Housing under communism

He was talking about apartment block.

it's more like a "where i want and need to be"
students would probably have a higher priority around universities and asked to move out when they go to work

artists should be able to meet up with each other, have a place of work close by too like theater or music studios

the question for "better area" is just a bit too vague and relative. something you might consider better can be highly unpractical for someone else

No.

It depends on the kind of communism you're talking about.

Most socialist systems would probably work towards guaranteeing housing for all. That's not particularly difficult, since we have a lot of abandoned houses. One could imagine that the state or commune (doesn't make much difference) would seize those abandoned houses and use them.

For the average homeowner, there wouldn't be much difference. So long as there is plenty of housing, you can pretty much own any house you can comfortably live in. If you have a massive mansion, it will probably be converted into communal housing (since that's a lot of house for just one family).

As for renters, those living in apartments, their situation would be improved. Communism abolishes absentee ownership, so instead of paying through the nose to a landlord, the block would be owned and maintained by the tenants (a lot like housing coops today).

How are they assigned? Preferably, they wouldn't need to be. There would be enough housing for everyone. You can just say "I want to live here" and you get it. If housing is scarce, it would be assigned according to need. A large family will get a larger house than someone living alone. Someone working in a specific place will get a house nearby.

As for who builds them: builders do. Doesn't make much difference if they're doing it for money or for the commune.

Of course, if we're talking FALC, all of this is pretty much moot. You can live how you want, where you want (within reason, no living in a nature preserve), and if a house isn't built there, the robots will build it.

But that's impossible. Buildings close to water will have a better view than buildings with nothing but other buildings surrounding them. The top floor will have a nicer view than the bottom floor. The apartment facing the street will be more desirable than the one facing the back yard.

Better as in closer to the geographical city center, having a better view over water or a nearby park etc.

i honestly don't want a waterview house. what now.

Beg your pardon???

(See, an objectively better house is hard to define)

And there will be no "city centers".

there isn't necessarily a real "city center", each appartment complex has their own. there isn't necessarily a "street facing" side either

this is lublin
granted, the shopping buildings south are new, but others were there before
the church is modernized but generally it's the same
all those appartments were build in socialism, you have small shops, markets and kiosk inbetween, kindergarten, doctors etc. all inbetween

Why not? They aren't means of production.

It doesn't matter if you don't want it personally – enough people do want those things in housing, which is why it's reflected in the price. You can confirm it yourself with 10–15 minutes of research.

Personal property is something you can own.
Private property is something you need a state to protect.

Owning massive apartment block would clearly be private property. Under Socialism it can only be owned cooperatively by its inhabitants.

Small house, on the other hand - could easily be personal.

In Marxist theory, communism abolishes every property, except for the consumption goods – that is, the goods that will disappear once consumed.

...

Quote, please.

Why do you need a state to protect an apartment block, but not your house?

forgot to mark the "młodzieżowy dom kultury", Youth culture house

Because if you own an apartment block, you own the apartments of the tenants. The only way to make that system work is if the state enforces your ownership; otherwise the tenants have no reason to be paying you.

When you own a house, you are the sole tenant of that house. It is your personal property.

Most people don't own a house. Most people aren't getting the housing they want now. So if personal wants don't matter under capitalism, why is it suddenly a requirement under socialism? Housing will be planned and rational, it will provide for people clean and safe living areas with utilities. People will have the opportunity to move as their life requirements change. They won't have the opportunity to become rentiers with investment properties and have the state defend them; the state will ensure there will be no rentiers whatsoever.

Sounds bad, socdem is better.

Full Communism™. Gommie blocks unrelated.

It's not like you have a choice, you know.

They would pay because they are virtuous people who don't want to steal from others, and they would recognize that the landlord invested millions to build such an apartment. If they thought the rent was too much, they would go elsewhere. I think it's the same thing that prevents people from raping and murdering, which I don't think depends on scale. If they can steal something big, they can steal something small.

Who says you have the right to be the only tenant in a house?

How do you know that?

You didn't understand what I said. Price is the best indicator we have of what people desire. An apartment on the top floor next to central park in New York City, will be more expensive than the ground floor in the same building, the ground floor apartment will still be more expensive than an apartment in Harlem – all because virtually every New Yorker wants to live in central park duet to the beautiful view and central location, but fewer people desire to live in Harlem. Nobody in the thread has given a good answer as to how these limited resources will be distributed when desire is virtually infinite.

