POVERTY IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG

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I hate both of them equally and with a vile passion. Having to share walls with other families is just as inhumane. I don't know why "Urban Sprawl" is such a looked down upon term. I'd much rather cities start as a central hub, and then urban sprawl outwards with minor hubs surrounding them every 100 miles or so.
This whole -- either everyone has to be packed like sardines, or everyone has to have 5 acres per house crap is annoying. Give the nation some medium density housing. We have the fucking internet now, half the people can work from home. You don't need to be walking-distance from everything.
- Yes, occasionally hearing your neighbors is just as inhumane as having no shelter, water and heating.
  
  You've obviously never actually lived in one of these places. They regularly have infestations, dirty water, and no heating due to the types of people they house and the "affordable" nature of them which generally causes lack of upkeep once built. Which can be, yes -- just as inhumane as living in a tent.
  In addition, it removes the potential for ownership away from the people living there, in an effort to rent-seek and make sure they own nothing for as long as they live.
  
  the types of people they house
  That's gonna be a yikes from me, scoob
  
  How is that a yikes? We're talking about poverty here, it is a class of people which regularly lack the same benefits in society as others, so there's higher instances of drug use, crime, etc. You know in conversation, it's occasionally useful to classify things with a broad brush so you can talk about overarching issues and how to solve them without being prejudiced, right?
  
  I'm not gonna dox myself here bg linking my adress, but rest assured: I have been living in apartments all my adult life, and it's been fine. The problems you describe are not inherent to apartments but rather the way landlords handle things. With better regulations and organizations that help renters assert their rights, it can be a good way to house people.
  
  I agree that we're incredibly overdue for regulations in these areas. Since the mid 90s it's been deregulation, privitization, deregulation, privitization. A healthy capitalistic society can only survive with regulations which govern how absolutely atrocious capitalists can be. If they could sell you rat poison as food to make a dollar, they certainly would. My guess is that these kind of apartment complexes are probably better in less city-centric areas where the construction is newer. Unfortunately all I see going up around here is wood-frame apartment complexes, and they are clearly inferior to block/prefab concrete.
  
  Not when done properly. Two poorer Eastern European countries have 90+% of their citizens living in government owned housing that costs them 2% of their monthly income. The apartments are modern, well maintained, and preferable to home ownership because 2% rent. IIRC it's Estonia and Lithuania, but I may be wrong there.
- With "Urban Sprawl," reliable public transit, and working from home, we could each nurture our personal green space and drastically cut emissions. I'm all for it.
  
  If you have urban sprawl, you're not having reliable public transport. You need density to make it work.
- Nobody is saying this stupid strawman you are arguing! If the kitchen is on fire and the trashcan is full, what do you do first? Do you take out the trash first because you can't live in such a wretched state?
  Your vile passion is just thinly veiled narcissism. You can get your just desserts after we take care of major societal problems affecting the wider community. POOR YOU.
  
  It's literally the argument in the image. That the bottom image is "worse to look at"...what are you on about?
  I'm simply commenting on a third option that people regularly complain about looking at, "Urban Sprawl". There's no strawman here - you should really learn what that word means. I live comfortably in a medium sized neighborhood. I don't have to deal with the sights of either of these images at all... there's no "poor you" because I'm...not complaining. I'm offering a third option to a 2-choices fallacy presented in the OP.
  
  Where does the land for the sprawl come from? You either have to destroy nature or farmland.
  
  https://www.visualcapitalist.com/america-land-use/ provides a nice visualization.
  Only 2% of USA's landmass is used for our urban areas. There is plenty of "Open Space" (3%), "Shrubland" (24%), Grassland (17%) to utilize.
  
