Public housing option - Why not build "commie blocks" all over the USA?

[XYZ]

There is currently much talk in politics about making healthcare a basic human right and giving out basic income, but no one has mentioned addressing the housing crisis, having a place to live be a basic right as well. I have yet to read through Andrew Yang's entire explanations of UBI, but it seems to overlook the issue of "rent-slavery," that housing is unaffordable in many places even with $1000 a month, and I'd expect property owners to raise rents as soon as basic income rolls out. I have thought a lot about this nuanced concept recently and want to get other opinions on it, particularly if you've actually lived in a former communist country where they had such things.

Basically: The government constructs residence towers everywhere. On government land, in open space, land grants form cities and philanthropists, seized properties, and purchasing private land. On VA land to house veterans who need housing. In cities the availability of space would be aided by enacting a ban on new residence towers other than the public complexes, forcing owners of land or existing buildings in poor condition to sell it to the government. The ban would be in effect until the native homeless population and others living in the city below the specifically poverty line are provided public housing.

-Each unit would have 2 or 3 small rooms, 2 for individuals, 3 for families with children.

-Would have sufficient soundproofing, climate control and indoor air quality. Also it's own appliances and toilets.

-People would be qualified to live in these if they are below a certain income and wealth threshold, or meet other criteria such as having a disability or working in the public sector.

-The system is managed at the county level, and only people born in the same county or having lived in a residence in that county before becoming homeless or incarcerated would be allowed in it's public housing complexes. This encourages local responsibility for taking care of their own population and prevents and open free-for-all, where the needy flood into and overwhelm resources in certain places. Homeless would need to be returned to where they came from to be housed and new immigrants are excluded from this program.

-Complexes would be designed and assigned based on needs and preferences. For example, some specifically for elderly, some for homeless taken right off the street, some for those getting out of prison with no home to go to, some for families only, some for individual childless non-smokers with no pets who want it quiet....

If this were to become a reality, I would predict that:

-The housing bubble would pop hard. Prices of average homes would fall down to a more accurate reflection of their value as places for people to live, not as investment assets. Private apartment rents would drop, and fewer luxury properties would be built. This would fuck Wall Street in the ass no doubt, but that fucking would have come anyway due to shrinking of the middle class, un-sellable homes and mortgage/loan defaults.

-Homelessness could be eliminated, if everyone homeless is either provided housing or institutionalized.

-Would have many positive ripple effects for real social justice and human potential if everyone is guaranteed a place to live: People would demand better working conditions and shorter hours, crime would drop way down, freedom to work on creative projects and risk starting a business, pursue things they are passionate about and talented in rather than worrying about making the rent... overall positive effects when people are no longer in desperate survival mode at the mercy of private property owners.

Overall, in an ideal setup the government would provide a form of safe and modern housing for those who need it, and complexes would . It would be sufficient for meeting basic survival needs, while still incentivizing people to pursue financial success and move someplace better, and afford more than just rudimentary existence.

What do you think?

And do you think that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be on board for this if either became president? Since both express strong passion to tax the shit out of millionaires and billionaires to create a more equal society.

[Leo Gura]

There are some things government would not be good for, and I think housing might be one of them.

There is enormous range in quality of housing and it all depends on location, build quality, management, and even the type of people who live in it.

I don't see how the government could realistically level the real eatate market. The market is too big and too wide. Prime land is super expensive. You can't just make it cheap or seize it from people who already own it.

I think a better solution for this is UBI plus high taxes on real estate which is not lived in by the owner. There needs to be serious taxation and regulation of real eatate speculation to cut down on over-priced real estate. But NY and California will always be expensive places to live.

I think housing development is best handled by private local companies because it is such a geographically specific thing.

[CreamCat]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

There needs to be serious taxation and regulation of real eatate speculation to cut down on over-priced real estate.

What if sellers just reflect high tax on the price? They could include tax in the price.

High tax by itself is not panacea. The way you tax things matters.

Slowing down the rate of real estate deals is better than just raising tax.

I also think that increasing remote investment and remote jobs can cut down the price of over-priced real estate in prime land. Prime lands are expensive because they offer local opportunities. What if those local opportunities were turned into remote opportunities available on the internet?

Why can venture capitalists in silicon valley not review remote applicants instead of local applicants? Why do people need to fly to silicon valley and live there for months to get some investments? This drives up real-state prices.

Why can google not hire more remote workers? Because google hires mostly local workers, google campuses drive up real-estate prices.

I think it boils down to industry-era surveillance mindset. People haven't adapted to information era which doesn't require constant surveillance of people in close range. Because managers trust knowledge workers as much as they trust factory workers, they have to keep the workers nearby. This drives up real-estate prices. If they trusted knowledge workers to work remotely, real-estate prices will go down.

