this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Housing is a human right, and therefore should be provided at-cost to everyone for virtue of existing. Fuck for-profit housing.
To build housing requires massive amounts of labor. Labor is expensive. (Thus DIY is a thing to save money).
If there is no opportunity for some profit, no one is going to build housing, because that profit is also generated from work (by a general contractor or builder). It requires finding and buy land, conception, designing, permitting, inspecting, financing, sourcing, selecting architects, engineers, designers, and contractors, etc. And not to mention taking a big financial risk to borrow a loan or pay upfront for all the materials.
If you take away the potential to make profit from all that effort, then what you will end up with is that any housing will be built with very low effort. You will basically end up with complexes like old, spartan Soviet apartment blocks.
Edit: Basically what you're saying is "other people should work for free or very low wage, so I can enjoy cheap or free housing, because 'human rights'". Which is pretty ironic.
Wrong. You don't need profit to build housing. The people getting the profit aren't doing any building to begin with.
Having lived in former society countries, there was genuinely nothing wrong with society apartment blocks that are well maintained. They were very pleasant, well proportioned apartments.
I would say the bigger problem isn't the workers who build houses being compensated for their labor, but the high price of houses being driven by rent. A huge federal program to build millions of houses with deed restrictions that make it unprofitable to ever rent them would go a way to help lower the price of homes to be driven by materials and labor again, and could potentially help end homelessness in the US.
Pay workers for making the world better, don't pay people for owning things.
That's a lot of assumptions about my thoughts on who and how the housing will be built and maintained.
The US federal government has monetary sovereignty, and therefore is only limited by the amount of labor and resources available to the US. The government could produce and provide high quality housing wherever it's needed, and then transfer the property through an interest-free loan to the residents through a housing cooperative.
This does a few things:
I lived in USSR/ Russia, and these free housing thing didn't work out well
People had to wait for years before being assigned an apartment, which was never in the place you wanted. In the meantime, you d live with your grand- family in the same 30sq meters
This could be, maybe, improved somehow? But definitely not straightforward
I could see this being improved by processing paperwork through computers instead of humans. But I can also see how dragging this process out is beneficial to the government, the longer it takes to assign a apartment to somebody, the more likely they will jump ship and find another solution and the less the government has to pay.