  I think you missed the point of the meme and then argued about a common, tangentially related topic, which made it sound like a strawman argument. Because you seem to be more genuinely confused as to my response than arguing in bad faith, I'll drop it. Those types of dismissive comments are meant for people arguing in bad faith.
  The image is not attacking urban sprawl, it's attacking the very mindset that you displayed in your comment: "why do I have to choose between these two things? I hate living in apartments, so why would you force me to do this?"
  The meme is showing two different approaches to dealing with a massive housing crisis where many people did not have access to housing. In the first image, we see how the USSR dealt with it: they needed more houses for people, so they forced families with homes to share with those without until new homes had been built. The government subsidized the construction and focused on building economical housing that functionally fixed the problem, but at the expense of luxury and some comfort. Would people have liked more space? Yes. Was it reasonable to accommodate that want before the needs of people without housing? No.
  The lower image is showing how the US has handled a massive housing crisis...it hasn't. If someone can't manage to find and/or afford to house themselves, they choose to force those people to live on the streets. The thought process is more individual focused rather than community focused as in the top image. "Why should the people who have houses be inconvenienced by those who do not?" This assumes that those without have some type of moral or personal failure that justifies them having nowhere to live rather than the situation being a result of a system that does not prioritize human needs. It rests on the callous assumption that people do not deserve a place to live, but they instead must earn a place to live.
  As to your argument, I don't think you offered a third option so much as a complaint about the state of the things. To be honest, I agree with your complaint. Assuming the context of your comment was focused on the US, there is plenty of space for people to live in larger homes and there isn't some false dichotomy where we only have the options of urban sprawl or dense apartments. The problem with how you approached the problem is that without further analysis of why a housing crisis exists and how we can eliminate the source of the problem, saying "just build more medium-density housing" equates to no more than a complaint.
  You cannot fix a problem unless you address the root of the problem. Pushing the homeless out of sight does not fix the problem. Much of the problem is caused by our economic and political systems, but there is also the influence of the cultural aspect in how we think about the problem and how we think about people (individualistic vs collective focus). When you focus on yourself and how the problem affects you, it is often at the expense of other people. For the people this hurts and the people cognizant of the cultural influence, seeing individualist-focused complaints really rubs them the wrong way.
  
  Sorry, I know there are a lot of bad-faith actors here on Lemmy, I understand if you thought I was just being antagonistic.
  I think the discussion about where people live is probably less helpful than discussing the method of getting there. You obviously already know my preference for where to house people, but I think the conversation we should all be having is how to get people out of the situation they're in in the bottom picture.
  Housing prices right now are out of control due to places like AirBnB, so more regulation needs to be slapped down there for sure. "Below the line" pricing needs to stop, and taxes on these short-term rentals need to be raised so that all housing doesn't just keep looking like an investment opportunity to offshore investors.
  Another problem is that a lot of the people that are homeless suffer from massive mental issues which make them unfit to live in everyday society. Many homeless suffer from schizophrenia, drug addiction, or other major mental illness. I won't pretend that I have even the beginnings of a solution for this. Of all the solutions I hear about, many require taking these peoples rights away from them and putting them under government care, but that rarely works out the way people think it will.
  I agree pushing them out of sight is not the way to handle it. I think that's true in most things -- I think a lot of us agree on a lot more than we disagree on, but we get so hung up on the details that often times online conversations spiral out of control. I commend you for being one of the few here who can actually hold a legitimate discussion without losing your cool. It's hard to find that when half the people on here are just looking for a fight.
- How is it inhumane? Have you only ever lived in apartments made of paper walls?
  
  Have...you sat there and thought about what you're asking? What "affordable housing" complexes do you know that aren't made out of paper walls? That's the "affordable" part.
  
  Come to the Netherlands, where I’m from, social housing apartments are made of brick and concrete with thick walls. No shitty 5 over 1 stick building apartments in my country.
  Also social housing apartments in my country are always mixed in between owner occupied apartments of different price ranges. So the buildings are of high quality and maintained.
  
  Two poorer Eastern European countries have 90%+ of their citizens living in government owned housing. It costs them 2% of their monthly income. They prefer the apartments because the government built them properly, so they are modern, and well maintained. Oh, year and the rent is 2% of your income.
- What you seems to be describing is Single-Family Housing. True medium density is actually really compact, using lots for more efficient housing and including public green space.

370 comments