https://twitter.com/eean/status/926892649096740866?lang=en
Every socialist state that ever existed has built a massive amount of public housing, and it should be the goal of any socialist movement. There's a leftist talking point that claims there are more vacancies than homeless people, but that talking point is overly simplified and deceptive for a number of reasons.
for talking points, if your town has > 50,000 people you probably have some homeless kids in your local school district while the whole of cuba usually has zero.
There's a leftist talking point that claims there are more vacancies than homeless people, but that talking point is overly simplified and deceptive for a number of reasons.
We have more vacant units than homeless residents in virtually every metropolis and rural backwater in the country. I'll spot you its oversimplified, as there's more to housing than just the physical structure. But the YIMBY plan to just "build more build more build more" completely neglects this core truth. We build units to incentivize new consumption and new financial investment, not to shelter an existing homeless population.
The lesser problem of homelessness is pronounced and obvious. The greater problem of an opaque and adversarial internal economy is occluded.
We have more vacant units than homeless residents in virtually every metropolis and rural backwater in the country. I'll spot you its oversimplified, as there's more to housing than just the physical structure.
It's oversimplified because there are a number of reasons why a unit might be vacant at any one time. A lot of units counted as vacant are simply between occupants, many more are derelict and not suitable for human habitation. You might be able to get homeless people into those units faster under socialism, but the talking point also the housing crisis is limited to solving homelessness, when it's much larger than that. You need a solution that solves the whole problem, not just one facet of it.
But the YIMBY plan to just "build more build more build more" completely neglects this core truth. We build units to incentivize new consumption and new financial investment, not to shelter an existing homeless population.
That's why I specifically mentioned PUBLIC housing. If the subject of this thread is about what policies leftists should support and what kind of housing policy socialism should deliver, then I'm saying a policy of building lots and lots of PUBLIC, i.e. NOT commodified, NOT for profit, housing is the proper solution to the housing crisis. And there's dozens of more reasons why densifying American cities and suburbs is good policy- the SFH home suburban development model America has chosen is an environmental, economic, and social disaster, and ought to be remedied at all costs.
A lot of units counted as vacant are simply between occupants, many more are derelict and not suitable for human habitation.
This is routinely overstated. Vacant rental units are abundant, particularly in higher income buildings. The vacancy rate in Houston, for instance is one unit in ten. High income units were twice as likely to bee vacant as their low cost peers, with 30k brand new units on schedule for delivery in 2024 concentrated inside 610.
This, in a city with around 3500 homeless people in a given year.
To claim we just don't have the unit space is denialist.
then I'm saying a policy of building lots and lots of PUBLIC, i.e. NOT commodified, NOT for profit, housing is the proper solution to the housing crisis.
And I'm saying there's no need to build new units. They already exist in abundance. The city just needs to take them rather than enriching landlords for their use.
This is routinely overstated. Vacant rental units are abundant, particularly in higher income buildings. The vacancy rate in Houston, for instance is one unit in ten. High income units were twice as likely to bee vacant as their low cost peers, with 30k brand new units on schedule for delivery in 2024 concentrated inside 610.
This, in a city with around 3500 homeless people in a given year.
To claim we just don't have the unit space is denialist.
It's actually denialist to claim that the only facet of the housing crisis is homelessness. There are a myriad of other problems with housing that can only be solved by building public housing, especially around public transit, which we also need to build a shitload of.
the only facet of the housing crisis is homelessness
Who made this claim?
There are a myriad of other problems with housing that can only be solved by building public housing, especially around public transit, which we also need to build a shitload of.
A great deal of the new Houston units have been built up around our nascent rail system.
Who made this claim?
YOU MOTHERFUCKER
A great deal of the new Houston units have been built up around our nascent rail system.
dont care build more
Building units for use instead of commodification also means accessibility based on income, and building something that won't start falling apart in 20 years.
The current paradigm is great for people who live home lives that are isolated with just their nuclear families, who drive 0.8 cars per capita to work 15-40 miles away, who maybe have a dog they let out in the yard twice a day, who consume 5 gallons of gas equivalents per day, and who take up 0.1 acres of land apiece not counting needs outside of housing. It's not designed for a healthy society.
Building units for use instead of commodification also means accessibility based on income, and building something that won't start falling apart in 20 years.
Sure. But the 5-over-1s that have been churned out for the last two decades appear to have largely stood the test of time.
I'm all on board with doing some actual civil engineering and city planning, rather than just letting Highest Bidder decide the next random thing we construct. But that's a 5-year-plan problem and homelessness / immediate housing shortage is a We-Can-Solve-This-Tomorrow problem. Grab those unsold units in the Houston Galleria Area "Astoria" and surrounding mid-rise blocks. Turn them into public sector units and you'll be well on your way to housing everyone that needs it practically overnight.
