Quote:
Originally Posted by Encolpius
At least you recognize that there are positive examples of public housing. That's a start! But seriously: the problem with public housing is diversity due to immigration??! Hah. Half of Amsterdam's population is non-Dutch, and half lives in social housing of fantastic quality. Ditto in Vienna, where 62% of people live in social housing.
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I'm not sure that Amsterdam is a very good model. The rental market is crushingly expensive and difficult to get into. The social market (mostly stock owned by private individuals,
not public housing corporations) has a waiting list that stretches into the decades. People who have places in the social market hold onto them no matter what, worsening the market still further. It works extremely well for people who already have places, but (anecdotally) might be the worst city I have personally seen for people who are trying to get into the market - worse than Toronto, Vancouver or Portland
by far. By the end of this year, most of the people I know will have left the Netherlands (or at least Amsterdam) because they simply cannot live here with any quality of life.
Mind you, I basically like the system, but it seems to cope extremely poorly with significant growth or influx of wealth, making it a questionable model for fast-growing, wealthy American or Canadian cities. I do think it could do better if there was more give-and-take (e.g., if we are going to impose more rules on landlords, perhaps we can do something to also make renting easier), but the mentality here seems to be that more rules are always better, which simply doesn't seem productive or realistic to me.