this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I don't get people that have such a visceral reaction to apartments (the horror). What they write is frankly hilarious how they think. Right up there with what they write about transit (ohhh noooo) and electric stoves [sobbing noises].
There's a pretty big spectrum though. On the one hand you have people in suburbs or in-city suburbs complaining about not building the occasional apartment building, essentially because they're scared of poor people, but then on the other hand you have people living in dense desirable mid sized cities watching them get manhattanized and have their relatively dense yet still pleasant row houses get torn to build rows of ugly skyscrapers that block sunlight from even reaching street level.
The shift of housing from being predominantly individually owned to being parts of major buildings has also come along with the corporatization of real estate, where individuals have less choice, less freedom, and are in many many cases, are being actively exploited by for profit landlords and real estate developers.
Yes, we need to density and build more apartments but people on the left these days who I normally agree with are so laser focused on building housing at all costs that they don't even realize that they're racing to the bottom. By today's standards Jane Jacobs, basically the founder of the entire modern urbanism movement, would be a NIMBY just because she advocated for making sure that cities remain livable rather than just building at all costs.
Let's build way more low and mid rise apartment buildings, and let's build way more transit so that cities other than just the major ones are livable without a car, let's ban airbnb, and let's severely tax real estate and landlord profits to prevent them from hoarding supply. And yeah we're gonna have to build some high rises, but let's not pretend like replacing all of our individual housing with towers is universally a great thing.
You're showing exactly what I said.
Fake association that people in apartments are poor. Don't know if you hold that idea, but you're repeating it
You've now defined them as ugly and thus undesirable.
Now you say apartments are against freeeeeddooomm lol.
As if you can't own a condo.
Or if we increase apartments builds then there will be actual competition. Instead of the current scarcity. Basic supply and demand.
Not like we have a mf housing crisis. Noooo.
Now you suggest that building apartments makes things unlivable! The very place people live is somehow unlivable. Or that apartments inherently make the surrounding area undesirable.
Yeah. Visceral reaction to apartments. Peace.
It's pretty obvious I don't, and if you think accurately describing the misguided motivations of people counts as repeating propaganda, then you must live in a pretty thick bubble.
They are.
You have to buy the condo from a corporation, you have to pay condo fees to a condo board that is out of your control, and much of the quality of your home is determined by the original corporation that built it, as well as that board that you have no real control over and typically pays out maintenance, repairs, upgrades, etc. to other corporations.
I advocated for increasing apartment builds. I also advocated for numerous other measures to increase rental supply, I just didn't advocate for blindly buying the developer propaganda and letting them build high rise after high rise.
So since we have a food supply crisis we should all stop cooking and hand over all food control to corporations that will sell us back bland nutrition paste?
They literally do. Go live in Manhattan, it sucks. Sunlight literally doesn't hit street level except for at noon because you've put a bunch of gargantuan towers everywhere. Go look at a complex like Habitat 67 that actually tried to make apartments pleasant to live in instead of just being the cheapest they can possibly be to maximize developer profit. Go look at the size of Walmart parking lots in small towns that are the size of entire Manhattan blocks. Yes we need to densify, no we don't need to necessarily build blindly and continue just letting the free market decide what gets built where.
Yeah, not having a visceral reaction to anything, just plainly stating their benefits and downsides, though you seem to be having a visceral reaction to any perceived criticism of apartments whatsoever.
Fucking tell me about it. The best part is how they try to justify how they are only focused on themselves by shit like calling apartments "inhumane." JFC, living in an apartment is not inhumane. Living on the street is inhumane.
Why do you think people are living this way? Do you think it's personal failure or maybe desperation? Where else do they have to go? If you tear down the buildings but don't address the root problem, do you think they will just stop existing or will they be forced to find a new spot to live? Were these places always this way? What would you like me to call them?
Please continue making assumptions about my personal life and deriding me for my choice of words rather than contributing something useful. I try to meet people where they are at, which means speaking to what they know. In this case, you seem to know the symptom, but not the cause.