I’m a YIMBY. I think we need to build a shit load of apartments. I don’t care whether it’s state-owned or private. If we wanted to build a shit ton of public housing, we’d need to implement YIMBY policies anyway.

I don't really know if Marxism is relevant here, but I see bourgeois NIMBY homeowners trying to keep property values high at the expense of everyone else as a common enemy everyone needs to fight against.

  • Dolores [love/loves]
    ·
    6 days ago

    I don’t care whether it’s state-owned or private

    "affordable housing" allotments on newly built private developments are uniformly minuscule proportions that EXPIRE and the firm makes any 'losses' back when they kick out the section 8 tentants and raise the rent like they always do. there is no path to universal or even generally affordable housing that is not paved with the public purse.

    • regul [any]
      ·
      6 days ago

      Any world in which the US starts building public housing again is also a world in which it does buybacks of formerly affordable developments to turn them into public housing anyway. It's better for those buildings to exist already than not.

      Preventing housing construction because it could be public (in a political climate a world removed from ours) is just accelerationism for housing.

      • Dolores [love/loves]
        ·
        6 days ago

        my interpretation of 'i don't care' is that you would be satisfied with a bullshit private contract rather than lobby for it being implemented in a better way, but i guess some YIMBY thought could be a strain of lesser evil/critical support

  • edge [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    Neoliberal YIMBYism is just trickle down economics for housing.

    We have more empty housing units than homeless people, so building housing isn't really required anyway.

    Building state owned housing of course would help immensely, provided the state supplies them to the homeless at a loss (ideally at no cost).

    The way to solve homelessness is to give homeless people housing, directly. Not to build a bunch of housing and insist the market will sort it out. No landleech is going to accept a tenant who has little to no money, they'd rather the unit go empty. You could have a massive oversupply of housing but most people homeless now would still be homeless then if it's meant to be profitable.

    Plus YIMBY policy usually involves letting developers build anywhere, including land that already has low income housing, leading to gentrification and poorer people being outpriced from their homes.

  • buckykat [none/use name]
    ·
    6 days ago

    Bulldoze the suburbs and replace them with high rise apartments and mixed use development. Give me some of those Chinese style mega apartment developments.

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      6 days ago

      my contentious opinion is that suburbs should be 'villagized', pick a section with a school and other infrastructure to serve as a core and then bulldoze->redevelop a surrounding hinterland, then run a trolley or train out from the city core

      its too wasteful too actually move them all & abandon all the infrastructure, plus a lot of possible terrorists could be pacified by continuing to indulge their separateness from the city core

      • buckykat [none/use name]
        ·
        6 days ago

        That separateness should not be indulged, suburbanites need to be urbanized by force. Do the 15 minute cities conspiracy but only to owners of SUVs and trucks with empty beds.

        • Dolores [love/loves]
          ·
          6 days ago

          rhetorically i agree but in material terms suburbs have a lot in place that could be turned over to communities that support and supply urban areas, just reverse the flows of resources & power. we wouldn't need all the people that'd work on new farms, upkeep renewable energy fields, recycle suburban waste to commute from the glorious new commie-blocs when they could be put up in surpluses of housing we'd only need to not tear down (well, maybe modify into more efficient multifamily buildings, but it'll still be cheaper than brand-new)

          • buckykat [none/use name]
            ·
            6 days ago

            A lot of suburbs are built on what used to be farmland and could be turned back into farmland after densifying the bulk of their populations into the cities, but in order to do that would require demolishing the vast majority of the existing suburban housing. And that wouldn't really be that much of a loss since suburban housing, in addition to being a horrible use of land, also tends to be built out of wood and plasterboard

  • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    I'm a YIYBY - yes in your back yard. I might be a yimby if I could afford a yard.

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    6 days ago

    I don't really know if Marxism is relevant here

    Marxism specifically is relevant here because the housing market in the US and many parts of the imperial core is the premier example of how capitalism turns in on itself and hinders the development of the productive forces in the name of profit. Capitalists will never build enough housing because the market values scarcity and the housing they do build will be as detached from social consequences as it can be.

    This doesn't mean we should want a bunch of ugly concrete apartment blocks built and administered directly by the central government everywhere (no offense to those who do), but socialism would mean structuring our economic system in a way that the state and private sector could be mobilized to build in excess of what we need rather than significantly less than what we need and to build it where it needs to be.

    • combat_doomerism [he/him]
      ·
      6 days ago

      This doesn't mean we should want a bunch of ugly concrete apartment blocks built and administered directly by the central government everywhere

      why are you even ceding this point, were commie blocks ever even adminstered directly by a central government? also those "ugly concrete apartment blocks" were the easiest and cheapest way to get people off the streets after the devastation of ww2, weird way to frame it

      • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
        ·
        6 days ago

        I'm not really sure what point you think I'm ceding. Is it that we shouldn't replicate the housing solutions of the post-war Soviet Union because we don't live in the post-war Soviet Union? My point is that Marxist solutions to the housing question are based on the existing conditions, not caricatures of what the Soviet Union did 70 years ago.

