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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

> build the affordable housing people actually want.

And the unspeakable little problem that people don't want to live around the people who will be living in the affordable housing people actually want. Hence, NIMBY.

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This is an interesting point. So the housing problem is (at least partially) a crime problem? Because I don't think there's anything that makes low income housing _inherently_ unpleasant to live next to; it's more a question of how the people who live there tend to conduct themselves, and to what extent that behavior is tolerated by the local authorities. I don't often see people complaining about living next to affordable senior living centers, so it's not really the income level of the residents that's the problem.

It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - which has nothing to do with crime, I hasten to add - are not defiling their beautiful suburb.

I’ve never been to the US, so I don’t have a good idea of what it is like there, but over here I lived for a couple years in a poorer district of Warsaw, where I would never be able to get good sleep, because there would either be a neighbour screaming out of nowhere in the middle of the night, or a party going on with music on full blast a floor up the whole night. Every night. Police wouldn’t do anything about the noise. It was also commonly accepted to smoke in the stairwell, leaving the cigarette dust on the floor in little dunes. A couple times I found a big pile of crap (once it was literally cow crap size) left in the middle of the first pavement tile at the exit of the building. I moved to a more expensive district. One of the best decisions I made in my life for my mental health. So it’s not a crime problem, but it is a real problem of public order, tidiness, peacefulness etc.

> a real problem of public order, tidiness, peacefulness

Side note: that's part of what I meant by "crime". Usually in the states there are laws or ordinances enforcing such things even if they're not necessarily criminal statutes.

It's possible some of it is simple prejudice. But personally I'd bet the bigger factor is that people don't want drug deals and gunfights happening right outside their house. (How much of that fear is rational vs prejudice, I'm not sure, but I'd bet it's a lot more than "none at all".)

I don't have anything concrete to substantiate this assertion though (no more than you gave anyway), so I guess we'll just agree to disagree on this point...

This here. You can't fix housing problem in a bubble. You need to solve healthcare, public transit and more. It needs to be handled as a complex unit with solutions advanced in parallel.

I think this may be changing as older Americans realize it is their own middle class children who need affordable housing in order to live close by with grandchildren.

Retireees wanting to see their main investment vehicle lose value so their lazy kids who can't bootstrap themselves into a home as hard as they did can live near them?

That's the funniest thing I've read all week.

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