[spaniard89277]

Public housing can be made properly like in Vienna. You have to build a lot, build nice, and worry about having many different socio-economical tenants in the apartments, though.

And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

IMO public housing is the best tool, but it seems that in many places they just want to set up some buildings and forget about it, and that way it will never work.

It seems like for many people it's just a naive idea of getting problematic people out of the streets, but that shouldn't be the main idea. The main idea is to get the most modal income people out of the offer/demand cut, so they can save more money and use their increased disposable income locally.

If you build enough and make private developments easy enough everyone benefits.

In fact, Vienna is starting to have problems because their conservative government (I think they have a coalition now) doesn't want to spend money on the program and private developments have a set of restrictions that allow price gauging.

[xyzzyz]

> And be ready to kick trashy people of course.

Not going to happen in US cities. Literally every person actually living in a city knows this, which is why many people protest having public housing built anywhere near them.

Many Americans claim to like European welfare state, but they they don’t seem to be aware as to what it takes to get there. One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy), but another thing is more ruthlessness in enforcing social norms. Nowhere in Europe you can just sit on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin: you’ll be arrested, put in rehab, and if you persist, jailed. Psychotic mentally ill who scream obscenities at passer-byes are involuntarily committed. Tent campers are arrested and forced into shelters. None of this is happening in many UD cities, which claim that their policies of looking the other way, or subsidizing the underclass lifestyle, is “harm reduction”, and continue to repeat that as number of people living this lifestyle is not reduced, to the contrary it keeps growing.

[spaniard89277]

Well, then you guys have to do something because, honestly, some famous cities in the US are in a deplorable state.

You know what your problems are and you don't even have to come up with anything new or revolutionary, as solutions are already invented and tested.

The US can build public housing and can manage it properly. The money is there, and it has already been done (built, not managed properly). Mix public housing with transit oriented development, mix-use zones, more lax private development and you'll get nice neighborhoods for modal income people which is what's really important.

As for cars, you can build multi-story car parks with commercial and/or residential development on top too. Not cheap but necessary given your constraints.

The US has IMO very strong civil society organizations. Take advantage of that and go advocate for this.

[andrekandre]

  > One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy)

interesting, because thats the opposite of what i thought...

any good charts/data for that?

[xyzzyz]

See eg. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/growingunequalincomedistributio... which states that the United States has the most progressive tax system among developed countries. It has not fundamentally changed since 2008.