Then again: there will be no central park anymore. What makes Harlem less desirable today will not be true then.

You didn't answer what I said.

The only reason paying the landlord is considered virtuous is because we live in a culture that enforces the property rights of the landlord. It's a medieval mentality. Without this culture, any logically thinking person wouldn't give a penny to the landlord unless the state forced him.

To pay a bunch of people to build the apartment for him. Now you gotta ask how he got those millions. Most likely he got them from renting other apartments to people, so in other words he has literally got the money for this apartment by doing nothing. He can sit on his flat ass for the rest of his life, investing his millions at building more apartments to make more and more money, and meanwhile hundreds of people are paying exorbitant rents to subsidise him.
Except for the fact that when you steal something small it's considered a crime, but if you steal something big it's considered good business.
Because no reasonable person would willingly let themselves be exploited unless the system around them forced them to. Whether it's a state enforcing the landowner's property, a culture where such exploitation is considered normal, or a religion that says that to oppose this system is immoral.

You said every new-yorker would live to live in central park rather than in Harlem. I'm saying: that is true today because of capitalism, but that won't be true in communism. Doesn't that answer to what you said?

In theory everyone gets a house but its managed collectively.

Most sensible answers ITT rely to some degree on some kind of state or authority, purely to organise and plan housing if not to enforce on behalf of those who can't impose their will themselves.

How would housing work in an anarchism?

No, unless you are planning on cutting down every tree in central park, leveling all taller buildings and filling in the water in all ocean front property with gravel. You didn't explain why things innately desirable would lose their desirability under communism.

People build houses and then live in them

Because the reason why some places are more desirable than others is because they get more investment. Under Capitalism, some neighbourhoods get a lot of investment (see central San Francisco) while others are just left to decay (see every other part of San Francisco). In Communism, every neighbourhood is invested in, which means they are all desirable, in one way or another.

Fuck off.

Stop ignoring answers you don't like. The point of socialism is not to meet every desire; neither is it of capitalism. Human desire is only partially fulfilled under capitalism, a thin minority of the human population can have their every desire catered for, yet this is automatically assumed to be the superior system because of the price mechanism. It's bullshit; go worship the market somewhere else.

If you're willing to listen rather than blabber nonsense, then I'll continue: various systems in the 20th century attempted to address the problem of abstracting value and did not move beyond the price mechanism, even if they did make gains elsewhere. We have not found a solution to the price mechanism that has been proven for the simple reason no socialist, or anarchist, society is allowed to exist without intervention and containment, and that has resulted in those societies, along with internal deficiencies, reverting to full capitalist social relations. If we ever manage another shot that lasts, new technologies and new thinking will be applied to the problem. Every answer until then is pure speculation.

This. There's a reason why Marx focused on critiquing Capitalism rather than speculating on what a Communist society would function. There's also a reason why every past attempt at predicting what the future will look like has been inaccurate. It's impossible to predict. What Communism will look like is ultimately determined by the conditions and decisions of the people who build it, and we can't know that in advance.

So communism is not set in stone? Stateless, monelyess and classless are guidelines? Is it fair to say then that communism is simply an anti-thesis to capitalism and the actual solution will more likely me somewhere between capitalism and communism?

No, it is not set in stone, just as our Capitalist society is not set in stone. If you compare the theories of, say, Adam Smith to what Capitalism is now, they are vastly different.
No, they're the definition, just as Capitalism has a specific definition. If a society does not follow that definition, then it is not communist. But a stateless, moneyless, and classless society can have many forms, and that's not set in stone.

Under capitalism, ownership of a thing functions as a right to restrain other people from accessing it, clearest example so-called intellectual property. Under communism it will be the ownership of a thing as access-right to it as a use-value, and only a right of restricting others inasmuch as not restricting other people would interfere with your own access, so "intellectual property" will vanish. But, for pretty much everything else, other people using a thing does reduce your ability to use it, so will these things be owned in the same sense as currently (not talking about means of production here)?