Edited September 14, 2019 by CreamCat

[Alex]

@XYZ You are probably rigth about the homeless issue it would be a tromendous aid for them if basic needs would be taken care of, In my homecountry Germany we have an homelesnes rate of 0.072 % and anyone has the rigth to get 424€ per month and get basic housing. Homelesnes is still an issue here, but it seems to be not the fault of the government, but more of the homeless people not beeing able to integrate themself into society (or vive versa) or being on the streets by their own choice. (punks or drop-outs)

Atleast if you lose everything by any misfortune you dont have to fear for your survial here, but dealing with the bureaucracy is an hell in of it self. 

[Leo Gura]

If income from real eatate that you didn't live in was taxed highly, people would be much less incentivized to invest in it. Investing only works if there is a good ROI. So eating into that ROI will work nicely.

Same with capital gains tax and passive income tax.

[Moreira]

34 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

If income from real eatate that you didn't live in was taxed highly, people would be much less incentivized to invest in it. Investing only works if there is a good ROI. So eating into that ROI will work nicely.

Same with capital gains tax and passive income tax.

Investing in real state is passive income for those who dont have creativity and skills to be an enterpreneur. Passive income or UBi is needed to escape wage slavery. And I doubt Yang 2020 will be elected. If I didnt have the guarantee that i'll inherit a propert and will rent it I'd have commited suicide or joined some remote tribe. For highly sensitive people being abused and milked like a cow at work is too unbearable for 65 years

[Leo Gura]

@Moreira You are not going to fix the milking problem by becoming a milker yourself.

The way to solve that problem is reducing the incentives to milk.

Passive income is not needed to escape wage slavery. Passive income is what causes wage slavery.

In the future everyone will have to generate creative value or not get paid.

Income should be tied to how much creative value you can generate. Being a landlord is not adding significant creative value to society. You're just basically taking advantage of the fact that you have more money than others to earn even more money. Which is like standing on someone's shoulders while kicking them in the teeth.

Everyone has creativity. Don't give me that excuse. It is your job in life to actualize your creativity rather than becoming a parasite.

[Key Elements]

@Leo Gura Leo, one of the things I see with not passing through orange properly is the overpopulation of ppl. In countries where they don't put restrictions (red tape) on businesses, they just build real estate wherever they want. They take it out to the edge of cities, and start cutting down trees. The rent is cheap, and so ppl go there. In green communities, where they build homes by themselves, there is an overpopulation. Worse yet, developed hospitals are not nearby. When something serious happens to one's health, you're in trouble. Here, in the U.S., we're too stuck in orange. I think we're too dependent on big companies for jobs, and we buy food/products from them instead of mom & pop shops. Starbucks does much better than a regular family owned coffee shop. We buy factory made foods--much cheaper. We have corporate farming. Corporations took over. It's out of balance. The head of these corporations make the laws. They could easily gather a bunch of lawyers to sue the government. That's why passive income gets taxed the least or 0%. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Leo Gura]

23 minutes ago, Key Elements said:

The head of these corporations make the laws. They could easily gather a bunch of lawyers to sue the government. That's why passive income gets taxed the least or 0%. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Of course corporations are a source of government corruption and rig the laws to serve their survival.

But the problem is far deeper than that. Complex technology and massive scales of life (human society in the 100s of millions) requires massive infrastructure and collective forms of organization. We cannot just go back to living in little tribes in some hippie eco-village. The whole challenge here is that individual humans are not the end-all-be-all of life. Life has surpassed humans to include corporations, organizations, religions, social movements, cultures, governments, nations, and beyond. Massive complexity and bureaucracy is necessary to sustain things like nuclear weapons, gasoline cars, airports, highways, currency, the internet, GPS satellites, regulation of pollution & deforestation, regulation of endangered species, modern medicine, modern food, modern electronics, etc.

None of that could exist without corporations or giant bureaucracies.

You cannot build a modern home by yourself, or even with a small group of your friends. Modern housing construction requires sophisticated supply chains, regulation, infrastructure, factories, shipping containers, airports, railroad, power plants, mining, logging, and a thousand other things.

Starbucks does better than a family owned coffee shop precisely because it solves complex organizational problems like supply chain issues, warehousing, etc. and it delivers a very reliable, high-quality product which people love.

You must always take into account the problem of scale. Scale! Scale! Scale! is what people underestimate. It's very easy to run a small coffee shop that serves 100 customers. It's a whole nother design challenge to serve good coffee consistently to 1 billion customers. What worked at the scale of 100 does not work at the scale of 1 billion. It's a whole new creature. And we live in a world were business is done in the billions, not in the thousands. If business is not done in the billions, say goodbye to your car, your TV, your house, your phone, your computer, your internet, your video games, your fave TV shows, your GPS, your vacations, your books, etc.

