alt Hacker NewsWhy bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm
For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.
With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.
Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.
As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.
There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.
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It only works in Singapore because there’s too little land. There is too little options. HDBs are capped value. While Condos are quite expensive in comparison, and you cannot own both. Singapore system for housing would be hard to replicate anywhere else without government stealing everything off the citizens and disallowing private ownership of land.
Singapore system won't work in USA cities. Their town councils are near scholars level. Quite a few of them doctorate. They are pretty much selected on 2 criteria, merit and perceived likability with accountabilities evaluated both by government and locals citizens. American leaders are selected based on sound bites with zero accountability to citizens for maybe 2 years to 4 years. They do accountable to mega donors which almost always work against for the good of the public. Singapore also have world class city planners that entire America have never experienced or seen before. Heck even China look up to Singapore during 80s and 90s for advice. And the quality of people going to USA in the last 10 years are very low. Look at Singapore Amos going there. Meanwhile hundreds of American engineers migrated to Russia and China.