It’s fine, but it depends on upkeep. Just like any other housing. It was a good idea, but needs funding (like roads, bridges, etc.).

Plenty of people live in unmaintained apartments owned by slumlords, but nobody’s saying “look at how bad private housing is!” Few people (dummies) say “look how bad public roads are!” and advocate private toll roads and bridges.

You must not live in Chicago.

I’ve been lazy on Lemmy and just stopped searching for new lemmyverses after I hopped off reddit. But I really doubt you’re gonna find good political discourse on the Internet. I’m really disappointed everywhere I turn and I’d rather participate in real life action than argue during the few free hours I have.

The UBI crowd takes theses studies and uses them to say ‘UBI works’ or ‘UBI can work’ even though it’s not UBI.

That’s a bit disengenuous. Of course people acknowledge that economic policy is difficult to experiment with.

People serious about UBI talk about phasing it in over a long period of time, in lieu of “experiments”. For example in Australia we already have refundable tax rebates (I’m sure everyone has these I just don’t know what they’re called), all you’d have to do would be to introduce a $1,000 refundable tax rebate and increase that by $1,000 each year until you get to a reasonable UBI. If, along the way the data showed deleterious effects then you could correct or discontinue.

I’ve been a proponent for UBI for a long time however after reading your comments I agree with you.

In reality, I’ve advocated for UBI because I feel the govt should provide these basic services. However in reality UBI does just seem like a means to an end.

We really should just redefine what “utilities” are (including internet, phone, public transit tickets, etc) and then provide basic access to utilities for free.

That would require an entire reworking of our economic system, whereas giving everyone $1000 a month would not.

For an anecdotal example, when I was in my 20s I worked with an old lady at a fish market who had to strictly regulate the number of hours she worked in a year because she couldn’t afford to make above a certain amount of money. If she went into the next higher tax bracket, she would’ve been kicked off her social security, and regardless of how many hours she worked, wouldn’t be able to make up for the lost money.

Another interesting benefit I’ve heard of from a similar study that gave everybody above a certain age in a town $1,000 a month, but was focused on the impact to the labor pool, was that almost everybody continued to work except for in two categories: pregnant women and high-school students. This coincided with an increase in the average grades of high-school students, the number of kids who graduated, and the number of kids who continued on to college. The theory was that the kids who would normally have to work to help put food on the table were instead able to focus on their studies.

I was not talking about price controls. I don’t know of the USA but government buybacks of housing stock have helped relieve some of the pressure in Europe as well as purpose built high quality housing like in Vienna.

No, it would BE BOUGHT by government at fair price (they know the fair price, just look your houses tax bill)

Or built by them.

And then rented out with a certain maximum rental price per Sq Mt like 10$ so 50sq m (500sq ft) = 500$/month

Most importantly, they would be obliged to make it Energy efficient by their contract with the state so much lower electric and heating bill, maybe even topped off with solar, would be small percentage of a new building but cut costs for actual people.

Not saying it’s perfect in Holland (they have shortages because no new land available to build new social housing projects), but it sure works!

I kept it deliberately vague, but the main idea is democracy and public accountability, and that we need to take certain things out of corporate hands. Because it only optimizes for profit and not for social benefit or the nation’s benefit. Basically all the fundamental needs of the people need to become a kind of guaranteed basic right - food water shelter education and communication. And there could be multiple different models.

There are widespread and established neoliberal myths now that only “private” institutions can work efficiently and unbiased. Definitely based on Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl, and then perpetrated by the “third way” leftists that declared democracy as an inefficient tool to order society.

But you can establish institutions with more useful motivations and that are more intelligent to withstand things like shortages. With things like healthcare you actually do want less efficiency, e.g. in a pandemic.

Right now it seems unthinkable, but with the climate and other crisis looming it might become feasible. At least if we have the actual ideology “at the ready”.

State owned public housing has worked all around the world. Council houses in the UK for example looked good and helped lots of people get houses, and didn’t really get associated with poor people until Thatcher and her shitty policies. In Finland, like a third of their housing is public housing and they’ve managed to essentially eliminate homelessness this way.

Not exactly. Saying something cannot work can be disproven by showing a single example of it working. There are plenty.

What I am trying to say is that housing should not be run for the sole pursuit of profit. People should own their own house, should own and manage an apartment block collectively, or have institutions that “own” and manage housing not for profit but for social and global benefit. But Individuals or corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own other peoples houses for profit. Or land for that matter. At least not as “capital”.

So you can “own” your own house and keep it for your children but you’re more like a steward, you can’t rent it out or own the housing of lots of people. It would cease to become a commodity and be much cheaper then.

That’s very radical and faces many potential problems but you can’t say it’s erroneous proposition. What you’d need are scientific studies that compare different models in different countries and account for all the variables including political corruption to sabotage public housing. And what benefits can be shown.

I don’t propose state socialism because that kind of total concentration of all economic power was shown to be very corrupt. But we need better models because right now wealth inequality is so vast than most housing is being bought off and concentrated for the 0.1% - which is very similar to state socialism too!

An apartment is a gateway home.

You know you can trust me because I sell high quality health supplements. So you know I care about you.

Shows a bottle marked “Maggoty’s Gainz”, it’s clearly just a relabeled bottle of Scotch.