Comment on Rent is theft
Riverside@reddthat.com 2 days agoBoth can be done, though. There’s more demand for dense housing in cities than there is availability. Simultaneously build millions of housing units for social rent and cap existing prices or directly expropriate rented housing.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think at a certain point this line of reasoning becomes “the US becomes communist” and while yes that would be a solution it’s not exactly a practically achievable one in the short term.
HOWEVER: The US already already sort does this - there were ~6 million subsidized housing units in the US last year, and roughly 7 million Khrushchevka apartments built. The US is behind the soviet statistics here, having a higher population and lower subsidized housing count and should absolutely be doing better, but it’s not like this is a completely neglected concept - there are real, practical barriers to implementing a similar policy (urbanization having already taken place and building codes being the two biggest - look into the state of the foundations for a Khrushchevka if you ever want to see why site prep steps like soil surcharging and foundation curing are critical - soil hydrodynamics is a shockingly modern discipline in structural engineering).
Things like an unoccupied home tax (as someone else mentioned) are an immediately workable solution, and have had excellent results thus far. Hopefully they can continue to be adopted, though I fear there may be a brief pause on any kind of beneficial social progress while we have a small civil war in the US.
Riverside@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Source for the 7mn Khrushchevki? That number seems entirely too low. Maybe you’re not counting Brezhnevki? Because I remember figures of more than a million housing units being built yearly.
While “US becoming communist” is not achievable on the short term, “regulatory policy to improve rent under capitalism through reform” has even less of a background if you ask me. Like, housing is getting worse everywhere under capitalism, and better nowhere. What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism are the primary one I’m using here.
I’m not, no - nor stalinski (not that those were all that prolific comparably though)
Riverside@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don’t understand how a referendum can be illegal).
Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn’t need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?