[eru]

I think even the benefit for the less fortunate here is at most a short-term one. In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.

It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.

[tmnvix]

We don't always have to consider the apparently very fragile and fickle motivations of investors. Social housing can and has worked very well in many cases.

[CalRobert]

Unfortunately, most housing "investors" are people who bought a home 10-30 years ago and will be furious if they can't sell at a large profit compared to what they bought it for.

Sadly, a lot of places (Netherlands and Ireland come to mind) _discourage_ you from investing in things like stocks, and _encourage_ you to "invest" in a primary residence, making the problem even worse.

[eru]

Seems like a non sequitur?

If you want people to be able to live in a place without paying rent, please just outright gift that to them and make that official policy. That may or may not be good policy, but at least it's honest.

But if the deal that people agreed to is to pay rent, then the courts should also enforce that.

You can get from one regime to the other, by eg buying out the landlords or outright expropriating them. But if you want to do that, please just advocate so outright.

Social housing may or may not be a good idea. But it's a completely separate issue from non-enforcement of existing rental contracts.

[tmnvix]

Not a non sequitur. I was responding to this specifically:

> In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.

[eru]

Maybe. That narrower focus definitely makes your remark more defensible.

On a tangent: along with most economist, I generally prefer giving poor people money that they can spend on goods and services as they please; instead of having some pencil pusher decide what they need and giving that to them in-kind.

[tommica]

Where has it been successful, and what counts as success in that? I genuinely do not know.

[BobaFloutist]

It's been exceptionally successful in Singapore, for one.

[dreijs]

I currently live in an HDB property in Singapore. It's great.

I'm originally from the Netherlands, which traditionally had a strong social housing sector: regions and cities would have their own housing corporations ('woningbouwcorporaties') tasked with building affordable housing. Those corporations were given government support after 1950 to help with the post-WW2 housing shortage, but were semi-privatized in the mid-90s, and in 2015 their scope was strongly curtailed.

It would be reductive to say that this privatization was the sole cause of the current housing crisis affecting the Netherlands -- rents and housing prices have also increased a lot in Singapore since Covid -- but it probably didn't help.

[eru]

Rents and housing prices went down a lot in Singapore during Covid. So them going up again afterwards is just a reversion to the mean.

[youre-wrong3]

Singapore doesn’t have social housing. HDB is government built and sold for 99 year lease hold.

[tovej]

You're describing a form of social housing.

[youre-wrong3]

No. Because HDBs are not owned by the government.

[inigyou]

Primarily Vienna. There's nothing complicated about what Vienna did - other cities just prefer to please billionaires instead of providing services to citizens.

[Plasmoid]

Do you actually know what Vienna did? Because the overwhelming number of people who reference the city basically just repeat a few dubious talking point about restricting rent.

[CalRobert]

Have a massive empire and then lose it resulting in a capital city with surplus housing?

[chadgpt3]

That was Berlin several decades ago. The gap has closed now and it's just another city.

[raybb]

I don't know about restricting rent but they certainly had a progressive tax on high rents, a 1% income tax to fund housing, and then used that to build a ton of high quality social housing with balconies and amenities for all. I also like to think it helped that they slapped a big sign on each to proudly let people know it was their tax dollars at work.

I didn't stay in social housing while I living there but I never once heard people complain about it. They basically just didn't think much about it at all and felt it was a good system and then would ask me why the US only makes it for poor people.

[eli_gottlieb]

I mean, to be fair, having your population semi-permanently depleted by two major wars and a fundamental loss of national economic centrality and prestige will help you keep a fixed stock of social housing lasting longer.

[oblio]

Vienna's population has been growing constantly for the last 40 years.

[pyrale]

Basically, all of Europe post-WW2. A significant share of new build in the 50s-60s was social housing.

[woodpanel]

No one absolutely no one considers that to be remotely true. Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.

And while Vienna or Stockholm are often cited as Utopias, the citees often intentionally leave out the negative side effects (ie. Waiting-times of years, housing black markets, etc) that are eventually coming full circle to the thing they were proposed as a solution against. Just with much less transparency.

There have been social housing projects that paint a more nuanced picture, eg Hamburg-Steilshoop, where a giant block (for EU standards) has been erected in the 1970s and was basically divided into three sections: one to be run by existing housing coops, one by owner occupants, and one by the city. Needless to say that those parts run by the city were quickly becoming a prime example of a German „banlieue“ while the other parts became a prime example for those eager to dismiss any criticisms.

[pantalaimon]

This was aggravated by modern city planning with it's separation of function that left these new districts with no third spaces, barely any shops and large spaces of 'no man's land' between buildings.

In classics European cities there were shops on street level and dense blocks that generated demand for those.

The post war developments followed the 'high rise in the park' concept, lots of greenery and parking lots between buildings to create a mid density neighborhood.

But there is no life in the streets and you have to walk a lot through repetitive environment but to do anything you still have to go to the 'old city'.

[pyrale]

High rises were far from being the only, or even the dominant model for social housing in Europe. Different plans such as low rises, semi-detached houses and single homes also got implemented.

[pyrale]

> Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.

Sure, because what existed before was absolutely fine [1][2]...

The truth is that these policies worked so well that pepole completely forgot what existed before. The alternative to housing projects wasn't a country without crime or despair, it was more crime, shanty towns, people displaced by war and unable to get back to normal life, and young workers unable to move to places of employment in the postwar economic boom. That topic was so uncontroversial that every european government, leftwing or rightwing, did it.

I agree that a social housing project alone isn't enough to fix every problem, but that doesn't make it the source of other unsolved problems.

[1]: Nanterre's shanty towns, https://www.defense-92.fr/exposition/la-vie-des-bidonvilles-...

[2]: pre-war shanty town, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2019/jul/04/how-p...

[BoxFour]

Eh, I agree with the general point that rental housing has to be financially viable over the long run. I just don’t think NYC politics lets this particular problem turn quickly into a clean “landlords stop renting/developers stop building” outcome. It’ll look a lot weirder.

Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.

The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.

They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.

Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.

[eru]

It's a shame that NYC can't raise more from property taxes / land taxes?

They sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the world, surely that should be able to find public infrastructure etc? Especially since the density they have would allow them to provide the infrastructure rather efficiently.

But they are so ham-strung / incompetent, they still have surface level street parking on public roads. Surely, there's more valuable uses of NYC real estate than that, and the market would be more than happy to find them.

(At least they made some inroads recently by introducing some congestion pricing. As neutered as that programme turned out, it's a lot better than nothing, which they had before.)

[BoxFour]

They can and it often comes up: One of Mamdani's tax proposals was to raise property taxes, though he backtracked on it.

Still, NYC's municipal budget is already the largest in the world by far. When I last looked, it was roughly double Tokyo's and bigger than many countries: NYC's municipal budget is larger than Singapore's, for example, and obviously NYC's budget gets to exclude things countries pay for like national defense.

It's likely they will need to continue raising taxes, but we also need to take a hard look at how effective each dollar being spent is.