Every socialist state that ever existed has built a massive amount of public housing, and it should be the goal of any socialist movement. There's a leftist talking point that claims there are more vacancies than homeless people, but that talking point is overly simplified and deceptive for a number of reasons.
for talking points, if your town has > 50,000 people you probably have some homeless kids in your local school district while the whole of cuba usually has zero.
There's a leftist talking point that claims there are more vacancies than homeless people, but that talking point is overly simplified and deceptive for a number of reasons.
We have more vacant units than homeless residents in virtually every metropolis and rural backwater in the country. I'll spot you its oversimplified, as there's more to housing than just the physical structure. But the YIMBY plan to just "build more build more build more" completely neglects this core truth. We build units to incentivize new consumption and new financial investment, not to shelter an existing homeless population.
The lesser problem of homelessness is pronounced and obvious. The greater problem of an opaque and adversarial internal economy is occluded.
We have more vacant units than homeless residents in virtually every metropolis and rural backwater in the country. I'll spot you its oversimplified, as there's more to housing than just the physical structure.
It's oversimplified because there are a number of reasons why a unit might be vacant at any one time. A lot of units counted as vacant are simply between occupants, many more are derelict and not suitable for human habitation. You might be able to get homeless people into those units faster under socialism, but the talking point also the housing crisis is limited to solving homelessness, when it's much larger than that. You need a solution that solves the whole problem, not just one facet of it.
But the YIMBY plan to just "build more build more build more" completely neglects this core truth. We build units to incentivize new consumption and new financial investment, not to shelter an existing homeless population.
That's why I specifically mentioned PUBLIC housing. If the subject of this thread is about what policies leftists should support and what kind of housing policy socialism should deliver, then I'm saying a policy of building lots and lots of PUBLIC, i.e. NOT commodified, NOT for profit, housing is the proper solution to the housing crisis. And there's dozens of more reasons why densifying American cities and suburbs is good policy- the SFH home suburban development model America has chosen is an environmental, economic, and social disaster, and ought to be remedied at all costs.
Building units for use instead of commodification also means accessibility based on income, and building something that won't start falling apart in 20 years.
The current paradigm is great for people who live home lives that are isolated with just their nuclear families, who drive 0.8 cars per capita to work 15-40 miles away, who maybe have a dog they let out in the yard twice a day, who consume 5 gallons of gas equivalents per day, and who take up 0.1 acres of land apiece not counting needs outside of housing. It's not designed for a healthy society.
The "more houses than unhoused people ..." line is not intended to suggest that we should find vacant homes in a random Kansas town and just start filling them up. Its like pointing out that we produce more than enough food for people to eat yet so many go underfed. Or that we have more than enough medicine supplies to vaccinate the entire world, but tons of people dying from preventable diseases. Etc etc.
Who is being deceived here? Is it not untrue that there are more homes empty than unhoused people in this country at any given point?
The point is demonstrating the failure of a system to adequately allocate resources to all of its citizens, not to think that maybe if the local McDonald's didn't throw out its cheeseburgers we could feed the hungry or some shit. Doesn't mean it's not worth pointing out the enormous food waste that occurs at all levels of the supply chain.
we have so many empty buildings its insane, sure we made need to fix some up but thats clearly the sensible option. think about the environmental cost.
Marx never said that capitalism fails to build enough things. It's the ownership of those things, and the crises of overproduction that capitalist firms are subject to, that are the problem.
I agree with it. It is trivially true that, as long as housing is allocated under capitalist rules, there is not enough housing.
Too many socialists fixate on the fact that, if the Red Army swept through tomorrow, there would be enough housing. This sort of thinking is unhelpful and unrealistic. People are unhoused and unable to afford rent now. A diversity of strategies is key. We should be pursuing public housing, making Section 8 an entitlement, land trusts, co-ops, but also replacing anything that's not already multifamily housing with multifamily housing.
yeah, there's plenty of housing, something like 20 housing units for each homeless person, and of course homeless families could live together. and that's not even considering underutilized housing.
it's the first premise in the tweet that's wrong. capitalism has built more than enough housing, and then it deliberately and violently prohibits the use of that housing in order to extract rents from the working class.
Housing does not sit empty to extract rent, because then it would no longer be empty. The reason housing sits empty meanwhile housing prices in big cities are sky high is because the empty housing is in places nobody wants to live. Sure you could move to that empty house in nowhere, Nebraska, but then what will you do for work, groceries, how will you see your family?
It remains true that capitalism has failed to build enough housing - in places where it's needed
Not really. Major US cities have extremely low vacancy rates. Technically there are more “empty houses” than homeless people, but those houses are in places people don’t live, only temporarily empty between residents, or so run down they aren’t livable. If I live in New York City an empty house in Buttfuck, Kansas isn’t particularly helpful.
