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by klipt 1050 days ago
The sad truth is you can't build grungy housing. At least no sane developer wants to.

Grungy housing was new fancy housing - decades ago.

I guess if the government is willing to build Soviet style grey blocks then you can have new but modest, relatively cheap housing.
2 comments
majormajor 1050 days ago
Yeah, and big low-income housing projects have been tried here. But concentrating poverty like that doesn't work well.

But the "just build more" path of least resistance is to bulldoze today's grungy housing to build tomorrow's new housing, and most of the time that doesn't make it easy for the existing displaced residents find enough replacement grungy housing at rates they can afford.

So I think there needs to be something more than just laissez-faire building.

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astrange 1050 days ago
That's called "right of return". Give the displaced people their home back.

Although if they were homeowners before, they probably didn't mind selling their house, seeing as they did it.

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astrange 1050 days ago
Housing isn't expensive because it's grungy or not, it's expensive because the supply is less than the demand.

Some physical factors that might matter are underlying land value, single stair laws and similar things making building layout worse, how many 1br vs 3br units there are… not whether it looks old or not though.

You can't identify affordable (subsidized) housing from the outside in cities where it exists.

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