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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

I have no problem with public housing but let's call it what it is: a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live in areas they could not otherwise afford. A lottery with much better odds than a multi state powerball, no doubt, but the same concept, with the winnings being distributed as low (heavily subsidized) rent. If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas, then great - maybe this is the best way to make that happen. Some folks just a tad too well off for the lotteries, who otherwise could have squeezed in, will then be priced out. Winners and losers. Reframing the discussion in these terms will at least make it an honest debate.

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> "a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live among the upper class and rich"

This isn't even remotely true in the typical case. It is a lottery, to be a certain, but most NYC public housing is not in rich neighborhoods.

Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class.

There are notable exceptions - the projects on the Lower East Side for example were built when the neighborhood was one of the poorest in Manhattan, but in the past ten years has transformed into a playground for the wealthy with shiny new glass skyscrapers going up every which way.

The public housing system in NYC was neither intended as, nor does it generally have the effect of, mixing the poor with the rich. All of the complexes were built on what was at the time land that nobody ever expected would be worth much, the mixing of economic strata was not a major concern - in fact the design of the public housing system was in large part driven by a desire to segregate the poor.

> Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class.

Maybe 10 years ago, but the Jefferson L stop is mega upper class nice at this point. Indoor climbing gyms next to circus themed bars next to coffee shops with zen gardens, all within quick walks to public housing. Hell, I don't make enough money to get a lease off the Franklin Av stop in Crown Heights, at this point...

No, but seriously, cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function. Ever-rising land and housing costs keep accelerating beyond their marginal wages and compensation.

We already went through this a century ago during the last Industrial Revolution. Jacob Riis photographed all the many people living in the tenements. Society decided this was a terrible thing and that we wanted to at least provide a basic standard of living in America's richest cities. Hence public housing came into being.

Unfortunately it was never properly funded. It used cut-rate materials to do a literal poor man's version of Modernist architecture. Exclusionary zoning meant it could never really be co-located with middle-class or even wealthier areas, so the children of these families never got access to the same quality of public services or schools. When the demographic composition of public housing shifted from poor white families to poor black families, public support for it was just decimated.

> cities at this point require a large base of low-wage service labor to function

It's not really "low-wage" if their rents are being subsidized, randomly.

Here in the UK, once you're in social housing (which we call council housing) you're in for life - which leads to situations like the late Bob Crow earning £150k/year (probably $250k/year equiv) and yet getting his rent paid by taxes levied on people earning a fraction as much. This, he was fond of saying, was in accordance with his socialist principles.

I'd like to see a system where a council house is on a fixed term, say 5 years or 10 years, then it goes to the next person on the waiting list, and you can rejoin the queue at the back if you so desire. That's more than enough time for anyone to make a smooth transition to the rental or homeowner sector.

(Social housing covers local authorities and private housing associations)

I believe many new tenancies are "starter" tenancy agreements; a probation period of 12-18 months. There are also fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies.

Tenancies started before 1989 are somewhat controlled by a council Rent Officer. Applications must be made to increase rent. Tenancies after 1989 experience yearly rent increases, capped to CPI I think.

There are also 'affordable rents', basically a way for housing associations to charge more for rent.

Not disagreeing with you, but social housing is quite different to the pre-1989 era.

I'm a pretty strong critic of NYC's housing policies, but when I read about "Right to Buy" in the UK, I had to conclude that we may be far from the worst!

In the US, tenants in subsidized housing pay 30% of their income as rent, which avoids the specific policy failure you describe.

(Actually, I think they have the option of paying the "contract rent", which is an approximation of the market rate, if that is cheaper for them.)

> If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas

While this may be true, this is definitely not the only way to talk about public housing in New York (i.e. the whole city, not just Chelsea and other hot areas in Manhattan).

We do want disparate classes of people living close together, as there is evidence that this is a highly effective means of alleviating poverty: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/

How many poor people can you stick next to the rich people before the rich people leave for a place where they aren't part of your social experiment?

Not sure, but rich people don't seem to have a problem when the process runs in the opposite direction

I don't understand what this means. They don't mind when poor people move out? Of course they don't.

Unless you are going to legally stop people from moving out, you are going to figure out how much you can keep the factor you apparently need -- rich people -- while letting as many poor people as possible benefit from being in a mixed-income neighborhood.

If I owned property in those well off neighborhoods I would be -pissed-.

What birth lottery did you win?

Who do you expect to work construction building housing only for the rich? To work at bars and restaurants? Basically anything other than jobs that can be done sitting in your underwear at home?

Even if you aren't a bleeding heart, even if you accept greed as positive virtue, you can't expect to live completely separate from the poor, esp the working poor who actually do jobs in the actual city, and many of whom probably start work earlier than you wake up. Do you really want your trash collector to commute in?

Many construction jobs in NYC are highly remunerative, more so even than many jobs that "can be done sitting in your underwear at home". It seems a trend recently to conflate truly low wage jobs -- for example bar back or nursing home aid -- with perceived low status jobs, that nonetheless pay somewhere between pretty and very well -- for example MTA bus driver or union crane operator.

> If we think it's important to have such disparate classes living close together even in high cost of living areas, then great - maybe this is the best way to make that happen.

Yes. I think it's important to have disparate classes living together in a dense urban environment, rather than a homogeneity of wealth.

In fact, I believe that attention to this priority is one of the main reasons that NYC is the greatest city in the history of world civilization, versus the bland expanse of stripmalls, chain retail, and cultural drought that defines the American living experience in many other areas.

> NYC is arguably the greatest city in the history of world civilization (...)

Well then, go on, argue. :-p

There has been quite a few cities in the last few thousand years...

You raise a good point. I haven't been able to think of any other contenders either. I've edited my post accordingly.

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