The answer seems to be yes, perishable cheap things that can't be really used by groups will be obtained by individuals "paying" with labor vouchers. But housing is different from a toothbrush. What would it mean for a single person to own living space in many different places? That individual couldn't possibly claim all of that for simultaneous personal use, that would be a physical impossibility. A person who moves a lot back and forth between places might plausibly claim to need access to rooms for living in this or that city at this or that point in time. Ownership then would be usage rights of particular rooms during particular weeks, restricting access for other people exactly then. An individual renting multiple apartments at the same time would mean something like you only have access to one in a way similar to what renting means today, and for the other(s), aside from a small locked room with some of your personal belongings in them, other people would have access while you are absent.

No individual would own a whole building in the center of a city.

Any transition to communism will be a revolutionary process of discarding the detritus of previous ages and attempting to replace them with something better; all social revolutions have done this. It's not a matter of stopping somewhere between.

i am amazed by the new google map 3D option to move around freely and in some bigger cities have buildings, trees and in general topography shown

anyway, this is a planned from scratch town in east germany, formerly Stalin City, now "Eisenhüttenstadt", Ironworks City.

forgot pic

Gulag for you

These are bretty g8 comr8.

That's a very pretty drawing.

It is a drawing, right?

east german city architecture is pretty, yes

Search "architecture of density".

if you're trying to draw comparisions, you're very wrong and should take a closer look

I'm answering a question.

you were replying to me with those pictures implying they had anything in common

they don't

Actually, he was replying to me.

no, see

Well, excuse me.

Ah, I see. I don't think he was countering your point, just adding to it by showing how Capitalist architecture ends up looking like how people imagine Communist architecture to be like, ie. rows and rows of the same template.

The majority of anarchists are communists sooo

No. Wage-labour and the commodity form, aka the capitalist form of production, will be abolished. That's kind of the baseline.

makes sense that way too

bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm

No. It is not. It's like saying plane is an anti-thesis of car. It doesn't provide any information.

What solution? It's not like there is one moment of time that is The Future.

All moments we have now and will have later will be "somewhere between capitalism and communism".

You assumed wrong.

Every bit of this.

Is this real life?

I'm not such a sectarian faggot that I'd disagree with someone who puts forward very reasonable statements for having the wrong flag.

even from a liberal point of view, the claim that communism is antithetical to capitalism is absolute nonsense because they're both methods of distributing resources. The only thing that would be antithetical would be putting resources back into the ground.

And there is no "actual solution" for "the future" because it doesn't take a genius to figure out that circumstances will always be evolving and thus our responses to our own world will change, which in itself causes more changes. Pretending there's "the actual solution" only makes sense if there's an "end" to humans where we "win" like in a video game.

This looks like St James Town in Toronto, Canada

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Town

I knew it

I'd rather plant a new park in Harlem and build taller buildings there (if people actually want tall buildings, which I doubt).
As ocean front property, they are already banned in my country.

youtube.com/watch?v=Hy4QjmKzF1c

Le Corbusier has pretty much been universally rejected by urban planners today. Even public housing these days looks nothing like this.

under socialism, you search through a listing of available houses and request. If you have no housing, you are guaranteed it, but if you want to upgrade to a more expensive (labor or resource intensive) house, or you request to build a house at the preferred location (particularly in urban centers with modular housing that can be expanded upon) you might have to give some labor vouchers or energy credits
under communism, it would be a similar process, except the difference is any labor involved in the process (probably very little if any) is unremunerated, and the body organizing it is a volunteer organization and not the state

Ways to distribute "desirable" apartments vs. "undesirable" apartments when one person does not really "need" the desirable apartment more than the other:

1. First come, first serve
2. Seniority at work, with workers who have put in most years of work getting the highest apartments
3. People with legitimate depression getting sunset views and ocean views to relieve their depression

etc. etc.

There are many ways to do it. All in all, it is not too important because almost all housing would be desirable to the same degree. In communism, there is no reason to build 150 story buildings with pent houses at the top. That money would just be spent building several apartment blocks and small houses, all having basically the same size and the same cost of construction. These small houses could be built with differing architechture styles depending on democratic decisionmaking or pre-ordering.

4. labor vouchers
5. energy credits
6. over abundance of housing
7. awards for competitions (think non-capitalist olympic games)
8. military service awards
9. local communes vote
etc, etc, etc

...

There's also the top-trade cycle algorithm. That is a mechanism for redistributing things when everybody owns one thing. People rank the things and the algo searches whether there is any connection of the sort Alice has what Bob likes and vice versa or bigger loops where A wants what B has and B wants what C has and … Z wants what A has. It's strategy-free.