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Comment by swarnie | Hacker News Reader

> mixed income public housing

Maybe its just my country and the way we do things but these words dont make sense in this order. What do you mean by public housing?

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Public housing is housing owned and managed by the government. It could be the same copy paste apartment blocks but owned by your city or state government. Despite public housing always being connected to affordable housing, it does not have to be affordable housing to be public housing.

I'm talking about publicly subsidized housing construction, along the lines of Singapore model[1].

Public housing in the US is stigmatized because there's a focus on the deliberately ghettoized, designed-to-fail low income housing that was built in the 20th century. This is held up as the definition of public housing, but there are other version of it that were and are successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Singapore also has "draconian" laws, so it may not be as easy to replicate.

Vienna has great public housing and is probably closer to the US culturally in some ways.

100%, Vienna would be my other example of how to do it right.

The US 'attempt' to do public housing is like your child, being told to wash the dishes, simply smashes all the dishes and says that this chore is impossible because look, all the dishes got broken. Meanwhile the kids next door have built an entire dishwashing machine in the time your child spent complaining it wasn't possible.

Which housing related laws are "draconian"?

A high percentage of public housing is not the only solution to limit rent prices: any non-market housing is often enough to keep the prices down, although public housing is the most proeminent across the world, associative housing work very well, and can be taken from existing stock (friends of mine inherited 4 appartments and let them be rented by an association, a sort of 20 years free lease where the only obligation for the association is to take care of the renovations and keeping the appartments appliances up to date).

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