Social housing typically doesn’t look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn’t have to look terrible. Here’s some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.
It’s kind of the China Town of Paris.
It’s right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.
Well, those have been built in a highly industrialized and rich country, not in a developing economy. Social housing in China nowadays looks more like your pictures than the one in the post, let’s keep in mind that that kind of housing is at this point over 50 years old.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like them to build more social housing.
The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.
In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.
Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.
Well, the Soviets and China never stopped building socially affordable housing. Turns out it’s a quirk of capitalist regimes leaving people to spend half their income in housing!
Social housing typically doesn’t look as good as high-end apartments, but it doesn’t have to look terrible. Here’s some pretty neat looking social housing in south Paris.
It’s kind of the China Town of Paris.
It’s right next to an accessible tram station, has green spaces and social areas spread around, a couple of malls with great independent restaurants right next door. There are cycle lanes all around the place.
If you’re curious, here it is on Google Maps
I’d live here. I only wish there were more neighbourhoods like this.
Well, those have been built in a highly industrialized and rich country, not in a developing economy. Social housing in China nowadays looks more like your pictures than the one in the post, let’s keep in mind that that kind of housing is at this point over 50 years old.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like them to build more social housing.
The lifecycle of social housing projects like these, as I understand them, is meant to be that you continue to build them, and as the old ones reach the end of their lifetime (around 60 years?) you demolish them and move the people into the new ones.
In practice, most places are not continuously building them as they should, so many of them are reaching the end of their lives without a plan for where to move people afterwards. This shows a lack of foresight and long-term planning.
Of course, politics are a fickle thing so the latest government can choose to decide that actually, poor people should be punished for the failures of the system and long-term initiatives fail.
Well, the Soviets and China never stopped building socially affordable housing. Turns out it’s a quirk of capitalist regimes leaving people to spend half their income in housing!
No comrade, nice looking things are bourgeoisie decadence.