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I don't know why you think if the government controlled housing things would be better. Let me give you some insight into government controlled military housing is (even though they privatized it).
A military member receives BAH (housing allowance) monthly. If they live in military housing they don't see a dime of it. They pay for their own rental insurance, if they want a fence they can rent it to a tune of 30-40 per month or buy it themselves and install it, they go over X amount of power and water they pay extra for it also all out of their own pockets. Sometimes the housing is twice or three times older than the member themselves (lets just say my mom was surprised the house she lived in when she was 7 is still standing). Even some of the military housing in some locations don't even have AC. So it sucks when a heat wave comes through.
If they (military member, spouse, or kids) cause issues they can get kicked out of the housing. It's also federal property so if you break a law you're out of there. You can get in trouble if your flower beds are not maintained and also if your yard is not too. Speaking of kids, some kids have to share rooms also.
The housing we lived in prior to buying our house had mold growing in places, we were always sick, we even had a rodent issue that they could not seem to fix. After that, we do everything we can to NOT live on base/post. If they want to do construction behind you, guess what they are going to do it. You have no option but to sit and watch half of the yard you wanted to fence in for your kids disappear.
That is government ran military housing is like. It's not always greener on the other side.
At least it is a roof so you are not on the street! And the place your mother was at was bad because funding for government housing projects has been hemorrhaged for decades. If we get the government building more places again then you wouldn't have had to live in a house that was half a century old.
My opinion is that government funding should go to private developers to build rental units for working class people. That funding was stripped back in the 1980s and when the money ran out in the late 80s the multi-family housing building came to a trickle.
Ideally we won't have to have the government needing to build more apartments itself, but the clock is ticking! This is straight up scary, everything I'm reading on the internet and all the graphs showing the proof. Our nationwide rental crisis is now late stage and if our private sector doesn't do something to get more affordable multi-family housing units built the government WILL have to get involved. The longer we let this problem fester the more the calamity will be and the more the government will have to do to fix the problem, even if the fix is less than ideal.
And all the stuff you mentioned about breaking rules and getting kicked out, private sector rental properties do that too! If you get kicked out for you or your kids behavior you even have to still make payments on your lease.
At least it is a roof so you are not on the street! And the place your mother was at was bad because funding for government housing projects has been hemorrhaged for decades. If we get the government building more places again then you wouldn't have had to live in a house that was half a century old.
And all the stuff you mentioned about breaking rules and getting kicked out, private sector rental properties do that too! If you get kicked out for you or your kids behavior you even have to still make payments on your lease.
You screw up and get kicked out in the private sector it does not affect your job aka your lively hood as much as it does in the military world.
This rental crisis has been brewing for a long, long time, since the late 1980s. What is going to happen to renters in the next recession? The cost of renting sure isn't going to go down due to shortage of supply, we are just going to have millions more that can't afford rents.
I think they should build newer stock. Why are they still using homes from the 1920s?
They have built some. I would think it's too expensive to completely rebuild. They have remodeled some also. Including the one my mom and her 3 brothers lived in (it was a 3 bedroom house). Our old house they ended up putting carpet over the parquet wood floors and new vinyl in it over the 1950's stuff that was there.
This rental crisis has been brewing for a long, long time, since the late 1980s. What is going to happen to renters in the next recession? The cost of renting sure isn't going to go down due to shortage of supply, we are just going to have millions more that can't afford rents.
We are transitioning to a new feudalism of multigenerational rent serfdom, where exorbitant rents ensure most renters never accumulate a down payment sufficient to buy a home, and there will never again be sufficient filtering of rental stock to make older rentals affordable to the poor.
First, there's the general willingness of consumers (remember that houses and apartments are consumption goods just like anything else) to pay more for "experiences" -- stuff they can post on Facebook. There's enough of a demand nowadays for the experience of living in a trendy city.
Second, there's the fact that America is getting bought out by foreigners. It's politically correct to say that the wealthy Chinese who buy up the lakefront properties in my beautiful West Coast city are "investing" in America, but what they're really doing is buying up America. What did you think the Chinese were going to do with those $50 billion/month in U.S. dollars they get from our trade deficit?
Third, there is definitely a Housing-Industrial Complex that has an interest in there being a shortage of housing so they can extract higher rents.
Fourth, there's the population increase. Sure, you can flood the market with high-rise apartments, which then makes the area crowded and decreases the standard of living for everyone due to fewer good views, fewer parking spots, more crowded parks, etc.
Fifth, there's the fact that although the size of apartments is going down with respect to price, the quality and amenities are going up. For example, my brand-new apartment complex has a community swimming pool, fire pits, movie theater room, fitness center, wifi lounge and more.
Who exactly is the Housing Industrial Complex? Lets put actual names to it so that it isn't some conspiracy theory about people getting together in some dark room to make housing decisions in some national scale to screw the little guy.
Much of the rental market is comprised of individual people who own an extra house or maybe a few, they aren't part of some unseen group trying to manipulate a majority of the rental markets. It doesn't work that way.
Then, about this tax payer money going to developers idea as put forth. So, who gets to decide which developer is going to get that money hmmm? Some committee of concerned citizens or the same politicians some have said should being fixing what they claim.is now broken?
There are hundreds of millions of people in the USA and for most, planning results in their having a place to call home, either they buy a house or rent.
It seems like the biggest concern here is for government housing for people unwilling to accept their part in not doing what needs to be done to obtain adequate housing and that naturally bleeds over past housing and into redistribution of wealth. See how that works? Starts out as housing but then turns into taking money from those who work and give it to those not earning it.
This has been tried in society after society, the appetite for the wealth of others by those not earning it is insatiable, there is no end until earning stops and the government is the means and the end to life.
In every society where the redistribution of wealth and the nanny state has been tried it has failed or is failing. None have prospered.
Of course, there is communism but that isn't for this country and even those proposing government supplied everything are unwilling to move to countries with that form of government. That in itself is strange since they advocate for it but use alternate words to describe it.
To be clear, it doesn't appear that anyone here is talking about those unable to obtain affordable housing because of physical or mental defect or disability nor those who need temporary help to overcome special circumstances after which they get out of those circumstances.
On the contrary, the so called needs seem to be relegated to the portion of the population which thinks working, or not, is justification enough to require all others to provide them with a home regardless that they've not contributed enough to their own lives to make that happen.
That segement of the population is satisfied, in the short run just to have something provided by someone else at some else's expense. Later however; they too want more and then reaching into other people's pockets to get it becomes the norm instead ofbthe exception.
You can read the sense of entitlement right here, the avoidance of responsibility because there is always a "they" to blame things on but never an "I" or "Me".
That artificially jacks up the rent in urban areas.
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