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Riverside

@ Riverside @reddthat.com

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3
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369
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  • They also had an incredibly corrupt and repressive society

    I've yet to find any serious study talking of "widespread corruption" in the USSR compared to countries of equal level of development. This is entirely vibes-based.

    the poor struggled paid most of their income to basic necessities and the rich paid hardly anything

    Income inequality was the lowest in the USSR in the history of the region, by a long shot. Again, you're making stuff up:

    housing in desirable areas and cities are hardly abundant

    Yes, but housing was primarily accessed through the work union. Housing near a factory went to the workers of said factory, people mainly got to live near where they worked.

    You wanted off the waiting lists, you had to bribe someone

    Again, as if bribes don't happen in capitalism. In capitalism, you don't "bribe" someone to get a house, you're just poor enough not to afford it and you rent for life instead. Waiting lists, while unpleasant, are the more egalitarian solution. How else do you propose distribution of limited housing in a rapidly industrializing country that's moving tens of millions of people from the countryside to cities?

    But I mean, yeah if you wanted to be miner in Siberia and live in a shack housing was cheap. Not so much if you wanted to live Moscow or St Petersberg

    Care to share any of that wonderful data about housing prices in Soviet Leningrad or Moscow? Regardless: your analogy of "being a miner in Siberia" is dumb. Lifestyle in the countryside and in smaller cities was highly subsidized, but that's a good thing. Now hospitals are closed, roads aren't maintained, and schools are left underfunded everywhere outside Moscow and Saint Petersburg, making life especially in non-Slavic regions of Russia much worse than it used to be. It's not that people want to move to Moscow, it's that there are no jobs or infrastructure outside three big cities, and that's really bad for many people. I don't see what you have against living in relatively minor cities like Murmansk, Ulan-Ude or Tomsk, provided there are jobs and infrastructure (which there were).

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  • The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism

    Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don't understand how a referendum can be illegal).

    the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m

    Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn't need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?

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  • So, build the housing socially by legal mandate. Only in capitalism "housing is too cheap" can be a bad thing

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  • Why the fatphobia? No need to insult Mao based on his body.

    Tankies still to this day praise him for executing landlords

    Rightfully so, too. Life expectancy in China doubled under Mao. If India had had its own socialist revolution, it wouldn't be very different from China in terms of life outcomes, unfortunately for them they didn't have one.

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  • Source for the 7mn Khrushchevki? That number seems entirely too low. Maybe you're not counting Brezhnevki? Because I remember figures of more than a million housing units being built yearly.

    While "US becoming communist" is not achievable on the short term, "regulatory policy to improve rent under capitalism through reform" has even less of a background if you ask me. Like, housing is getting worse everywhere under capitalism, and better nowhere. What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?

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  • The USSR had such dorms for students and people in waiting lists for housing, idk if they were technically free but the fee was ridiculous if it existed. Rent, for example, was 3% of the monthly incomes. I do think we should have such social housing, both in flat-form and in dorm-form, for whoever wants to rent a very cheap housing unit.

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  • The post: "rent is a tax that poor people pay TO RICH PEOPLE[...]". The problem is obviously private landlordism, not social housing in the form of rent

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  • I edited my comment and added the second paragraph, not your fault you didn't see it :)

    Communism doesn't actually say anything about wanting everyone's income equal, I've only seen this claim by anticommunists before. Communists simply believe that people should earn according to their labor, and not according to the exploitation of others' labor. For example, the Soviet Union had widespread use of work quotas which, when exceeded, granted workers a higher wage. As an example, the Stakhanovite movement did wide promotion of work effectiveness and of rewarding exemplary workers, both through monetary and through social incentives.

    I personally don't believe there's much place for capitalism at all, but that's a very deep ideological topic that's far beyond the scope of this post. If you're interested on discussing this, however, I'm very open to this topic!

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  • a world without rent entirely is a really stupid idea that only ever seems uttered and promoted by Tankies

    Meanwhile, in the USSR, nobody owned housing privately, most housing was accessed through the work union, and was rented at about 3% of monthly costs. You clearly, CLEARLY haven't ever engaged with a Tankie (such as myself) on the topic of housing.

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  • fair

    market value

    Choose one

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  • I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage

    Holy fuck, my sides. How can you be this BLIND to reality? You fucking said yourself that you have A FAMILY OF WAR REFUGEES PAYING OFF YOUR MORTGAGE. In 30 years time, you'll own a house and those refugees will own what exactly?

    For reference, when the war broke out I was a tenant in Germany. You know what I did? I HOUSED a Ukrainian refugee in MY OWN DAMN HOME for NO COST, because I'm not a piece of shit

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  • What's "a fair price"? 1% over production + maintenance costs is already exploitative, in the sense that rich people who can afford to buy the flats will do so because they will get passive income from it, and poor people who can't afford housing will be forced to rent at prices higher than otherwise.

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  • Let's translate yours: "I cannot conceive of a social housing system similar to that of social healthcare, in which people are guaranteed housing at affordable prices by law"

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  • Well, yes, I'm a communist, but seeing the housing in literally every western capitalist country suffering from the same issues, I have 0% of hope that the issue of housing will be solved within capitalism. Capitalists are in power and they're the ones owning the housing, so they simply will prevent legislation from passing unless forced by worker organizing.

    I don't see why communism is equated with minimal houses though, housing size is more or less proportional to the wealth of the country and less so to ideological stuff. The USSR is famous for small socialist flats because most were built during industrialization in a post-war condition. East-Germany flats from the 1980s, for example, are much larger.

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  • Then the government will need to purchase the houses / apartments from the current owners

    Expropriation can be carried out without purchase, and it has been done in several countries to the great benefit of the workers. No need to pay for the housing of the landlords, we can just take it at gunpoint.

    Then you’d still be paying rent, just to the government instead which will mostly go towards paying administrators that don’t care or do anything just like current landlords

    Who says the housing has to be centrally administered? Housing could absolutely be organized by local collectives in charge of the maintenance of the buildings after its construction, likely in the form of democratically elected councils. As an example, most access to housing in the USSR was through the work's union, not through the central government.

    Unless you mean all social government owned housing should be free

    No, people should pay costs to maintain it. For example, rent in the USSR was about 3% of the monthly income. Seems much better than what I pay now!

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  • See there’s an issue you want a one size fits all that’s never going to happen

    It's happened historically in several countries, whereas georgism has happened in a total of 0.

    Well through public ridicule or at gunpoint I’d imagine

    Great. Now, who are the people organizing and agitating the workers to gather the numbers and strength to do this at gunpoint? Hint: again, not the Georgists

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  • you will barely find anyone outside your family willing to lend you a home

    Yes, that's why housing ownership should primarily be socialized, and access to affordable rent should be a right guaranteed by the public administration as much as healthcare and education.

    rent is close to or less than 4% of property value annually

    That's still a worthless metric, though, rent should be proportional to construction costs + maintenance, not subjected to markets.

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  • Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner's profit.

    Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets...

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  • Nothing. Abolish all private rent and socialize it

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  • Yes, you can choose to die on the streets instead. What's your point?