alt Hacker News> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society
We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.
> The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.
This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.
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Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.
> We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Well-stated! Yes, defective implementations with negative outcomes should not be used to make overly broad or even grossly incorrect assertions about human nature.
The thing that goes wrong again and again and again with public and low cost housing is that they build housing, and nothing else.
Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?
The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.
You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about.
89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world.
I'm not sure what your proposal is?
Public housing isn’t actually free in the countries you listed. It’s subsidized, but the people who live there still have to pay. The affordable housing units in New York are also subsidized. The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?