They stopped this practice because those government built homes or “projects” were absolutely horrible places to live. Imagine the most run down apartment complex you personally know of, now every time there is a problem instead of talking to a landlord you file a grievance with a government agency that honestly doesn’t give a fuck whether it gets fixed or not, also when someone gets hurt on the property because of disrepair instead of being able to sue a landlord or even file charges against a landlord, you can’t do anything because of sovereign immunity with only a few exceptions allowed under FTCA. Also zero fucks given about crime which leads to a high crime rate which leads to eventually the police completely ignoring the neighborhood and then even worse crime (see Cabrini-Green in Chicago prior to demolition as an example).
Source: grew up in a project in the Mississippi River delta.
They actually stopped because they didn't give a shit about you and didn't want to spend money bringing in more police, social workers, medical professionals and mental health care people with the right kind of training and personality.
Crime doesn't magically disappear because you stop giving someone a home.
Another issue with their model was it basically took all impoverished people and shoved them into slums, which is not a recipe for economic mobility. Housing programs that distribute people into mixed income neighborhoods have much better outcomes
Missing from this entire discussion is the fact that the projects were built at the same time as school integration, Brown, Plessy, White Flight, MLK, redlining, etc. The idea of the projects didn't fail because it was run by the government, it failed because white people in the deep south REALLY hate black people.
The fact that no one has mentioned this in the thread above is like waiting until minute 59 of the 1 hour meeting to mention that the entire projects is cancelled and everyone is fired...
The projects did not do well anywhere they were built.
North, South, East or West, but segregation and disdain for a demographic was a pretty big contributing factor.
Government incompetency was another.
Well the government also really hated black people like yeah this is a society problem but we still see similar problems within the government because we put people from the black hating areas in charge
it really doesn't. Pointing out that some cats are orange does not imply that all cats are orange. It also does not imply that some cats are not black. In fact, pointing out that some cats are orange does not, in any way, say anything about whether or not some cats may or may not be black.
That's not what the data implies. The general trend is towards greater economic mobility for the impoverished with little negative effect on neighborhoods
They built a subsidized apartments in my area. When it was being built the neighborhood Facebook page was going crazy about the increased crime and lowered housing prices. The place got built and I haven't seen any difference.
The lowered housing prices do precede the completion of construction of new housing.
That’s because a major component of current price of investment property is the expected future price, and a major component of price of residential property is how much of a housing shortage there is.
Since houses are both housing and investments, anything that is predictably going to reduce the severity of the shortage is going to immediately reduce prices.
That's not what I mean though. Giving folks housing where their direct neighbors are of higher income is when the intervention is best. But in general, those folks being in that school district will absolutely, without question, improve those kids' future
Saw this in Chicago growing up. It just spreads more crime to previously low crime areas. Now all of a sudden you have GD's, Latin Kings, and Vice Lords in the suburbs causing trouble.
This person has fallen into the classic conservative propaganda “common sense” tactic. It SOUNDS logical that because in the past the “projects” were dangerous and horrible they are bad and therefore the very concept is bad.
They don’t stop to think “hmmm, I wonder if there’s really just not enough resources being allocated to help these people, and whether I’ve really considered that rehabilitating someone who IS homeless leads to that person paying BACK into the public good through taxes in the future…”
Seen it a million times. “People want too much free shit!!” It’s called investing. Give your citizens what they need when they need it and they contribute far more than what you gave them over the rest of their lives.
Public housing is shitty because it's deliberately underfunded so it doesn't compete too much with for-profit housing, not because it's inherently bad.
In order for it to not reduce the housing shortage, it must be so inherently bad that nobody who has a choice prefers it to living rough. The bottom of the market-rate housing market is competing with living on the street, and getting people who just barely prefer paying for that housing to living on the street.
On that we can agree. It's important to be clear in your critiques, though. Just talking about how horrible public housing is without actually identifying why it's horrible puts the blame on the program, not the deliberate attempts to defeat it for profit.
Well, that isn’t the alternative. Since that time frame HUD has instead offered section 8 stipends so that people who would have qualified to live in a project instead get a financial stipend. Not everyone who is homeless now would have qualified to live in government housing then either.
And the line itself is just a way to hide that there isn’t enough housing in general. If everyone on the list suddenly got approved for section 8, they would all realize that there isn’t anywhere left to rent.
The alternative would be a larger financial investment with lower standards of qualification, obviously at the expense of these projects being shitty places to live. Inferior products are inferior, sure, but the project being shitty alone doesn’t justify not doing it at a larger scale.
And honestly... The inconvenient truth of the matter is that a lot of the homeless ARE drug addicts, and either had (before becoming addicts), or have developed (due to the addiction and side effects) mental illnesses... And giving them housing only fixes one of those problems. If you don't address the others (which costs far more)... You're not really fixing the problem. You're covering it up.
Yeah the one I’ve seen is truly awful. The whole time I was inside I just imagined what it would look like if it wasn’t full of the rabble that I saw there. The places probably would have been nice but no maintenance staff or funding can keep up with that many crackheads. At this point if you are in the vicinity of one, you can tell by how many windows have iron bars on them lol
There is a systemic issue that needs to be addressed somewhere in that mess you describe. If one person falls off your balcony, it might have been their fault. When millions of people fall off your balcony, there’s probably a problem with the balcony.
Oh don’t start with that semantical bs. They are homeless, saying it in another way doesn’t do anything. Also have you actually inspected them every single day and found no damage or garbage everywhere? The ones I’ve seen just end up shitting in the bushes next to the sidewalk and leave garbage absolutely everywhere. As for damaging their own tents, well I haven’t ever made a habit of getting close enough to inspect them that close
How long would your plumbing and trash pickup have to be out of service before your waste was just as bad?
