I have been banging the drum about increased investment in public housing for years now. Public housing has a bad reputation among some because the Projects in the USA which were not well done. But Vienna, Austria has been showing us how to build desirable public housing that both wealthy and poor want to live in, while solving a raft of social issues along the way.
As someone who works in public housing, one of the issues I see is that it’s a place for people we want to forget about. There’s a lot of mental health/social issues with our tenants because we’re basically the last step before homelessness. We get their welfare/disability penion/social support direct deposited in our account to cover rent, stick them in an apartment, and forget about them.
Its hard for your average joe to want to live in subsidized housing, even with the cheaper rent, when he has to worry about an untreated schizophrenic running down the halls at 3 am banging on doors, or horders causing cockroach, bed bug, anf rodent issues, or finding needles and crack pipes in the stairwell.
In most living situations, this would result in eviction, but since our mandate is to keep people housed, we tend to accept that it comes with the territory.
What we really REALLY need is a robust social services network to not only house people, but treat them so that they can self actualize and actively participate in society.
But we’re not too interested in doing that, because if we dont have these dregs of society, what else to we have to threaten the middle class to keep them in line?
Meanwhile ODSP has not seen a meaningful increase since I don’t know how many years ago but more than five. Your untreated schizophrenic was probably traumatized by previous hospitalizations and stigmatization from medical professionals and is now trying to get by on about 13k a year.
They don’t want to forget about us. They want to punish us. They’re like Mother Teresa but without the self delusion. They hate the poor and they cannot even conceal it, do not even know to conceal it. It so pervasive in society that I don’t even think there is a word for hatred of the poor, but we all know it exists and warps public policy.
I agree with these issues but I think a lot of this comes from our current conception of what public housing can be. In Vienna, something like 60+% of all housing stock is public in nature. It’s not a place to stick the least fortunate among us, but the primary means of housing people. If we can make that sort of conceptual leap, it would go a long way towards solving our housing woes, I think.
This country could be so much better. Fingers crossed that social services and housing are improved like that by the time I retire.
Check out M. Moneybags over here, with retirement plans. Social services for retirement, hah! We get MAID and consider ourselves lucky to have it.
I’m quite the opposite of a moneybags, I just like to dream. :(
If the government does not want to get into public housing for some stupid reason, they could at least be funding and facilitating housing co-ops.
for some stupid reason
The economy. Real estate has unfortunately became a huge part of most advanced economies, so affordable housing would be detrimental to a country’s GDP growth. I’m not saying we should keep people homeless for the sake of the economy, I’m just saying that is absolutely what’s happening.
I agree that real estate is expensive because the people with the most economic power want it to be expensive. Nearly every Boomer out there is counting on real estate investments (in the form of their massively overvalued houses) to see them through retirement, but that has required housing to constantly appreciate over the last 50 years. If housing were suddenly made affordable again, the state would have to support millions of wiped out Boomers whose only asset is suddenly worth no more than a shelter to sleep under.
There are any number of things a state could do to make holding real estate an unattractive investment and absolutely tank the real estate market – which would be good for every poor person struggling to find a shelter to sleep under, and murder on entrenched capital. There’s an obvious conflict of interests here. The ruling class has a “moral” incentive to make housing affordable for everyone, but they have an even stronger financial incentive not to. They are openly squeezing us exactly hard enough to get the most money out of us, no matter how many people needlessly die, no matter how many children are raised in inter-generational poverty. It’s not part of the calculation, it’s incidental.
“If housing were suddenly made affordable again, the state would have to support millions of wiped out Boomers who’s only asset is suddenly worth no more than a shelter to sleep under.”
Oh, god, the horror. Imagine if a house was just… a home shudders in investment banker
Decent rhetoric, right?
Here in Waterloo Region, the closest thing we’ve had to new public housing in decades AFAIK are a bunch of insulated garden sheds they erected across the street from an actual dump, outside of town and away from all services. And yet such a grim offering is the only thing we have to be optimistic and hopeful about. The poor have been entirely abandoned.
It will be widely unpopular, but the government needs to build public housing for the middle-class. Restrict it to people who are gainfully employed within a certain salary range and use that as evidence that public housing can work. Justify it by saying that it’s a pilot program yada yada.
