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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

It's not like landlords provide housing to fulfill human need, they only serve people with money. Rent control might make them sad and build less, that's why we need to go further and provide universal public housing.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/housing-crisis-rent-landl...

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Tell that to people living in NY public housing...

"Imagine paying rent for a home with rats, cockroaches, lead paint and mold. That’s what far too many of the estimated 600,000 residents of New York City public housing are doing, even after a lead paint scandal led to an investigation by federal prosecutors." [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/opinion/new-yorks-public-...

Yes, when you make programs target only the poor it breeds resentment and makes them vulnerable to conservative attack. Thus they get defunded, look like crap, and people can point to them and say they suck. Making them universal creates a mass constituency like social security and Medicare that is protective.

I don't think by any measurements the NY State/City gov'ts and/or New York Times can be called conservative.

I would call them a mixture of conservative and liberal. They share in common an interest in preserving the power of capital and private property. I am not a liberal, but am a leftist.

I used the word conservative not because it's 100% accurate (liberals are conservative compared to leftists though so it still is accurate), but because it's the word that people more immediately understand.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/public-housing-social-wel...

So the way it’s run is not the problem, it’s that we’re not spending money?

Kind of like public schools?

No, we don't need anything fancy or government funded. We just need to let builders build.

We have more empty houses than homeless people by >> 3x. This is a problem of distribution. Also, why should I pay someone who does nothing for me 1/3 or more of my income? They just own a piece of paper, thus extract rents and victimize people that can't pay. People must be housed, the landlords should be cast out into the cold.

I agree with you on the first point but not sure I understand the second. People had to pay to build or buy the property. For example, my uncle built a 12 unit apartment building. He paid the mortgage on it, maintained it, and took care of it for 30 years until the mortgaged was paid off. Was he victimizing the people that paid him to live there?

If he evicted any of them, refused reasonable accommodations, or made a profit off it in excess of the labor and services he provided.

This is an old joke, but why should we show any deference to a person we literally call Lord?

Depends on how much he was charging. I have no problem with paying to cover the cost of running the building, including labor, but I do take issue with my rent payment being used to pay off a bimmer while the building falls apart.

Full blown commie blocs make more sense than rent control. If you're going to give stuff out for free, just go all the way. The government trying to make a compromise that depends on straining the market in some artificial way never ends well. It's the same with healthcare. Look at that mess. It was better when it was free market and would probably be better socialized, but in between it's trash.

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