How European-Style Public Housing Could Help Solve The Affordability Crisis

[The North One]

A massive expansion of public housing is sorely needed and is the most obvious solution to many problems currently ailing the US. It's just that this country refuses to pay for it. Too busy handing out billions to apartheid Israel instead of American people I guess.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Here's a different idea: set up a not-for-profit crown corporation dedicated to building housing.

If this was a viable solution that could work in a capitalist system it would have happened already. But capitalism doesn't work, doesn't fit the housing needs of the people and that's exactly the problem.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by muppet

?? erm, are you talking about the native British population? If you are they don't get counted as Foreign Born, as well, they're not foreign born, whether they be Northern Irish, Welsh, Scottish or English, they were born within the singular borders of the United Kingdom. The rest are done from nationality by foreign country of origin (and if they're not a sovereign country, their colony/ territory), as recorded by the ONS (Office of National Statistics) using the National Insurance applications data. For example anyone from the hundreds of disparate communities in India would get counted under the one category of Indian rather than say Punjabi or Sikh etc.

https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/n...ionals-borough

I'm not sure why we're still talking about this?

sorry, but then again that is england's fault for diving the little island up every way til tuesday. maybe there is a direct link for your chart that describes all the so-called countries on its graph? i mean dont let me catch you with wales, scotland, isle of man, etc. on that list lol.

if no that's ok, just bustin yr nuts, lets drop it.

[muppet]

ok man, but just go on that link and scroll right on any of those lists. It's a foreign born count, and trust me, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are absent. If they were being counted as 'foreign' by the official census peeps would go berserk (by implying England is the most important of all the united kingdoms, and after 700 years of war and intrigue not to say that).


If for example people born in Scotland were counted they would become one of the biggest communities (nearing 200,000), pushing London's count up from 5 to 6 100,000+ communities. As it stands those are the Indians, Poles, Bangladeshis, Nigerians and Irish (ROI). No Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish.

(In reality the Romanians should be up there too -they jumped by 100,000 alone in 2017 -but that's another story).

[austin242]

Austin has been trying something similar.
Here are some of examples of low income or subsidized. The only problem is that we are not building enough . housing.https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2471...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.3041...7i16384!8i8192
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2719...7i16384!8i8192

[Qubert]

Speaking as someone in NYC, the sad reality is that class and racial resentment has poisoned the ability for something like this to ever be implemented on a wide scale here. Moral panic over "displacement" has caused socioeconomic diversity to fall by the wayside as a social good.

[nito]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

This is the wonderful European style public housing:

It would be foolish to say that council housing in Europe is some sort of utopia, many mistakes were made, and in the UK many of these post-WWII estates are now being redeveloped to rectify issues that were created. The problem with Grenfell had nothing to do with the tenant status however, because the same cladding was applied to private residential blocks. The episode was a colossal cock-up from manufacturing through to certification and installation.

Originally Posted by jtown,man

I love how Muppets graph lumped all of the Americas into ONE category.

I wonder if that makes NYC look a little less diverse?! Of course, it does, and it was done on purpose. Lying by statistics.

My original research was based on the country grouping by the Office for National Statistics, a project which then amalgamated data from the USCB and StatsCan. All of Asia – a far larger and diverse grouping of territories than the America’s – comes under one group. There isn’t a conspiracy to devalue New York because it is still behind London in terms of total, country count and several threshold counts.

Originally Posted by mrnyc

no doubt for london they divide up the british isles or whatever they want to call it that will juice their stats to look best to beat ny, into a dozen or so different cultures, whereas usa would count it as one culture, england.

People born elsewhere across the British Isles (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Channel Islands, etc…) but excluding the Republic of Ireland don’t count as foreign born.

Originally Posted by lio45

I can see his point though. An Irish living in London (the culturally closest world city) counts as foreign born. Same with a Continental from just over the channel.

If people born in New Jersey or Connecticut counted as foreign born, NYC's stats would be through the roof... (as it is, a good chunk of NYC's Caribbean community - Puerto Ricans - aren't even counted!)

A much better metric would be % who didn't have English as their native language. No idea how these cities would rank then, but it would more closely match reality.

Cultural differences aren’t based on geographic distance; try telling people from the Republic of Ireland or France that they are synonymous with New Jersey or Connecticut relative to London and New York! Puerto Rico is an interesting situation but isn’t a foreign country.

Linguistic comparisons are notoriously hard due to where lines are drawn unlike say country of birth. Nigeria has 500 native languages for example. Based on London’s broader range of foreign-born communities from countries which have greater linguistic diversity, I’d suspect London is ahead of New York.

[10023]

Hopefully it isn’t as much of an eyesore as the vast majority of British council (public) housing.

And Americans are looking at this through rose coloured glasses as well. Housing estates (as they are called here) have all sorts of problems, beyond having destroyed the streetscape in parts of British cities (“towers in a park” don’t work anywhere, even if they are only 4 stories tall). It’s just that European society has historically lacked the violent crime, weapons and long-standing racial divides of the US.