Political Memes

Investment vehicle. Buy and keep it empty, in a few years, use the value increase as collateral to buy more.

Brutalism may not be the most aesthetically pleasing architecture style but, damn, did it house a lot of people who would've died.

i'd argue that's there's nothing depressing about homelessness if you divorce it from cultural ideas about the housed, the houseless, comfort and class and laws.

what are you lacking if you have no home? no netflix? no bed? people survived without those things for thousands of years. what they're lacking is dignity and freedom.

you have no agency as a living being when you're 'homeless'--you can't hunt here because it's owned land; you can't park here because it's owned land, you can't build a shelter because it's owned land, etc.

without those restrictions plenty of people would choose to be homeless.

"Communism bad because [thing that happens in capitalism]*", vol. 69

Meanwhile, in God's Own Chosen Land, all apartment complexes are one of two shitty design options and we get fleeced for the "privilege" of living there. Fuck it all, dammit

I would rather have a few boring tall buildings and lots of nature than lots of single family homes and way less nature.

Criminalised homelessness that enslaves you in the prison system

Any new housing is still helpful for alleviating the crunch. If a rich people see a fancy new apartment and move in, that leaves the old places they had occupied available to be rented or bought and they have to be offered at a relative discount to what they would have been otherwise because the rich people prefer the fancy new place. (Note: if people in that area are snapping up housing at a faster rate than housing is being made available, that would still manifest as rising prices but with the prices rising at a slower rate than they would have otherwise.) That’s an opportunity for the less rich people to secure a spot where the rich people used to be, so they move out of their older and less nice places and so on to relocate. Within five years or so that propagates down the vacancy chain and opens up low income housing as well.

Also many times any kind of new apartment is called “luxury” as a marketing gimmick since it’s not really a controlled term and it makes people think of it as a more attractive place to live.

More housing needs to be built to alleviate the housing crisis. Unfortunately with housing also doubling for many as their largest investment and a retirement vehicle all rolled in one, people get absolutely furious if anything is done that would appreciably reduce the price of housing. Because homeowners make up so much of society and particularly politically influential society those interests are very politically difficult to take on.

the first fallacy is that this was "left-wing" architecture.

It was just boring architecture from Russia, built rapidly during a time of extreme homelessness. And it addressed that problem more than fatcat hate.

I would rather have a shitty roof over my head than no roof.

There are far better options for visually pleasant housing than these Soviet Union era blocks.

Like, seeing so many of these in Poland or other post-Soviet countries is just sad. They’re grey, neglected, and the people who are forced to choose them don’t have any other option.

We could have affordable housing that has some proper aesthetics. Just got to take care of the real estate developer mafias around the world first.

Go to the poor neighborhood in any city in America and its just as sad. Go to a poor rural area and it's worse.

I know several very conservative people that believe all government buildings, or ones that receive any government funding, should be featureless concrete rectangles with no other whatsoever.

So i didn't know what this dude's talking about .

People of that opinion should really read Brian Goldstone's "There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America." Compared to other G7 countries, US is, indeed, a shithole country.

Alterlaa in Vienna from the 70s

I'm pretty sure a lot of the people mocking socialist architecture became really quiet when a data center was dropped next to their suburb.

Those things were created as alternative to substandard housing. My problem is, we dont see them as wellfare housing but the "new normal". Industry relies too hard on ppl living in those and paying too low wages.

Also, i dont care about visuals here but growing up in one of those, there's too little free space for human worthy life. Playgrounds covered in trash, srynges, dogpoop. Anything with grass covered in dogpoop. Sketchy people trying to snatch children being a daily occurance.

Its just too many people in one place. Not a left/right problem though.

I would kill to live in a brezhnevka.