this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Please, not this again.... Personally, I am a lot in favour of communism. But some people, especially US Americans, have a fundamentally wrong idea about the housing shown in the upper picture.
This is often neither cheap, nor does it reduce homelessness. And it's also not the goal of that kind of rental homes to reduce homelessness.
That is just normal homes of average people in many places.
It's not "cheap housing for everyone".
Those houses were built by state-backed actors to support growing urbanization and create a housing surplus for that urbanization to give the workers more power since they no longer have to deal with aggressively rent-seeking private landlords.
Wait, isn't that communism?
No they weren't built to give "the workers more power". You still have landlords and sometimes hefty prices on these apartments. Depending on the country/city.
Excess housing supply doesn't commoditize housing and give working-class people more choice? Hmm...
No, that's a welfare state
Welfare state would be if the state took over half the rent payments, for example. Building more houses, that are not owned by the government is examplatory of a planned economy and the aspect of doing it to give more negotiating power to the average worker is a communistic idea.
There is a reason why cringe tankie bullshit is the worst enemy of actual leftist policy.
If we are talking about cities, humant colonies are cheapest housing. Buuut kinda crap.
Don't look like rental homes to me.
Why doesn't it look like rental homes? I think it does. We had a lot of buildings built here in Northern Europe where I'm at that they built between 1965-1975 in the suburbs of our capital city when they built a large number of apartments during those years to alleviate the shortage of available homes.
People still live in them today, they are not beautiful but they are functional, and it's all rentals pretty much.
They aren't rental in Russia. And likely in most if not all ex-Soviet states.
How do they not look like rental homes? We have similar building in Germany. They are mostly build by companies and smaller versions of these homes are even build by private people. Because like this you can maximize profit on your property.
Or build affordable housing, if goal is not maximizing profit. They at least aren't rental where I live.
In the 2000s and onwards yes. Because often these were sold to private investors in the capitalization of former communist/socialist countries.
At the time when they were built they did provide a great improvement in housing, especially as most of eastern Europe has been terrible destroyed by the Nazis.
The top picture isn't capitalism; there are no landlords.
What are you talking about? Of course these type of buildings have landlords.
Why do you have to bother me with an inbox notification if you can't even follow what the conversation is about?