We saw this play out under former mayor Anise Parker, abet in the more capitalist friendly way of simply paying market rate for units. We had several hundred homeless veterans and we simply... rented some rooms in the area around the VA center and the problem was done with... until the next mayor decided to cut the budget for the program and let people get kicked out again.
The current paradigm is great for people who live home lives that are isolated with just their nuclear families, who drive 0.8 cars per capita to work 15-40 miles away, who maybe have a dog they let out in the yard twice a day, who consume 5 gallons of gas equivalents per day, and who take up 0.1 acres of land apiece not counting needs outside of housing. It's not designed for a healthy society.
No. I'm talking about Multi-Family Units inside 610 situated on some of the few functional mass transit lines the city actually maintains and work in the downtown service sector anyway. I'm not saying put the Houston homeless population in some Hwy 99 Katy Exurb. You can do this entirely within the inner loop and have units to spare.
Certainly, open up all the arbitrarily-vacant stuff by force. But that's just the beginning of the solution.
The "more houses than unhoused people ..." line is not intended to suggest that we should find vacant homes in a random Kansas town and just start filling them up. Its like pointing out that we produce more than enough food for people to eat yet so many go underfed. Or that we have more than enough medicine supplies to vaccinate the entire world, but tons of people dying from preventable diseases. Etc etc.
Who is being deceived here? Is it not untrue that there are more homes empty than unhoused people in this country at any given point?
The point is demonstrating the failure of a system to adequately allocate resources to all of its citizens, not to think that maybe if the local McDonald's didn't throw out its cheeseburgers we could feed the hungry or some shit. Doesn't mean it's not worth pointing out the enormous food waste that occurs at all levels of the supply chain.
If the empty buildings are in the middle of nowhere and aren't designed for efficiency than reusing them might be worse for the environment.
Half of the issue is only a problem under capitalism, but the other half is real.
Yes, it may be more work and require slightly more expense to retrofit and remodel an older home into being as efficient as an average more recent home than to just slap up a builder special house. It will never be as efficient as a home designed for maximum efficiency over the whole service lifetime of the home, but the reduction in resources needed and ability to reuse and recycle parts from homes that are being retrofitted and remodeled are major advantages, as is the quality increase from doing it right instead of slapping up McMansion shit.
The actual problem is that most of the vacant homes in the US are in the middle of nowhere, either vacation homes or in extremely rural areas, very far from everything you need to work and live. Most abandoned homes are abandoned for a reason, not just because they're kinda crappy.
Refitting office buildings into housing is a whole different story, and many genuinely would need to be completely torn back to the bare frame or just demolished to convert them into livable housing, not only because of building codes but because the structures are designed very differently and would likely result in many homes without any windows at all unless you make super weirdly-shaped apartments. Water, HVAC, and electrical are also concerns, as they can only be controlled centrally which a lot of people don't like.
the remodeling required to do plumbing alone can be less efficient than a new build. If it's a 40+ year old structure you'll make up a lot of energy efficiency gains over time. Some office park not near any schools, grocery stores, social services, or real jobs will incur a bunch of travel costs since there definitely isn't already transit. Maybe it's not better day one but like an electric car replacing a gas one you'll catch up on total emissions well within the service life.
i don't know enough to be in charge of such a project but
and if you don't want to throw out what little occupancy code we have it's apparently non-trivial to convert a cubical farm into living space
Marx never said that capitalism fails to build enough things. It's the ownership of those things, and the crises of overproduction that capitalist firms are subject to, that are the problem.
I agree with it. It is trivially true that, as long as housing is allocated under capitalist rules, there is not enough housing.
Too many socialists fixate on the fact that, if the Red Army swept through tomorrow, there would be enough housing. This sort of thinking is unhelpful and unrealistic. People are unhoused and unable to afford rent now. A diversity of strategies is key. We should be pursuing public housing, making Section 8 an entitlement, land trusts, co-ops, but also replacing anything that's not already multifamily housing with multifamily housing.
Technically we do have enough housing (in the US), the problem is it's not being distributed to the homeless and under-housed.
yeah, there's plenty of housing, something like 20 housing units for each homeless person, and of course homeless families could live together. and that's not even considering underutilized housing.
it's the first premise in the tweet that's wrong. capitalism has built more than enough housing, and then it deliberately and violently prohibits the use of that housing in order to extract rents from the working class.
Housing does not sit empty to extract rent, because then it would no longer be empty. The reason housing sits empty meanwhile housing prices in big cities are sky high is because the empty housing is in places nobody wants to live. Sure you could move to that empty house in nowhere, Nebraska, but then what will you do for work, groceries, how will you see your family?
It remains true that capitalism has failed to build enough housing - in places where it's needed
A relevant amount of housing in big urban markets is held empty as assets. The revenue possible from rent is low enough relative to asset appreciation that it makes sense to the owners to reduce maintenance costs by not renting. I think that's largely only true for high-end real estate in places like New York, San Francisco, and London, though.
