Sure there is. Infill is a thing, brownfield development is a thing, rezoning is a thing. Look at any Rust Belt city, especially the east side or the downhill side, you’ll see plenty of empty lots or boarded up houses.
The average length of homeownership is about 12 years. If you were to choose one city block with detached single-story houses and rezone it as medium density (apartments or townhouses, minimum 12 units per acre or 50 people per acre) with current usage grandfathered in, it would send a message to the owners that the property values would not be rising. Within 6 years you would have at least 30% of the block go up for sale, and a municipality or people’s housing entity could exercise right of first refusal, buying up the properties and putting lots of people in them, without the familial relation requirements, and adding accessory units too. Within a decade your land trust would own half the block, and they could start building on the in-between spaces or doing renovations or even demolishing buildings for larger constructions. And that’s operating within the current framework.
Really, the zoning is what people would push back the hardest against. The 11% of homeowners (and a good chunk of the 52% of mortgagers) do love their R-1 zoning. But if you had expropriation power this wouldn’t be a problem.
The only places where there’s truly no place to build are places that are already at an ideal density.
That’s exceptionally rare in the united states. There’s more than enough empty houses and the lots they sit on to seize from finance capital to bulldoze and build new communal housing without needing to resort to seizing houses people currently live in.
If you’re somewhere that’s a metropolitan area with limited developmental space due to land constraints ranging from literal limited land to natural disaster conciderations, I’d see merit to the discussion, but in broad strokes that’s a groundless justification to seize lived-in housing in relations to the United States.
thats mostly the perspective that im arguing from. i also think that the sprawl of the US, while good for lots of ““free”” land, has the downside of being much more difficult to organise public transport, accessible schools, hospitals etc. like if you imagine a future without cars, the US population will have to densify.
From an initial metropolitan perspective, as in imagine for a moment we accomplished to install a communist govt. Quickest expropriations that can be done in a metropolitan area such as New York city proper would be empty houses in the burbs - depending on how big they are you can house multiple families temporarily - damn near all the skyscrapers can be converted into temp housing, and that’s not even touching the zones that feed into or out of Manhattan via rail.
Surplus homeless or other temp housed people seeking better accomidations can be relocated via rail to additional expropriated housing across the east coast, and that same rail allows for ease of moving people out to temp housing as well whenever more dense housing projects begin that requires radical redesigning of urban cityscape.
i dont have major disagreements. the only thing is i don’t think skyscrapers or empty burb houses count as adequate housing, but if you count it as temporary then sure.
i think communal housing is good actually
Then build communal housing. Simple as.
sometimes there is no more place to build
Sure there is. Infill is a thing, brownfield development is a thing, rezoning is a thing. Look at any Rust Belt city, especially the east side or the downhill side, you’ll see plenty of empty lots or boarded up houses.
The average length of homeownership is about 12 years. If you were to choose one city block with detached single-story houses and rezone it as medium density (apartments or townhouses, minimum 12 units per acre or 50 people per acre) with current usage grandfathered in, it would send a message to the owners that the property values would not be rising. Within 6 years you would have at least 30% of the block go up for sale, and a municipality or people’s housing entity could exercise right of first refusal, buying up the properties and putting lots of people in them, without the familial relation requirements, and adding accessory units too. Within a decade your land trust would own half the block, and they could start building on the in-between spaces or doing renovations or even demolishing buildings for larger constructions. And that’s operating within the current framework.
Really, the zoning is what people would push back the hardest against. The 11% of homeowners (and a good chunk of the 52% of mortgagers) do love their R-1 zoning. But if you had expropriation power this wouldn’t be a problem.
The only places where there’s truly no place to build are places that are already at an ideal density.
That’s exceptionally rare in the united states. There’s more than enough empty houses and the lots they sit on to seize from finance capital to bulldoze and build new communal housing without needing to resort to seizing houses people currently live in.
If you’re somewhere that’s a metropolitan area with limited developmental space due to land constraints ranging from literal limited land to natural disaster conciderations, I’d see merit to the discussion, but in broad strokes that’s a groundless justification to seize lived-in housing in relations to the United States.
I suspect that many of those homes - as with many of the currently occupied homes - are in huge, dead exurbs that need to be demolished and rewilded.
thats mostly the perspective that im arguing from. i also think that the sprawl of the US, while good for lots of ““free”” land, has the downside of being much more difficult to organise public transport, accessible schools, hospitals etc. like if you imagine a future without cars, the US population will have to densify.
From an initial metropolitan perspective, as in imagine for a moment we accomplished to install a communist govt. Quickest expropriations that can be done in a metropolitan area such as New York city proper would be empty houses in the burbs - depending on how big they are you can house multiple families temporarily - damn near all the skyscrapers can be converted into temp housing, and that’s not even touching the zones that feed into or out of Manhattan via rail.
Surplus homeless or other temp housed people seeking better accomidations can be relocated via rail to additional expropriated housing across the east coast, and that same rail allows for ease of moving people out to temp housing as well whenever more dense housing projects begin that requires radical redesigning of urban cityscape.
i dont have major disagreements. the only thing is i don’t think skyscrapers or empty burb houses count as adequate housing, but if you count it as temporary then sure.