[Zigzag Idiot]

 

22 hours ago, XYZ said:

There is currently much talk in politics about making healthcare a basic human right and giving out basic income, but no one has mentioned addressing the housing crisis, having a place to live be a basic right as well. I have yet to read through Andrew Yang's entire explanations of UBI, but it seems to overlook the issue of "rent-slavery," that housing is unaffordable in many places even with $1000 a month, and I'd expect property owners to raise rents as soon as basic income rolls out. I have thought a lot about this nuanced concept recently and want to get other opinions on it, particularly if you've actually lived in a former communist country where they had such things.

Basically: The government constructs residence towers everywhere. On government land, in open space, land grants form cities and philanthropists, seized propergties, and purchasing private land. On VA land to house veterans who need housing. In cities the availability of space would be aided by enacting a ban on new residence towers other than the public complexes, forcing owners of land or existing buildings in poor condition to sell it to the government. The ban would be in effect until the native homeless population and others living in the city below the specifically poverty line are provided public housing.

-Each unit would have 2 or 3 small rooms, 2 for individuals, 3 for families with children.

-Would have sufficient soundproofing, climate control and indoor air quality. Also it's own appliances and toilets.

-People would be qualified to live in these if they are below a certain income and wealth threshold, or meet other criteria such as having a disability or working in the public sector.

-The system is managed at the county level, and only people born in the same county or having lived in a residence in that county before becoming homeless or incarcerated would be allowed in it's public housing complexes. This encourages local responsibility for taking care of their own population and prevents and open free-for-all, where the needy flood into and overwhelm resources in certain places. Homeless would need to be returned to where they came from to be housed and new immigrants are excluded from this program.

-Complexes would be designed and assigned based on needs and preferences. For example, some specifically for elderly, some for homeless taken right off the street, some for those getting out of prison with no home to go to, some for families only, some for individual childless non-smokers with no pets who want it quiet....

If this were to become a reality, I would predict that:

-The housing bubble would pop hard. Prices of average homes would fall down to a more accurate reflection of their value as places for people to live, not as investment assets. Private apartment rents would drop, and fewer luxury properties would be built. This would fuck Wall Street in the ass no doubt, but that fucking would have come anyway due to shrinking of the middle class, un-sellable homes and mortgage/loan defaults.

-Homelessness could be eliminated, if everyone homeless is either provided housing or institutionalized.

-Would have many positive ripple effects for real social justice and human potential if everyone is guaranteed a place to live: People would demand better working conditions and shorter hours, crime would drop way down, freedom to work on creative projects and risk starting a business, pursue things they are passionate about and talented in rather than worrying about making the rent... overall positive effects when people are no longer in desperate survival mode at the mercy of private property owners.

Overall, in an ideal setup the government would provide a form of safe and modern housing for those who need it, and complexes would . It would be sufficient for meeting basic survival needs, while still incentivizing people to pursue financial success and move someplace better, and afford more than just rudimentary existence.

What do you think?

And do you think that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be on board for this if either became president? Since both express strong passion to tax the shit out of millionaires and billionaires to create a more equal society.

Getting rid of the phrase Commie blocks' might help its success. I moved into green from orange about the time Hilliary quoted the famous indigenous way; it takes a village to raise a child, years ago She was scorned upon and then demonized.  a large % of blue and orange, you can't imagine bad how this made from them puke and rage.

Disolve or scale way down the Military Industrial Complew, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, multinational agribusiness of profit on food business with its shareholders.

Not let one more family farm disolve and are also declared as tax free for life. And use technology to assist in new ways while this small percentage provides for so many. Hippies Don't usually become good gardners overnight.

Pay these unemployed people to just stay home and do whatever, smoke cannabis, build bird houses, have sex, watch game shows, etc.,,, just DONT have babies. Maybe just one or two who past a lie detector that showed they weren't lying.

Having some form of stability with agricultural land and farm families, open up all national Forest and government owned land for the ones who tired of city life would be welcome to all those vast spaces in the spirt of land use the native Americans had and include them in the committee about it. When the world population adjusting back down maybe some of  on some of these policies.

one key element is crucial. No more oops I'm Preggo. The booming world population is really the issue isn't it. There's about 1 1/2 - 2 generations that needs to just stay home and chill out. Why wouldn't they be stimulated with that idea? There would be plenty of new jobs that involved assisting others and making difficult decisions. For the ones who can't sit till. The placeholders  of emotional Intellegence are rewarded in some ways we'll 

Maybe find away to do something better and integral with nursing homes.

Empty the prisons for the most part.

Im not a mathematician. Does anyone care to do the math on this way of being a global  citizen. whether its in the realm of possibility. My gut tells me maybe so.

massive amount of subversive art could be used to counteract the media for profit and all the do-gooder public relations and advertising conglomerates.

Just spitballing 

suggest alternitive or adjustments if the spirit moves you.

