• 0 Posts
  • 221 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: September 20th, 2025

help-circle

  • You’re describing the Soviet model of housing. Flats were often assigned by the union of the worker, and the rent dues were about 3% of the monthly income, which paid for basic maintenance. Homelessness was eliminated and housing was constantly improved through the construction of literal millions of housing units per year, more than any country at the time.

    Urban planning was also cool, organized in so-called “Mikroraion” (microdistricts) with accessibility on-foot to basic services being the core of planning. Green spaces, health centres, childcare and social activities were all within a 15-minute walk (the neighborhoods in most Eastern Block countries retain these features with whatever services haven’t been dismantled in capitalism). Quality affordable public transit (e.g. Moscow metro) also ensured mobility.




  • Why not though? The experiments done in housing nationalization have been extremely successful in abolishing homelessness and guaranteeing access to affordable housing. In Cuba, if you study in (completely free) public university, the state assigns you a flat at no cost. In the Soviet Union, housing used to cost 3% of monthly incomes back in the 1970s.

    Imagine the possibilities that we could get with 50+ years of technological and industrial development if we nationalized housing in the west…


  • It’s not a utopia, housing has been nationalized successfully in several countries, with the result of the abolition of homelessness, extremely affordable rent (think 3% of monthly incomes), and evictions essentially not existing.

    I’m all for revising zoning laws, enacting rent caps, and other transitional measures, but the end goal should be the collectivization of housing, which would eliminate the parasitism altogether.



  • I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away

    Me too and you make a great point. The problem isn’t with renting homes as a concept, it’s with renting from a private owner at market prices. Publicly owned housing for rent at maintenance cost-prices would eliminate the exploitative relationship and still allow people to rent for as long as they want.




  • There’s mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues

    Rent control obviously reduces prices. By setting up a maximum price, prices can’t raise further, it’s not rocket science. This policy was literally implemented in my homeland, Spain, when a few years ago an inflation-cap was implemented so that rents can’t rise above CPI. This has saved millions and millions of euros of tenants, again, because it’s not rocket science: if you correctly implement a rent cap (not difficult), prices don’t go above the cap.

    The same happened with the Berlin rent freeze that passed through referendum and was applied to some areas of the city. The comparative economic studies that analyzed the evolution of prices in rent-capped areas proved empirically that prices had gone up slower in rent-capped areas than in free market regime. I don’t know what kind of bullshit neoliberal YouTuber you’re watching, but they’re lying to you about empirical evidence.

    As for housing supply, I agree, rent cap affects supply, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When Milei removed rent caps from Buenos Aires, it became easier to find listed flats for rent in the city: because the people formerly living there were evicted since they couldn’t afford to pay fucking rent! What a great solution neoliberals offer us: just fucking evict the poors!! I’ve already brought up evidence you can look up, can you do the same to prove your point? Spoiler alert: no you can’t because neoliberalism is anti-scientific.

    Regardless, rent cap is only meant to be a temporary measure and I agree that it won’t solve fundamentally the underlying issue behind housing: treating as a commodity instead of as a human right. Build millions of public housing units, force businesses to move to smaller cities to fight overcentralization, do good urban planning, and establish socially owned housing. It’s the only model that has abolished homelessness in history, and you can keep denying reality, but Soviets enjoyed rents of 3% of average income throughout their lives while people in the modern capitalist world can choose between spending 40% of their wage in housing or literally dying in the streets.






  • Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true

    But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again. Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott’s 2014 paper. There has been no serious reply to this paper, or any followup by neoliberal economists finding any other variable explaining the creation of value to the extent that labour does. It is empirically true that labour is the only source of value, and you would need empirical evidence to argue otherwise, which you don’t have because it doesn’t exist.

    Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I’ll come up with the references later, busy now, but you’re just making stuff up.

    Edit: I’m actually not gonna bother giving you references because you’re just a blatant anticommunist making stuff up. Your talk of workers and doctors getting paid the same is absurd (highly trained specialists like doctors and university professors were the highest earning members of society), your explanation for the lack of housing in the USSR is absurd (they built more housing than any country in the world and allocated it efficiently, it’s just that half the housing stock of the country was destroyed in WW2 and the rapid collectivization of agriculture and the industrialisation led to 2 million houses per year not being enough), and I’m not going to change the mind of someone who doesn’t listen to facts.

    Go on licking your landlord’s boots (or leeching off your tenants if you’re lucky).