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I get where you're coming from, but making the slightest effort towards aesthetics when designing the apartment blocks doesn't cost much comparatively. I think brutalist architecture has its place too, but I could definitely see how coming home to apartment #5722 on floor #12 of block 31 in a trite and looming concrete labyrinth isnt very appealing to a lot of people. Making homely and livable apartments costs only slightly more and would do wonders in getting people to accept them.
Yeah nah I don't get it. Homeless is homeless, housed is housed. I'm currently homeless and I'd take apartment #5722 in a heartbeat, long as it was near public transport and had good insulation. Guess there's some people who'd rather rough it than stay in a boring apartment, but I think maybe we should house all the people who are willing to stay in boring apartments before we worry about catering to picky people. If they're comfortable enough on the street that a boring apartment is worse than the street, maybe they can stay on the street a little longer than the rest of us and be relatively okay. I definitely believe in helping them, but I think we should be trying to help the most people the soonest with the limited budget available.
Fair enough, i am fortunate enough to not have to speak from experience on the subject. But when building social housing on a large scale, hiring some halfway decent architects to design some functional and simple, but modern and liveable apartments is only a tiny fraction of the cost.
Think dense housing with a little less uniformity and more quality of life in mind, like room for planting and communal green spaces, perhaps areas that could be used and allocated by the inhabitants instead of pre planned rigidness. More colors, windows, etc.
Touching up a purely functional block design with these all very cheap and minor adjustments could make them a lot more appealing.
Though I of course concede that if the budget is so small that this isnt feasible, the purely functional aspect comes first.
Well the thing is, the budget is that small. Otherwise why would there be a five year waitlist for government housing? You're talking like a budget that could house everyone but only in boring housing is small. But the current budget, there's no way it can house everyone in any conditions at all. Every extra apartment we can build is another person off the street or out of the homeless shelters. That's the scale we're talking about here. There is no extra, there is no slack, and there's nothing we could possibly do to stretch the budget enough to create slack. But what we can do is stretch the budget enough to give one more person a home, and I think that's the most important thing.
Sorry, I did say if the government built block housing there would be almost no homeless. I was at the time imagining a fantasy world where the government gets its shit together and actually tries to solve the homeless problem. Take this current comment as assuming that the government doesn't decide to tax the rich appropriately to fund this endeavour.
I am probably talking as not an american, which is why I have a reasonable amount of trust in my government and its ability to build not shitty looking housing. They do that too sometimes, but still.
I am also a not American