There's another big block not on the regular rental housing market because it's used for short-term rentals. There are also services to help big landlords maximize rent by coordinating collusion to keep rental units off the market and raise market rates.
You might be able to get everyone living on the streets off the streets by redistributing these properties, but the most extreme forms of homelessness aren't the entirety of the housing crisis. You also have to deal with working class people living in overcrowded apartments, people forced to live far away from their work, young people unable to find suitable places to start families, etc.
These problems don't just disappear because you have a socialist government that redistributes all the rich people's property- housing was a constant problem in the Soviet Union all the way until its collapse, because despite building a massive amount of it, it simply wasn't enough.
It’s interesting watching people argue with you because I think this is the part they aren’t getting;
These problems don't just disappear because you have a socialist government that redistributes all the rich people's property- housing was a constant problem in the Soviet Union all the way until its collapse, because despite building a massive amount of it, it simply wasn't enough.
this is not true. even in cities like san francisco the actual unused housing stock outnumbers homeless people several times over.
People are roasting you but this is absolutely correct. Major US cities currently have historically low vacancy rates.
There are plenty of office buildings in cities that are empty. There’s literally a space in New York called billionaire’s row where billionaires buy and sell condos to each other while never actually living there whatsoever. They don’t even rent it out to anyone. These condos exist solely for speculation and circular trading and money laundering.
Maybe it’s not enough for every single homeless person or to support upward mobility for all, but it’s definitely not just some random crack house in the boonies.
Office spaces are not suitable for housing as-is, they have to be converted. So again, capitalism had failed to build housing where it is needed.
And regarding housing as speculative assets, another user pointed out there's not enough of those to actually solve homelessness
And those conversions are not easy. These buildings don’t have plumbing or HVAC for residential use, and they have huge internal spaces that leads to units with no windows which we don’t normally allow for good reason
Nah. For the most part people in big cities live somewhere, the problem is the places they lived are typically owned as a speculative asset by the rich.
Not really. Major US cities have extremely low vacancy rates. Technically there are more “empty houses” than homeless people, but those houses are in places people don’t live, only temporarily empty between residents, or so run down they aren’t livable. If I live in New York City an empty house in Buttfuck, Kansas isn’t particularly helpful.
Yup a huge number of those "empty houses" are vacation properties.
And as much as that probably trips flags about being owned by rich people that's not the reality a lot of the time.
I promise you there aren't a lot of people, even homeless people, that want to live full time in an unwinterized cabin with no cell service or internet a 30 minute drive from the nearest small town grocery store.
I promise you there aren't a lot of people, even homeless people, that want to live full time in an unwinterized cabin with no cell service or internet a 30 minute drive from the nearest small town grocery store.
literally me
socialism is just using the power of central planning and the guiding principle of equality for all people of the world to take a society from where it is right now to where you want it to be. There's nothing better about a socialism where you have to build all the housing versus a socialism where the housing was already built and you can just appropriate it, except that maybe the latter will allow you to house everyone more quickly and cheaply.
this problem is older than air bnb, we need to ban owning more than 1.5 homes
And decommodification of housing. People are hording real estate as an investment. Its the only thing left under late stage capitalism that accumulates value.
About the "工" in his display name...
Japanese word "工", mean "construction"
"工" (ko) means "construction"
I assume it means basically the same thing in Chinese.
That's pretty cool the word (symbol? character?) for construction looks like an I beam.
Pictographs can be fun like that. Like the character for "fire" 火 looks kinda like a camp fire. You got your little pyramid of wood and two little "flames" coming off it.
it originally depicted some variant of this but yeah the I-beam definitely helped cement* the continued use of this character
*
yup: tool > technique > work > industry, and branching off into “construction” from somewhere in there
Yes correct the problem is there’s enough, but it’s all in the hands of greedy bastards who have too much and squeeze everyone else from ever working hard enough to ever get it.
I like it because it cuts to the crux of the issue.
Housing has slowed down in building and housing demand has climbed up while supply stays low. Not to mention that capitalism has made a whole lot of different housing types illegal, betraying its own free market principles for the sake of investors that never do anything useful. From a capitalist standpoint, it would be one thing if investors funded housing projects to be built and took a cut of a landlord's rent because their investment made that project possible. But real estate investing is even worse. Buy house, do nothing, maybe stop all new housing from being built, and thanks to economic crisis after crisis, your house quintupled in value. How sell it, rinse and repeat. No new wealth is created, no problems are being solved, no one is even getting a delicious pizza in the shape of Garfield's head. You just get money for being lucky enough to have stuff.
I do think that we need a housing Stalin in order to build fucktons of more housing. If that means the entirety of the Bay Area becomes Hong Kong 2, then so bet it.
Socialism: it will get you out of your parents basement.