Edited September 14, 2019 by Leo Gura
Fixed formatting

[Key Elements]

@Leo Gura Yes, correct. We evolved to include corporations. I do realize that orange society like ours control the population of humans without talking about it. It's very expensive to live in a heavily dominant corporate society esp if you have kids. The best schools are in the most expensive neighborhoods. 

The biggest problem here is the long working hours. Ok, the solution: if you want better income, make a high quality product to scale in a ready-made corporation. You need investors for this.

You have to be careful building your own system, esp in the food industry. It's already saturated. (Hmm...unless, you cook for other ppl. Eg. Food truck, home catering business.)

[Aakash]

@Key Elements the trade secret to a high grossing product is to give people a platform to express themselves while earning commission for it. 

That is the lazy way out of life. Content is offloaded to others. The problem that Leo provides us is research behind high quality sources of information. 

Nobody actually wants to do the research of holistically putting abstract ideas together. 

This includes the government aswell, it’s going beyond survival 

[Key Elements]

@Aakash Lazy way? What lazy way? I think you've never done it before, and you don't know what's up ahead. Once you retire young, it's a different journey. I was trying to tell you this in a different thread. Go and do some work that will benefit others in positive ways after retirement.

"An idle mind is devil's workshop." You will find this quote out the hard way if you remain idle or spoil your children with money.

But first, you're not even independent from your parents. Don't remain idle.

Yeah, and I never said "grossing" products--whatever that means. I'm talking about high quality products.

[Aakash]

@Key Elements touche

 

 

[Key Elements]

5 minutes ago, Aakash said:

@Key Elements touche

This is a pretty serious topic for me. I want to do this right. I don't want to screw myself or others.

[Aakash]

@Key Elements I had 101 things i could write but i didn't want the thread to go off topic 

with leo's work you'll realise our problems are so pointless as they currently stand, they're not even trivial lol, like solving cancer is a trivial thing... but not our most basic problems  

start another topic in life purpose and we'll talk about quality products 

 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Key Elements said:

The biggest problem here is the long working hours. Ok, the solution: if you want better income, make a high quality product to scale in a ready-made corporation. You need investors for this.

I didn't start any large corporation, nor did I ever use investors to start my businesses.

You just gotta be creative. You can run a small biz and do well.

Of course you'll be working long hours to make your small biz thrive. Then you'll understand why long hours are common.

There exist many opportunities for small businesses. There are many market niches which are too small to sustain large corporations so they can't compete with you.

Business is just like the animal kingdom. The biggest animals are not the only game in town. In fact, most animals are small ones. You can be a highly successful small animal. But you gotta be more creative, clever, and strategic than the big guys.

[Key Elements]

19 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I didn't start any large corporation, nor did I ever use investors to start my businesses.

You just gotta be creative. You can run a small biz and do well.

Of course you'll be working long hours to make your small biz thrive. Then you'll understand why long hours are common.

Do you think using investors is wrong (or something)? Because I don't believe all investors are corrupt. Are they? Ppl are ppl. You have to watch out for the corrupt ones.

It will be nice to have a great presentation of a well designed product. This takes a team effort, not an individual effort. You can't be all the professions.

[Key Elements]

13 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I didn't start any large corporation, nor did I ever use investors to start my businesses.

You just gotta be creative. You can run a small biz and do well.

Of course you'll be working long hours to make your small biz thrive. Then you'll understand why long hours are common.

There exist many opportunities for small businesses. There are many market niches which are too small to sustain large corporations so they can't compete with you.

Business is just like the animal kingdom. The biggest animals are not the only game in town. In fact, most animals are small ones. You can be a highly successful small animal. But you gotta be more creative, clever, and strategic than the big guys.

Yeah, I agree with this. But, a win-win situation doesn't have to be corrupt. I am planning a small home business online. At the same time, I'm planning a quality product to scale. Why does a scaling product have to be corrupt?

[Moreira]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Moreira You are not going to fix the milking problem by becoming a milker yourself.

The way to solve that problem is reducing the incentives to milk.

Passive income is not needed to escape wage slavery. Passive income is what causes wage slavery.

In the future everyone will have to generate creative value or not get paid.

Income should be tied to how much creative value you can generate. Being a landlord is not adding significant creative value to society. You're just basically taking advantage of the fact that you have more money than others to earn even more money. Which is like standing on someone's shoulders while kicking them in the teeth.

Everyone has creativity. Don't give me that excuse. It is your job in life to actualize your creativity rather than becoming a parasite.

 

Future automation will force 90% of people to be creative or starve to death. Which is statically impossible 90% of population to be geniouses. Everything is invented, and the average IQ of people is not so high to be creative, society will collapse if people lose their jobs and dont get a UBI, so the last hope is going back to the countryside and build self-sustainable communities like in the "Alaska last frontier" show.