Yup a huge number of those "empty houses" are vacation properties.
And as much as that probably trips flags about being owned by rich people that's not the reality a lot of the time.
I promise you there aren't a lot of people, even homeless people, that want to live full time in an unwinterized cabin with no cell service or internet a 30 minute drive from the nearest small town grocery store.
socialism is just using the power of central planning and the guiding principle of equality for all people of the world to take a society from where it is right now to where you want it to be. There's nothing better about a socialism where you have to build all the housing versus a socialism where the housing was already built and you can just appropriate it, except that maybe the latter will allow you to house everyone more quickly and cheaply.
Pictographs can be fun like that. Like the character for "fire" 火 looks kinda like a camp fire. You got your little pyramid of wood and two little "flames" coming off it.
And decommodification of housing. People are hording real estate as an investment. Its the only thing left under late stage capitalism that accumulates value.
I think an important aspect that is being missed is that capitalism didn't "fail" to build enough houses or to redistribute them or whatever. Capitalists don't want to house the homeless, it's a conscious political and economic decision. Capitalists are not incompetent, if something sucks under capitalism you can be 100% sure that it's by design, and you should never accept a different explanation. Capitalists are evil, they are not stupid.
This means that while you can and should definitely fight to mitigate homelessness under capitalism, it will never truly go away as long as the system is standing. The landowning class is simply not going to allow it.
Yes correct the problem is there’s enough, but it’s all in the hands of greedy bastards who have too much and squeeze everyone else from ever working hard enough to ever get it.
I like it because it cuts to the crux of the issue.
Housing has slowed down in building and housing demand has climbed up while supply stays low. Not to mention that capitalism has made a whole lot of different housing types illegal, betraying its own free market principles for the sake of investors that never do anything useful. From a capitalist standpoint, it would be one thing if investors funded housing projects to be built and took a cut of a landlord's rent because their investment made that project possible. But real estate investing is even worse. Buy house, do nothing, maybe stop all new housing from being built, and thanks to economic crisis after crisis, your house quintupled in value. How sell it, rinse and repeat. No new wealth is created, no problems are being solved, no one is even getting a delicious pizza in the shape of Garfield's head. You just get money for being lucky enough to have stuff.
I do think that we need a housing Stalin in order to build fucktons of more housing. If that means the entirety of the Bay Area becomes Hong Kong 2, then so bet it.
Socialism: it will get you out of your parents basement.
Honestly that's a great tweet. In America, the way cities are built is horrible. Half of them are captured by existing land owners and can't change anything, and the other half are a totally subject to the whims of developers. Car hell is everywhere. Meanwhile urban population is generally growing.
When there are more people in your city, they need more places to live. When your city's infrastructure is bad, you need to do work to make it better. If there was a socialist party in power, hopefully we would be doing both.
Obviously we have capitalism now, and it's mostly true that there are enough houses to give everybody a place to live. But under the current system there is no mechanism to give those houses to those who need them. So if you're just trying to reduce harm right now, you still need to build more housing. Also, more co-ops or public housing would create more communities where general leftwing organization can happen.
Based on the government numbers, here’s the breakdown of the 61,000 units:
More than 18,000 are currently on the market seeking renters or are for sale.
More than 11,000 are listed as rented or sold but “not occupied,” meaning that the new renters or owners had not moved in as of the day of the Census interview.
More than 10,000 are “occasional use” homes, which could be vacation homes, pied-a-terres, or in many cases short-term rentals.
More than 21,000 fall into the broad “other vacant” category: Some are foreclosed, some belong to people who for various reasons (family, work, very long vacation) are out of town most of the time. There are also homes locked up in probate or inheritance limbo, homes getting fixed up but not yet listed, homes that are condemned or waiting for demolition — the list goes on and on.
okay, so of the 60000 vacant houses, 18000 are actively prohibiting people from using them unless the landlords can extract rent or sale value right now, 10000 are vacation homes that are actively prohibiting people from using them because they belong to a rich asshole who only uses it for vacation, and 21000 fall into a variety of categories such as a. the bank owns it and doesn't want anyone living there, b. we're not sure who owns it, so until we can figure it out nobody gets to live there, or c. the owner just doesn't live there and doesn't want other people living there. some of them may be unfit for habitation, okay, so at the high end there are maybe 20000 homes that are either condemned, being renovated, or someone's about to move in but it didn't get caught in the census.
that's still 40000 unused, empty homes compared to a homeless population in the city of san francisco of about 8000. that's all using 2022 data.
there are 5 times more empty, usable homes than there are unhoused people in a major u.s. city with one of the worst "housing crises" in the country, and they are sitting empty because the landlords want rent or because the owner doesn't want anyone living there.