        • combat_doomerism [he/him]
          ·
          6 days ago

          as far as playing into the stereotype part of the comment goes, i meant with you bringing up apartment blocks being "administered directly by the central government", which i dont think is actually what happened unless im just totally offbase. as far as the ugly aparment blocks goes, it just seems like a weird way to frame it, the common anticommunist narrative is that they just built these apartments like this because communists are souless, and to even use that kind of language helps play into it imo, this is more semantic but i think changing "ugly" to "plain" or "dull" and making sure to include they were in response to mass housing destruction

  • Feinsteins_Ghost [he/him]
    ·
    6 days ago

    I’m not so much a YIMBY as I am a IDGAFIMBY. Shits gotta go somewhere. Put it here. Put it there. But fucking put it somewhere please.

  • Mindfury [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    6 days ago

    dunno, i think yimby has just been poisoned by neolibs in my mind, but i'm definitely densitypilled based on the australian context in the 21st century

    yimbylibs like to crow about how they would support density builds in their area, but spend much more time screaming about "supply" that they realistically only see the implementation of suburban sprawl and a new development "estate" or "suburb" that's 1000 single-story, half block dogboxes with black tile roofs, no trees, one school, and one road in and out - and the whole thing is 70km away from the CBD. These shitheaps are built to no standard whatsoever, there's no public transport service, and people go hundreds of thousands into debt to wind up separated from everything, atomised and lonely. Then when any new project is proposed in the leafy rich removed suburbs, yimbys immediately become nimby and want "supply to be increased" elsewhere because they might see some smaller digits when they get their house valued.

    Fuck that, I want building standards rewritten from the ground up and all building certification to be re-nationalised. Everything will be 7 star energy efficient and every single build will be inspected by the state department, no private engineers or inspectors certifying non-compliant shitheaps. No residential properties will be sold without department certification and anyone caught doing so will be fucking jailed. Anyone caught phoenixing a building company will be publically executed. A public building corps will be formed with the express purpose of building higher density living spaces at or over the new rigourous standards, located directly around all possible public transport hubs, and providing a minimum percentage of family-sized apartments while allowing only a maximum percentage of private ownership and the rest being public housing. Zoning will be altered to a "less but more" restrictive regime - restrictions on dwelling height for residential, "local character" protections in suburbs and restrictions on mixed-use commercial services and retail in residential areas will get in the fucking bin immediately, but all areas within the range of housing corps builds will require public amenities and parkland, and any greenfields suburban housing builds will have so many fucking requirements on public transport service, access connections to existing areas, minimum amounts of education facilities and environmental vegetation coverage that property developers will simply kill themselves.

    alternatively, i will just drive to Puckapunyal, steal as much ordinance as possible, and conduct a widespread mortar campaign on Toorak and Brighton for fun

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
      ·
      5 days ago

      5-over-1 but it's 3-5 stories of timber frame and straw-clay on top of 1 story of earth berm with a greenhouse veranda and a green roof, 40 bedrooms per floor, 4 parking spots, bicycle rack capacity of 200 all sheltered by solar panels

  • foxontherocks [undecided, undecided]
    ·
    6 days ago

    No, and it is because YIMBYs do not support the building of new housing. They say they do, but their records have shown that they are liars. YIMBY policies are policies that might build a McDonalds or a super thin skyscraper or two but they have never built housing.

    Donald Trump is a YIMBY, we shouldn't be.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]
    ·
    5 days ago

    I’m a YIMBY, but strictly a left-YIMBY. I’m not opposed to working with liberal YIMBYs for the time being, and Georgists are actually fun to talk to. Yeah, they disagree with us but conversations at least tend to be productive.

    We tend to agree that cities need to grow, and become much more dense and walkable in face of the coming challenges climate change will face, and we all resent how suburbs have been forced on us. Although I live in the boonies (thanks to nimbys in cities protecting their property values to keep people like me out), if I ever get the opportunity to attend an event I don’t want to go in with the express purpose of recruiting new comrades but more or less destigmatizing socialism by being there.

  • QueerCommie [she/her, fae/faer]
    ·
    6 days ago

    From what I can tell there’s plenty of houses. Sure, some smaller or inefficient ones should be replaced with better ones, but generally expropriation and improvement should be enough.

  • regul [any]
    ·
    6 days ago

    I am.

    In my experience most folks here are PHIMBYs but draw the line at private development of pretty much any kind.

    • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]M
      ·
      6 days ago

      Ideally it would be government owned housing but we live in a far from perfect world. If a well meaning (emphasis WELL MEANING) private entity has to be the one to build high quality, well maintained, affordable housing, I’ll take the small win.

  • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    6 days ago

    I would be but they don't build them properly when they build them in my country. There's no attempt at making a livable, walkable neighborhood like they did in the USSR

  • xj9 [they/them, she/her]
    ·
    6 days ago

    I don't have a back yard, so I'm more like SOMS (Socialism On My Street) and I highly doubt private housing is going to help anything. We already have that and plenty to go around, its just unaffordable on purpose.