Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by AlexTWithBeard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

AlexTWithBeard

The cycle works like this:

- we have people who live in subpar conditions

- let's build some cheap houses and rent them at discount to those in need

- actually not that cheap: why is that only rich people deserve to have a balcony?

- within a decade the houses turn into a ghetto

- oh, but there is a research which suggests if people actually owned the houses instead of just renting them, they would stop throwing garbage on the floors. So we sell these houses at discount.

- goto step 1

View on HN

In New York, they were deliberately intended to become ghettos, or at best a place to sequester the city's poor.

http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-l...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/nyregion/how-new-york-cit...

"Mayor John V. Lindsay, who took office in 1965, was determined to break this cycle, to put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods. He tried, memorably, in 1971 in Forest Hills, Queens, figuring that the community’s predominantly liberal Jewish population would not object to the arrival of three 24-story towers. He was wrong. The construction site was soon overrun with angry protesters."

I have to wonder, does anyone, yourself included, want projects in their neighborhood? And more importantly, is there evil dirt in 'bad' neighborhoods that makes housing projects become high-crime ghettos, and if we just build them in middle-class neighborhoods with good dirt instead, everyone's going to behave and make it a nice place to live?

I can tell you, living in an extremely liberal, formerly low-crime small city that in the past decade decided to "put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods" and even offered section 8 vouchers to random people from a big city hundreds of miles away to move in, it's been a catastrophe. Spreading crime and dysfunction around isn't really better than quarantining it.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I think the general line of thinking is that it's concentration of poverty that causes these kinds of problems in the first place. Now that the problems exist, spreading the poverty around as you point out won't make the problems go away.

I'm sure there has been research done on this, I will try to find some references.

Sorry, I don't buy it.

First, there are buses going to Long Island beaches (Jones Beach, specifically).

Second, a place becomes a ghetto not because there's no nice park nearby. A district becomes a ghetto because people who live there deface the walls and throw garbage on the streets.

It doesn't always work like this. In the Netherlands you can find big parts of the cities built by housing corporations with people renting them for decades, yet very few of them you can define as ghettos

I don't know how you guys do it, but Netherlands keeps amazing me.

An absolutely fantastic country.

Building houses can help prevent homelessness, but it can't treat the socioeconomic causes that makes folks homeless in the first place. You can't "just" build houses - you have to treat income disparity and the massive wealth gap at the same time.

Don't forget:

-Ah, the federal government pushed/incentivized us to give mortgages to people who have poor odds of paying them back

-Economy or housing market downturns a bit

-A bunch of people can't pay their mortgages

-Major recession

Reply on news.ycombinator.com