
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I think what they're trying to say in thr meme is that the building is government funded. In the US, we also a made some government funded buildings, "projects" but it did not go very well (combination of bad optics, and supposedly bad funding) . So the US basically said fuck public funding for housing, the free market will fix everything. And instead of the "ugly" buildings that Russia has (the idea pushed onto Americans) , we ended up with a large number of unhoused people because of spiraling out of control housing costs
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The US uses vouchers, but they are underfunded (years long wait lists) and not accepted in many places. Some of the places that do accept them have similar issues to housing projects.
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There is only the illusion of a market. Construction codes and lack of construction sites prevent that there is a surplus that drives down costs.
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this confused me
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Whenever there is a major affordability housing project, it usually gets shut down by its area residents who get to have a say. They'll often say things like how it's unsightly because it blocks their views or overshadows their detached homes. Which in turn decreases their own house value. There are plethora of reasons, but I believe that is the one OP is making. NIMBY in other words. Alternatively, OP may be making comments about how government housing projects is socialism/communism and some people are rejecting simply on that basis.
Lack of supply in housing is a severe crisis in certain regions, like Toronto for example, which is now rated as the #1 housing bubble in the world according to some banks with the biggest reason being lack of supply. There's an estimated shortage of nearly 6 million homes for the Canadian population, most of which is around Toronto. The rapid housing prices is in turn making homelessness spike up.
Indirectly, but effectively, the local population is saying they'd rather have tents pitched near their homes rather than an affordable apartment near by.
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North Korea have more births than South Korea, having half of population. Capitalism is a demographic failure.
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Yeah because people have few activities they can do for leisure compared to "the west", so sex it is.
Not having money/access to contraceptives probably doesn't help either
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So having activities for leisure and money is a problem? Cause demography is the capitalistic problem. It consumes a population to produce leisures and money?
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They also have an infant mortality rate of 17 per 1000 vs 2.5 per 1000 in South Korea. I don't think counting births is super useful here.
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Infant mortality doesn't change the numbers a lot. North Korea have a much better demography than South Korea. Modern capitalism destroy the populations the embrace it.
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Thats funny because I live in a country that is significantly more left leaning than the US and yet our poverty and homelessness is significantly lower than yours.
Oh and it would help if you stop blaming each other for the problems in your country and start looking at the ones actually making the decisions to be responsible for them as well.
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Totally true!
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More like "This doesn't exist, we're going to deal with it just one minute" 🤗
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there's no worse/better they're both worse
237 comments
I don’t think anybody thinks that.
Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:
In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.
Maybe we should institute a tax on underutilized land in metro areas.
I wonder who is doing this voting? Oh, it's people who live in the areas we can't afford to live in. And capitalists add lobbying power to those voters selfish interests.
In the United States at least, your local government's public hearings for new housing developments kinda begs to differ.
People will demand the homeless be eliminated from their area while simultaneously opposing development of housing or shelters for the homeless in their area.
So maybe you're right though: they don't hate the apartments more, they simply can't make up their mind on which they hate more.
I agree but want to say everyone jumps to homeless. There are a ton of normal people that are suffering from high rent, lack of options, etc. We need to think about way more than homeless.
So it sounds like zoning laws are the problem?
I think it’s more so that people don’t want an apartment complex built in their backyard, not that they are opposed to them being built in an area where there is proper infrastructure
It's not far off what many think. Many think apartments are, oh so many adjectives, dirty, poor, unsanitary, inhumane, cruel, unusual, etc.
Who is “many”? Do you have surveys and data to support this?
Sure they do. Look at all of the posts from my neighbors on Facebook and Nextdoor every time a developer tries to build an apartment building instead of a single family home in our neighborhood.