The makeshift shelters I do pass on a daily basis only show damage from police and other vandals. Since you claim to not have any meaningful observations, I’ll trust that my observations are more representative than your lack of observations.
And if you want to use the wrong word to discuss the thing you’re discussing, go right ahead. I will continue to use the precise terms when I’m referring to various subsets of homeless people.
I’m just going to call you out for your choice to avoid calling them people.
Well if I decided to just shit outside my door or dump my garbage on the ground it would be pretty bad. But I’m not one of them. “Other vandals” being whom? Other homeless individuals? I’ve seen plenty of those filthy camps from afar. Just not close enough to see the integrity of all of their tents. But it’s hard not to see all the trash that they leave everywhere. Homeless is just not the politically correct term now lol. You’re not using some more correct term. I keep the term “people” reserved for everyone that doesn’t shit in a bush as I walk by. Or try to rob me as I walk down the sidewalk.
Public housing was initially supposed to be mixed income and self sufficient. Middle income folks got similar quality as the private market for lower cost, lower income people got better quality housing for the same or cheaper than they could get on the private market. The rent revenue would make each project self sufficient with middle incomes subsidizing lower incomes.
The real-estate lobby managed to lower the income cap to qualify and ruined the entire thing. Housing projects today are so bad because they require external funding which frequently gets cut.
Not to mention all the crime. I used to live next to some section 8 housing near a college. Hell now that i think about it, some of the apartments in my complex were probably section 8. I got robbed at gunpoint in my own house, and similar things happened every week. The guys that robbed me ended up executing a guy they were robbing that was fully compliant sitting on his knees in the laundry room. Heroin dealer lived across from me, watched him and his cronies walkin back carrying bags and bags of golf clubs regularly. Then walk around the parking lot pretending to hit cars with them to harass people. Craziest thing. The dude that lived there before the dealer, he died of a blood infection from using. Then the heroin dealer had a stroke a few months later from the same thing. Man what a shit hole. I could keep going with the stories. Probably just need to stop here. Lmfao
I mean I’d imagine a prison cell away from all the law abiding folk is the solution. Or should we just give a nice warm hug to all the violent felons as they rob us? Giving someone a place to live doesn’t just make them stop being a criminal.
I’ve never seen a project proposed that doesn’t just sound like a gigantic money pit with no returns. And no I’m not talking about making a profit, but some actual meaningful progress.
There’s exactly one project I’m aware of in my area and it is uh…dreadful. I was there one time for a job and man did I feel pretty damn good about my own living situation after. Damn things are insanely run down and you feel like you’ll be mugged just walking to your vehicle
> Also zero fucks given about crime which leads to a high crime rate which leads to eventually the police completely ignoring the neighborhood and then even worse crime
This isn't a housing issue let alone an issue specifically related to projects. This is a completely distinct problem that also needs to be addressed regardless if anyone's building projects.
There's some fair points in here that are challenges but they're far from unsolvable and the major issues exist without projects.
In order to solve housing and homelessness specifically, it requires the government to build/finance the construction of housing. That is an unavoidable practical reality.
what about homeless shelters or something though? maybe the $20B could go a lot further for proper homeless shelters? and if previous ones have sucked maybe they could be improved?
You are absolutely correct. However, completely changing the entire economic system of the US and the entire government out would probably be a lot harder to do than just fixing a single problem like homelessness.
That’s like saying “everyone can just 10 feet straight up on the moon, that must be an earth gravity problem”. While technically true, it doesn’t really change much.
Grew up in Chicago watching the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green disasters.
You also have to consider that if you build government housing for the homeless and stick them all in one place, the crime and addiction and mental health issues would not stop. They would become crime riddled drug dens.
The problems you mentioned are caused by people in power defunding those programs. There is modern, clean, and safe public housing around the world. And this type of housing is more affordable since a government should be more efficient than allowing landlords to control the market on a basic human necessicity.
I guess there's two ways to look at this: either the government is corrupt/inefficient so it's not worth doing anything, or that people should try to reform their government so that these types of programs are properly funded.
I think it also comes down to people not wanting to give what they view as the “dregs” of society a bunch of free housing. Meanwhile everyone else just struggles to pay rent while the addicts would be getting all of that for free. Puts a real bad taste in your mouth. On one hand I like the idea of helping them in that way. On the other, I can barely find places to live that are affordable but now someone wants to give “them” someplace for free or super cheap??
Building a bunch of affordable housing lowers everyone's rent in the area because now landlords have to compete with the public housing program.
But Americans would rather surrender half their income in rent than imagine a reality where someone else gets a little bit of assistance so they can live a better life.
lol no we don’t want to spend a fortune on housing. First of all, you’d need a developer to actually want to make such housing and also lower the costs of constructing it all so that they can make a profit. Which is what we definitely don’t have, but damn I wish there were some companies trying to make reasonable sized homes that aren’t exorbitantly expensive
There are many countries with very successful public housing projects like Singapore or Italy off the top of my head. No reason it can't be done in the states except for our national humiliation kink.
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u/Jdevers77 2d ago
They stopped this practice because those government built homes or “projects” were absolutely horrible places to live. Imagine the most run down apartment complex you personally know of, now every time there is a problem instead of talking to a landlord you file a grievance with a government agency that honestly doesn’t give a fuck whether it gets fixed or not, also when someone gets hurt on the property because of disrepair instead of being able to sue a landlord or even file charges against a landlord, you can’t do anything because of sovereign immunity with only a few exceptions allowed under FTCA. Also zero fucks given about crime which leads to a high crime rate which leads to eventually the police completely ignoring the neighborhood and then even worse crime (see Cabrini-Green in Chicago prior to demolition as an example).
Source: grew up in a project in the Mississippi River delta.